Power Play

Chapter Three: Moving Day

The problem with moving day, Rae decided somewhere around the third trip up two flights of stairs with her arms full of boxes, was that it stripped away every polite fiction two people could otherwise maintain about each other.

She hadn't expected Beckett to already be there when she arrived Saturday morning — she'd timed her move for ten a.m. specifically because his usual gym schedule kept him out of the apartment until noon, information she'd gathered not through any deliberate surveillance but through months of overlapping team schedules that made his routines impossible not to know. But there he was on the narrow front steps of 214 Birchwood, sleeves pushed up, hauling a mattress frame through a doorway clearly built for something smaller, and the sight of him — off the ice, out of uniform, in a gray T-shirt gone dark with sweat across the shoulders — did something unhelpful to the pace of her heartbeat.

"You're early," she said, by way of greeting, setting her first box down on the bottom step.

"You're also early." He didn't look up from wrestling the frame through the door. "I thought I had until noon."

"I thought I had until noon."

They stared at each other for a beat over the mattress frame, both arriving independently at the same unspoken conclusion: that each of them had shown up two hours ahead of the other specifically to claim the better room, the quieter hours, the small tactical advantage of getting settled before the other one arrived. It was, Rae thought, a genuinely embarrassing thing to have in common.

"There are two bedrooms," she said finally. "I assume one's bigger."

"The one on the left. Overlooks the street." He finally wrestled the frame through and set it down in the narrow hallway with a grunt. "I already called it."

"You called it in an email nobody sent you."

"I called it just now. Verbally. To you."

"That's not how calling dibs works."

"It's exactly how calling dibs works." He straightened, wiped his forearm across his brow, and looked at her with the particular flat patience of a man who had negotiated far worse things than bedroom assignments and found this one, if anything, restful by comparison. "You want to flip a coin?"

"I want the room that isn't directly above the radiator that clanks all night."

That landed somewhere unexpected — his jaw shifted, something that might have been the beginning of amusement quickly filed away before it could become a full expression. "How do you know about the clanking radiator?"

"Priya dated a guy who lived here sophomore year. Everyone knows about the clanking radiator." She hefted her box again, brushing past him into the narrow hall, close enough that she caught the specific, unwelcome fact of how he smelled — clean sweat and something like cedar, nothing manufactured, nothing she could dismiss as cologne trying too hard. "The left bedroom's above it. I did my research."

"You did research."

"I've been living out of a dorm and my best friend's couch for two months, Vance. I do research on everything now. I researched the T-stop schedule. I researched which dining hall runs out of the good coffee last. I am extremely prepared for disappointment."

Something in that admission — the specific, unguarded honesty of it, delivered flat and fast the way she delivered most things she didn't want examined too closely — made Beckett go quiet in a way that felt different from his usual silences. He watched her a beat too long before answering.

"Fine," he said. "Take the quiet room. I'll deal with the radiator."

It wasn't generosity, exactly — she could tell that much from the clipped, almost irritated way he said it, like conceding the point cost him something he'd rather not examine either — but it was the first time in four months of overlapping her life with his that Beckett Vance had given her something without making her fight for it first, and it unsettled her more than any argument would have.

The apartment itself was smaller than either of them had expected from the outside — a narrow shotgun layout with the kitchen and living room compressed into one L-shaped space, a single bathroom wedged between the two bedrooms, and a hallway so tight that passing another person required a small, deliberate negotiation of shoulders and hips that neither of them, over the course of the day, quite mastered.

"Sorry," Rae said, for the fourth time, pressing herself flat against the wall to let Beckett pass with an armful of hockey equipment that took up considerably more hallway than a person alone would.

"You keep apologizing like it's your fault the hallway's four feet wide."

"I keep apologizing because you keep timing your trips to intersect with mine."

"I'm not timing anything." He edged past, close enough that his shoulder brushed hers, close enough that she felt the heat radiating off him even through two layers of fabric, and neither of them moved faster to end the contact than the narrow space strictly required. "It's a small apartment. This is just going to happen."

"Great," Rae muttered, to the now-empty hallway, once he'd disappeared into his room. "That's a great thing to have confirmed."

By early afternoon they'd fallen into an uneasy rhythm — not quite cooperation, but something adjacent to it, a wordless division of labor that put him on furniture-moving duty and her on kitchen-unpacking duty, mostly because neither of them wanted to be in the same six-foot radius for longer than logistics required. It was in the kitchen, unpacking a box of mismatched dishware that had traveled with her since her dorm room and, before that, her father's apartment above the bar, that Beckett found her an hour later, having apparently run out of furniture to move.

