Page 119 of On Thin Ice

Bell met me around the front of his car, buttoning his jacket with a teasing grin on his face. His gaze swept over me before he reached out and smoothed his palm over my shoulder. A tiny touch, fleeting, but I felt it everywhere. “There you go,” he murmured, dragging his hand away.

“Stop smirking,” I said, feeling my face fall into that old, familiar scowl.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He pushed his hands down into his pockets and strolled toward the top of the red carpet, where a gaggle of photographers and Austin society reporters were waiting to harass us as we entered the arena.

“So fucking smug,” I muttered as I followed him to the waiting gauntlet.

“You know you love me,” he teased back over his shoulder.

“Unfortunately.” I huffed a laugh and forced a smile on my face as a photographer I recognized from theStatesmanshouted our names.

Bell and I stood a couple of feet apart on the red carpet as he flashed the throng of reporters his thousand-watt smile, the one that had landed him a major modeling contract.

“You’re scowling, E,” he said out the side of his mouth as he winked at a fan leaning over the gold rope screaming his name.

“I’msmiling,” I said from between clenched teeth.

“If you say so.”

We’d just stepped off the red carpet and into the arena when a voice called out behind us, “Hey! Wait up.”

Silas Johannsen, dressed in a crisp maroon tuxedo, his shirt open at the neck sans tie, fell into step beside us. His hands were tucked in his pockets, his energy more suited to walking into a bar and not a black-tie gala.

He glanced between Bell and me. “Just wanted to say real quick that Chet’s a fucker. Always has been. If I were you, I’d have knocked his teeth out. Don’t know how you kept it together as well as you did.” He nodded at me, a flicker of respect in his gaze.

That tracked. Hanny would drop his gloves at the barest provocation. He took absolutely zero shit from anyone, including his own teammates.

I scratched the side of my beard, my heart hammering a little faster. The thing was, Ihadn’theld it together.Bellhad held me together.

My mind flashed to the moment when he had kept me from going nuclear on that fucker—his hand on my chest, grounding me, his lips at my ear, soothing me—and then to everything that had followed. The silence. The whispers. The knowing looks.

“Hanny, I?—”

Silas glanced over his shoulder as Keats shouted his name, lifting a finger in the universal sign for “one second,” before turning back to Bell and me.

He moved in fractionally closer. “And don’t even sweat the other thing, E.” He spoke quietly, his words for Bell and my ears alone. “None of the guys care one way or the other if what Chet insinuated is true or not. Who you fuck on your own time is none of our business. Just don’t let it affect your game, and we’re all good.”

My skin prickled, but not from the cold radiating off the ice covered with wooden boards and industrial carpet or the industrial sized air conditioning system needed to keep it frozen.

I couldn’t believe how casually Hanny had dropped that bomb. Like me fucking Bell was no big deal. Like us being together didn’t matter. Not as long as we kept playing good hockey.

Before I could respond, he clapped his hand to my shoulder and squeezed, gave Bell a subtle nod of acknowledgment that left me wondering what unspoken understanding they shared, and then peeled off toward where Keats was waiting like he hadn’t just ripped the floor out from under me in the most bizarrely supportive way imaginable.

I stood there blinking, stunned.

Bell snorted, the sound low and amused, his shoulders visibly relaxing for the first time since we arrived. “Did that just happen?”

I stared after Silas, still trying to process the bizarre exchange. “I genuinely don’t know,” I said, feeling oddly weightless, like some invisible pressure had suddenly lifted.

A teammate, one I respected, had supported me—quietly, and without fanfare. But acceptance nonetheless.

Bell bumped my shoulder gently with his own. “Ready?”

I looked at the open doors ahead, the soft sounds of jazzy Christmas music and the murmur of conversation spilling out.

“No,” I said honestly.

Bell nodded once and smiled. “Let’s just take it one step at a time.”

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