Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Twelve: The Drawer

Delaney

Playoff push meant Roman's schedule tightened into something almost monastic, morning skate, film review, practice, more film review, a schedule so relentless that Delaney found herself measuring the relationship in stolen half hours instead of whole evenings, and discovering, to her own quiet surprise, that she didn't mind it nearly as much as she'd expected to.

"I used to think I needed a lot of a person," she told Sadie Chen, over coffee one Tuesday, the two of them having drifted into an easy friendship over the past few weeks that had nothing to do with either of their respective men and everything to do with genuinely liking each other's company. "Beckett and I had all the time in the world and somehow it still felt empty by the end. Roman gives me twenty minutes some days and it feels like more than I ever had before."

"Ashworth's the same," Sadie admitted. "Rookie season, they barely sleep, let alone date properly. But he calls me between drills just to describe what he had for breakfast. It shouldn't be romantic. It's the most romantic thing anyone's ever done for me."

"Low bar, high reward. The athlete special."

"The athlete special," Sadie agreed, laughing, and Delaney thought, watching her, that this was maybe the first real friendship she'd built since the breakup with Beckett, since the version of herself that had existed before hockey had taught her, twice now, what it cost and what it gave back in equal, complicated measure.

Her phone buzzed. Roman, three words, no context.

Drawer. Tonight. Please.

She stared at the text, heart doing something complicated, remembering the offhand comment weeks ago about a ring in a drawer, remembering Priya's face going soft when she'd mentioned it, and typed back, hands slightly unsteady: What drawer?

You'll see. Come to my place after your shift. No cameras. No Priya. Just you and me and something I've been sitting on too long.

She didn't get any work done for the rest of the afternoon.

Roman

He'd rehearsed it four times in the mirror that morning, feeling ridiculous every time, a grown man who could skate into a two hundred pound hit without flinching, entirely undone by the prospect of getting down on one knee in his own kitchen.

His grandmother had called that afternoon, as if she'd sensed it somehow, the way she always seemed to sense the things that mattered before he'd said a word about them.

"You're doing it tonight," she said, not a question, in the particular tone she used when she already knew the answer and simply wanted him to admit it out loud.

"How do you always know these things."

"I raised you. I know your voice when it's carrying something heavy." A pause, warm, amused. "Your grandfather proposed to me in a kitchen too. Nothing fancy. He said the fancy part doesn't matter if the person already knows you mean it. Do you mean it?"

"More than anything I've meant in my whole life."

"Then stop rehearsing and just say the thing," she said, brisk, loving, exactly the way she'd always talked to him. "She already knows you, Seo joon. She wrote you a whole book before she even met you properly. She doesn't need a speech. She needs the truth, plainly said, the way you finally learned to say it."

He thought about that the rest of the afternoon, pacing his apartment, the ring sitting in the drawer where it had lived for two weeks, a simple band with a single stone, nothing ostentatious, nothing built for cameras or sponsors or anyone else's approval. Just something true, chosen for her specifically, the way she'd apparently chosen him months before either of them had known it.

She arrived at seven, still in her work clothes, hair slightly windblown, looking faintly nervous in a way that made his own nerves ease, strangely, the two of them meeting each other halfway in uncertainty instead of either one performing confidence for the other's benefit.

"You said no cameras," she said, stepping inside. "That's either extremely romantic or extremely concerning, depending on what's in the drawer."

"Romantic. I promise. Mostly." He led her to the kitchen, the same kitchen with one photo on the wall, the same table where he'd first admitted, months ago, that the rule about no feelings had already stopped applying to him. "Sit down. I have to say some things and I might get them out of order if you're standing there looking like that."

"Looking like what."

"Like you already know what's coming and you're trying very hard not to smile about it yet."

She sat, hands folded on the table, and he could see her fighting the smile exactly as he'd described, which somehow made everything easier, the rehearsed speech evaporating in favor of something plainer, truer, the way his grandmother had told him it should be.