"You don't have a coffee maker," he said, standing in the kitchen doorway with the specific stillness of a man surveying a problem he hadn't expected to have to solve.

"I have a French press."

"That's not a coffee maker."

"It's a better coffee maker."

"It requires four minutes of active attention. I don't have four minutes in the morning." He said it like a genuine grievance, which struck Rae as almost funny, given everything else currently competing for space in her head about this arrangement — the fact that this six-foot-two future NHL draft pick, who could apparently absorb his own father's cold ultimatums without visible flinching, was standing in her kitchen litigating coffee preparation methods like it was the most pressing crisis of the day.

"Buy your own coffee maker, then."

"I'm going to." He said it with the particular finality of a man adding an item to a list he took very seriously, and turned to leave, and then didn't, lingering in the doorway a beat longer than the conversation required, watching her unpack a chipped mug that had clearly seen better decades. "That's an ugly mug."

"It's my dad's. From the bar." She set it carefully on the shelf, more carefully than the object strictly warranted, and didn't elaborate further, and something in her tone must have told him not to ask, because he didn't — just nodded once, filed it away the way he seemed to file everything away, and left her alone in the kitchen with the specific, unwelcome awareness that Beckett Vance noticed more than he ever let on, and said even less about what he noticed.

By eight that night, both of them exhausted in the particular way that came from moving furniture and negotiating a small space and pretending, for eight straight hours, not to be constantly, minutely aware of each other's location within it, they ended up in the same room for the first time without a task to organize around — the living room, one lamp on, a stack of unopened boxes between them like a poorly constructed border wall.

"We should set some rules," Beckett said, breaking a silence that had gone on long enough to become its own kind of statement.

"Rules."

"For living together. Bathroom schedule. Kitchen stuff. Whatever this is going to require to not turn into a disaster."

Rae considered him across the boxes — considered, specifically, the fact that he'd said rules with the exact tone he probably used to lay out a defensive system before a big game, methodical, prepared, treating the apartment like a variable that needed managing before it managed him. It was, she thought, deeply in character, and also, somehow, kind of endearing, a word she immediately regretted applying to Beckett Vance even privately.

"Okay," she said. "Rule one. No walking around shirtless in the common areas."

His eyebrow went up, the first genuinely surprised expression she'd gotten out of him all day. "That's your first rule?"

"It's a completely reasonable first rule."

"Do you have a shirtless problem I should know about?"

"I have a problem with living in four hundred square feet with a hockey player who's going to be doing shirtless post-practice recovery stuff constantly, and I'd like to establish a boundary before it becomes an issue."

"Noted." Something flickered across his face — amusement, maybe, or the specific challenge of a man who'd just been handed a rule he found faintly ridiculous but wasn't going to argue with in front of witnesses, even witnesses of one. "My rule: no talking about the team's chances after a loss. I don't want to come home and relitigate the third period."

"Fair."

"And bathroom schedule. I have morning skate at five-thirty most days. I need the bathroom clear by five."

"I have morning skate too, Vance, we're on the same team."

"Right." He blinked, the small stumble of a man who'd apparently forgotten, mid-negotiation, that the person across from him shared his exact schedule. "Then I guess we're figuring out a rotation."

"I guess we are."

They worked through it, slowly, awkwardly, the particular negotiation of two people used to controlling their own space now forced to account for someone else's — bathroom rotation, grocery division, quiet hours around exam weeks, a whole architecture of small compromises that neither of them acknowledged, out loud, was oddly domestic for two people who two days ago had barely tolerated sharing a locker room hallway.

It was nearly ten when Beckett stood to head to bed, pausing at the mouth of the hallway, silhouetted by the single lamp still burning behind him.

"Callahan."

"Yeah."

"This is going to work fine," he said, "as long as we keep it professional."

"That's the plan."

"Good." He held her gaze a second longer than the sentence required — long enough that Rae felt the specific weight of it settle somewhere under her ribs, long enough that neither of them looked away first, until he did, finally, and disappeared down the hall, and she heard his door close with a soft, deliberate click that felt, somehow, louder than it should have.

She sat alone in the lamplight for a long minute afterward, staring at the space where he'd been standing, and thought, with the specific dread of someone watching a plan already coming apart at the seams, professional was going to be a much harder word to hold onto than either of them wanted to admit.