Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Ten: Row Two, Seat Twelve

Delaney

The tunnel kiss went everywhere by morning, exactly as Priya predicted, except it went bigger and softer than even she'd braced for, less scandal and more fairy tale, sports blogs and actual entertainment outlets running the clip side by side with breathless captions about the enforcer who finally got his happy ending.

"I've officially lost control of the narrative," Priya said over coffee, sounding more delighted than alarmed. "In a good way. Nobody's asking about the fic anymore. They're asking if you're planning a wedding, which, please, for the love of my remaining sanity, do not answer that question in public yet even if the answer someday is yes."

"Nobody's proposed," Delaney said, feeling her face heat despite herself.

"Not yet," Priya agreed, entirely too pleased with herself, and went back to her phone.

Delaney's actual work that week involved less crisis management and more of the ordinary business of running a team's public image during a playoff push, which was how she found herself in the equipment room helping coordinate a rookie media day, and how she first properly noticed Sadie Chen, the young beat reporter who'd been covering the Ironclads' rookie class for a regional sports network, and the way Ashworth went suspiciously, thoroughly silent every single time Sadie walked into a room.

"You've noticed it too," Marchetti said, appearing at her elbow with the specific glee of a man who'd been dying to gossip about someone other than Roman for weeks. "Kid can take a two hundred pound hit without flinching. Put a reporter with a nice smile in the same hallway and he forgets how to use complete sentences."

"Is she single?"

"No idea. But she asks about him in every interview she doesn't need to ask about him in. Last week she worked an Ashworth question into a piece about the power play. There is no version of the power play that requires an Ashworth quote. She wanted the Ashworth quote."

Delaney watched it happen in real time an hour later, Sadie approaching Ashworth after the availability wrapped, notebook clutched like a shield, asking a follow up question about his development stats that could easily have been emailed, and Ashworth answering in the careful, overly formal voice of a twenty year old trying desperately not to sound like he'd rehearsed being casual.

She recognized it instantly, the particular awkward orbit of two people who liked each other and had absolutely no functional plan for what to do about it, and something warm and nostalgic moved through her chest, watching it, remembering a hallway six weeks ago that had started in something considerably less gentle.

"You should ask her to dinner," she told Ashworth later, catching him alone by his locker, unable to resist the meddling. "Sadie. You should just ask her to dinner instead of finding excuses to answer questions she doesn't need answered."

Ashworth went the specific shade of red that only very young athletes seemed capable of achieving. "Is it that obvious?"

"Marchetti's been narrating it to me for a week."

"Great. Wonderful. My love life is apparently a spectator sport now too." But he was smiling, despite himself, the smile of someone grateful to have the thing named out loud instead of carried around silently. "She probably thinks I'm an i***t. I answer every question like I'm reciting a hostage statement."

"She's asking questions she doesn't need to ask, Ashworth. That's not journalism. That's flirting with extra steps." Delaney softened, remembering exactly how it felt to be on the receiving end of well meaning advice she hadn't asked for and desperately needed anyway. "Take it from someone who spent a year writing four hundred thousand words instead of just talking to the guy. Sometimes the brave thing is smaller than you think it is. It's just a dinner invitation. It's not a contract negotiation."

"Kade got a blackmail deal. I get unsolicited dating advice from the team publicist. Feels like an uneven trade."

"Trust me," Delaney said, laughing, "the blackmail deal was significantly more stressful than what I'm suggesting you do."

Roman

He watched the whole exchange from across the locker room with the specific, warm amusement of a man watching someone else fumble through the exact thing he'd once fumbled through himself, badly, over a hallway confrontation that had somehow become the best decision of his career.

"You're meddling," he said, catching Delaney by the arm as she left the locker room, unable to keep the smile off his face.

"I'm helping. There's a difference."

"Is there?" He pulled her close, doing the thing he still hadn't gotten tired of doing, checking that she was actually there, actually real, actually his in whatever quietly permanent way this had become. "I seem to recall someone telling me, very firmly, six weeks ago, that this was a business arrangement with one rule. No feelings. And now you're out here coaching rookies through their feelings like a woman with extensive personal expertise on the subject."

"I have extensive personal expertise. I learned from a master."

"Who was your master, exactly."

"You, obviously. You skated through the world's most transparent blackmail scheme insisting it was strictly business right up until you accidentally admitted, in a kitchen, over coffee, that you'd already fallen for me before either of us had the guts to say it plainly." She kissed him, quick, before he could argue the sequence of events. "Ashworth's just further behind on the timeline. I'm trying to spare him the six weeks of unnecessary suffering."

"Unnecessary." Roman raised an eyebrow. "I recall those six weeks fondly, actually. Every miserable second of them."

"That's because you're the one who got the girl at the end. Try being on the other side of that particular arrangement sometime." But she was smiling, leaning into him, easy in a way she hadn't been easy with anyone since Beckett, since before Beckett, maybe since a version of herself that existed before hockey had taught her what it cost to love someone whose job was built on collision.

He watched Ashworth, across the room, finally, visibly, work up the nerve to catch Sadie Chen before she left the building, and felt something settle in his chest that had nothing to do with his own relationship at all, just the simple, uncomplicated pleasure of watching someone else find their way toward the same terrifying, worthwhile thing he'd found with Delaney, one clumsy, overthought conversation at a time.

"Ten dollars says he asks her to the team charity dinner instead of just a normal dinner," Roman said. "Because he'll overthink the casual option into feeling insufficient."

"Twenty says you're right, and it takes him three attempts to actually get the words out."

"Deal." He shook her hand, formal, delighted, and across the room, Ashworth said something to Sadie Chen that made her laugh, real and unguarded, notebook forgotten at her side, and Roman thought, watching it, that maybe this was what winning actually felt like, off the ice, in ways no scoreboard had ever managed to capture.