Page 59 of Slapshot Baby

Ava holds two nearly identical shades of blue up to the window light, squinting between them. She rotates them slowly.

"The client wants the color of the ocean at sunset. She calls this one pacific blue and this other one coastal calm. But both look like a public pool."

"They look the same."

"They are absolutely not the same." She angles them toward me, offended. "Coastal calm has a grey undertone while pacific blue is cyan blue. Completely different emotional registers."

"They're both blue."

She stares at me with the expression of a woman considering violence.

"Never say that to a designer. We will end you." She angles the swatches toward me. “Take another look and tell me what you think.”

I lean in, my mouth close to her temple. I inhale the citrus scent ofl her shampoo.

“So what are you going to tell your client?”

She turns her head to respond and finds my face right there. Her breath catches. Those hazel eyes flare wide.

She doesn't lean back.

Neither do I.

"You smell good," I murmur.

"That's not relevant to the discussion."

"I'm changing the subject."

"Don't start something you know I won't finish," she whispers.

"I think you'd finish it. That's what scares you."

I tuck the strand behind her ear. My thumb traces the curve of it, following the shell down to her earlobe.

Her hand comes up and wraps around my wrist.

Her fingers press against my pulse point and I know she can feel how fast it's going, the same way I can see hers hammering in the hollow of her throat.

We stay like that; my hand at her ear, her fingers locked around my wrist.

"You know what I keep thinking about?" My voice is conversational, like I'm discussing a play, not the woman pressed against my side.

"Hockey?"

"That sound you made when I kissed you in the hospital."

Her throat bobs. "I don't remember making a sound."

"Small. Low. Right here."

My fingers find the loose strand of hair at the back of her neck. I twist it once, slowly, letting my knuckle graze the skin behind her ear.

She shivers, a full-body tremor she can't disguise because I'm pressed against her from hip to knee and I feel every inch of it.

"You grabbed my shirt with both hands and pulled me in,” I say. “Then you pretended you didn't want it."

"I wasn't pretending."