Page 99 of Slapshot Baby

Ava’s breathing is even now. Her hand has found my forearm again, holding it against her chest, fingers curled loosely around my wrist—as if even in sleep, she refuses to let go.

This woman just had an orgasm with me in her sleep, and she doesn't even know it.

But that's the thing. That's the piece I keep circling back to.

Her body is honest in a way she won't allow herself to be when she's awake. Asleep, there are no rules. No walls.

Just Ava wanting me so deeply it comes out of her when she can't control it.

And I involuntarily dreamt about driving my cock into her.

Yet I've been treating what we have like an arrangement.

I look at the training plan still open on her laptop across the room. She typed it while I talked. Every strength I named, every gap I admitted was formatted into a system I can follow.

She didn't just listen to me fall apart last night. She built me a way back.

I think about the ceramic bowl on my entry table and the way Ava told me keys go there every time, no thinking required.

The championship photo on my mantle that she placed in a timeline of a life I can't remember so I could picture it myself.

The way she showed up at the hospital for a man who didn't know her face. The food she brought every visit. The nights she sat on my living room floor going through my phone, reading my own life back to me with a patience I never earned.

She reorganized my closet.

Nope, my life.

She called all of it helping and friendship.

I've been calling it the same things because the real word required admitting something I wasn't ready to face.

I'm falling for Ava Hartley.

I've been falling since the day she walked into my hospital room while calling it gratitude, convenience, attraction, a fake arrangement that serves us both.

I let her draw the lines because it was easier than admitting I want no lines at all.

She’s done more for my recovery than my doctors, my family, my teammates. She asked for nothing back. Not once. And I've been too consumed by my hockey career and my own fractured pride to count the cost of that.

I'm done. Fake dating is over.

I want to take Ava somewhere she loves and pay attention to the things I should have been paying attention to all along.

Her favorite restaurant. What she orders when she's not curating for a client. What it costs her to keep showing up for a man who's given her nothing but borrowed time.

I'm done with borrowed time.

I'm still mapping out the details when Ava stirs against me.

A slow stretch. Her spine lengthens, her toes curling against my shins. She turns onto her back and blinks at the ceiling.

Then she turns her head and finds me watching her.

There's a crease on her cheek from the pillowcase. The lace bralette has shifted, one strap fallen off her shoulder, the swell of her breast exposed above the fabric.

She's beautiful.

"You're staring," she says, voice hoarse.