"I read your fic before I ever properly met you," he started, "and I want to be honest that I've never fully told you what that actually did to me. I'd spent a decade building a version of myself that only existed to be useful on the ice. Hit hard. Take the penalty. Protect the skilled guys. I didn't think there was a person underneath that job worth writing about, not really, not until I found forty chapters of a stranger who'd apparently seen something in me I hadn't let myself believe existed." He reached across the table, took her hand, steady despite the nerves. "I blackmailed you into this relationship because I wanted an excuse to find out if the man you'd written was real, or if I'd just gotten lucky with a very generous author. Turns out you weren't being generous. You were just paying closer attention than anyone else ever had."

"Roman."

"Let me finish, I rehearsed this four times and I will lose my nerve if you interrupt me now." He almost laughed, despite the tightness in his chest. "I don't want an end date anymore. I told you that at the charity dinner and I meant it, but I've been sitting on something bigger than indefinitely for two weeks now, because indefinitely still sounded like a word with room to change its mind, and I don't have any room left in me for anything except certain."

He got up from the table, came around to kneel in front of her chair, the ring box finally out of the drawer and into his open palm, and watched her hand fly to her mouth, eyes bright, already answering before he'd finished the question.

"Delaney Voss. You wrote me softer before you ever met me, and then you loved me exactly that way once you did, blackmail and all, article and all, every complicated thing that got us here. I don't want to be your fake anything anymore. I want to be your husband. Properly. Permanently. No countdown, no clause, no renegotiation clock ticking down in the background. Just this, for as long as you'll have me."

"Yes," she said, before he'd even fully opened the box, laughing and crying at once, the specific unguarded joy he'd only seen from her twice before, once in his grandmother's kitchen, once in a tunnel after a hit that hadn't ended anyone's season. "Yes, obviously, yes, you enormous, ridiculous, wonderful man, yes."

He slid the ring onto her finger with hands that weren't entirely steady, and she pulled him up and into her arms before he'd fully found his balance from kneeling, and they stood there in his small kitchen, under the one photo on the wall, laughing into each other's shoulders, the whole apartment quiet except for the sound of two people finally landing somewhere they'd both been circling for months without either one admitting how close they already were.

Delaney

She called Priya from the car twenty minutes later, still crying a little, still unable to stop looking at her own hand on the steering wheel like the ring might disappear if she looked away too long.

"He proposed."

"I know," Priya said, and Delaney could hear the smile in her voice even over the phone. "He asked me for the afternoon off two weeks ago and told me not to schedule anything after six tonight. I've known since the charity dinner. I'm just very good at my job."

"You knew and you didn't tell me?"

"I'm his publicist, Voss, not yours. Client confidentiality." A pause, warmer than Delaney had ever heard from her. "For what it's worth, this is the best thing I've ever helped happen by accident. I built a blackmail cover story for a fake relationship and somehow ended up planning the timeline for a real proposal. My résumé has never looked stranger or better."

Delaney laughed, wet and unsteady, and drove home slowly, taking the long way, unwilling yet to be anywhere but inside the feeling of the last hour, the ring catching streetlight every time her hand moved on the wheel.

She thought about chapter one, written over a year ago in grief and confusion, a story that had started as an exorcism and become, somehow, without her ever planning it, a blueprint for the truest thing she'd ever have. She thought about Taxes 2019, still sitting somewhere on a shared drive, forty two chapters of a man she'd invented before she ever properly knew him, and wondered, driving home with a ring on her finger and her whole chest full of something too big for the car, whether she'd ever actually invented anything at all.

Maybe she'd just been the first person paying close enough attention to write down what was already true.

She got home, sat at her kitchen table, and opened her laptop for the first time in weeks, not to delete anything, not to hide anything in a folder named for taxes. She opened a blank document instead, and typed a single line before closing the laptop again, satisfied, ready to let the rest of it wait until morning.

Chapter Forty Three: He said the thing plainly, on his knees, in a kitchen with one photo on the wall, and for the first time in the whole story, I didn't have to imagine the ending. I just got to live it.