Page 85 of Playing for the Hat Trick
Not because I’m trying to be sweet.
Not because I think it’ll make the moment better.
But because my chest is pounding like I just broke away, deked out the goalie, and slammed the puck top shelf in overtime. The crowd’s roaring in my head, but it’s not pain. It’s adrenaline. It’s clarity. It’s something dangerously close to awe.
She didn’t just push me to heal.
She made me see.
And fuck me, that might be scarier than the knee ever was.
I gently ease out from under her, careful not to wake her. She shifts and murmurs something sleepy but doesn’t stir. I grab the brace off the nightstand, still in the spot I left it yesterday when I was trying to have a normal fuck night—even if I had to endure the pain.
For a second, I wonder if I should wear it, just slip it over, strap it, and . . .
“Really?” comes a voice from the pillow. Raspy. Disbelieving. Sharp as ever, even before coffee.
I turn.
Scottie’s propped up on one elbow, hair a mess in the most distracting way possible, eyes half-lidded and squinty, voice low and scratchy from sleep and sex and whatever the hell lastnight was. She looks like temptation wrapped in my oversized Mammoths shirt and a whole lot of attitude.
“You’re putting the brace back on?” she rasps, blinking at me like I just announced I was joining a boy band.
I freeze, one strap half-fastened, caught mid-act like guilty twelve-year-old sneaking cookies. “I—uh?—”
She lifts a brow. Just one. Which is worse than yelling.
“I was just—” I glance at the brace, then back at her. “Trying to figure out if I still need it.”
She lets out a disbelieving breath and sits all the way up, the sheet pooling in her lap. “You’re fucking kidding me, right?”
I open my mouth.
She points at me. “No. No, Jason Tate. Do not even try it. You carried me. Across the apartment. With a smug little smirk on your face, like it was nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing. She was wrapped around me, her mouth on my neck, whispering filthy things between giggles while I tried to remember how to breathe and not collapse with her naked in my arms.
“If you lie and say it hurt,” she says, narrowing her eyes, “I swear to God, I’ll . . . I don’t know, call your mom.”
“I’m not lying,” I mutter, caught, the strap still dangling from my hand. “It didn’t hurt. At all.”
Her expression shifts—not softer precisely, but less full of fire. “And yet, here you are, strapping it on like you’ve got something to prove.”
I look down at it again, suddenly aware of how automatic it is. How natural. Like brushing my teeth. Like guilt. “Muscle memory,” I offer.
“Bullshit memory,” she counters, and now she’s crawling across the bed toward me, the shirt riding high on her thighs. “You’ve been using that thing like it’s armor. It’s not your knee that’s scared, Tate.”
She’s right in front of me now, eyes locked on mine. “It’s you. You’re scared about a future without a dream, but the thing is that you get to write and rewrite your dreams as many times as you want. One thing doesn’t define your entire existence.”
Fuck, she’s right. Not sure why I thought that if I stop being Jason Tate, hockey player, my life is over. Over. Her words are about to wreck me. I could kiss her for it or set the brace on fire. I could do both.
Her words hang between us like static, buzzing in my chest.It’s not your knee that’s scared, Tate. It’s you.
I’m about to respond—say something clever or deflect with a joke, anything to avoid the way she’s looking at me. But she moves before I can.
She leans in like she’s about to kiss me. I brace for it.
Instead, she slides off the bed.
