Trapped On The Ice With My Obsessed Captain

CHAPTER 5

Wren’s POV

I left it open. Two inches. Just enough to be a statement.

I lay in bed with the lights off and my heart doing wind sprints and the very clear understanding that I had just drawn a line in the ice and invited a man with obsessive tendencies and zero emotional regulation to cross it.

The apartment was quiet. He'd come home at eleven. I'd heard his keys, his footsteps, the bathroom door. The shower ran for twelve minutes. Then his bedroom door. Then silence.

I stared at the ceiling.

Eleven-thirty.

Midnight.

Twelve-fifteen. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the notebook and the forehead and the "lock your door" were just a man having a moment and I'd read it with the desperate optimism of someone who had spent two weeks sleeping twelve feet from a person she wanted to…

His door opened.

I stopped breathing.

Footsteps in the hallway. Bare feet on carpet. Slow. The walk of someone who was giving himself every chance to turn around and not taking any of them.

He stopped outside my door. I could see his shadow through the two-inch gap. He stood there for a long time. Long enough for me to count my heartbeats. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.

Then his hand appeared on the door. Fingers spread against the wood. Not pushing. Resting. Like he was deciding.

"You left it open," he said. Barely audible.

"I know."

"I told you not to."

"You told me to lock it. That's different from telling me not to leave it open. One is a warning. The other is a request. You made the warning. You didn't make the request."

A sound that might have been a laugh. "You're arguing semantics at midnight."

"You're standing outside my bedroom at midnight."

Silence. His hand was still on the door. I was still on the bed. The two inches between open and closed was the distance between everything we'd been pretending and everything we actually were.

"If I come in," he said, "I'm not going to be able to go back to hating you tomorrow."

"You never hated me."

"I tried."

"You failed."

"I know." His voice cracked on it. Not dramatically. Just a hairline fracture in the voice of a man who had spent his entire life keeping everything controlled, discovering that control was just a word he used to describe the space before he fell. "I know I failed, Wren."

My name. Not Calloway. Not "the girl on the team." Wren.

"Come in," I said.

The door opened.

He stood in the frame. Grey sweatpants. No shirt. The tally marks on his ribs catching the hallway light. His hair was still damp and his eyes were the opposite of every cold, flat, November look he'd ever given me on the ice. They were open. Terrified. Certain.

He didn't move. He stood in my doorway like a man at the edge of a cliff who had already decided to jump and was just taking one last look at the ground.

"I don't do this," he said. "I don't want people. I don't keep lists. I don't stand in doorways at midnight trying to talk myself out of something I decided to do three weeks ago."

"What did you decide three weeks ago?"

"That you were going to ruin me." He took one step into the room. "And that I was going to let you."

He was at the edge of my bed. Looking down at me. Every line of him taut, wound, barely held.

I sat up. Eye level with the tally marks on his ribs. Twenty of them, four neat clusters.

"What are these?" I touched one. His stomach contracted.

"Every game I've captained."

"There's twenty. You've captained more than twenty."

He looked at me. Something raw and unfinished and completely honest in those grey eyes.

"Those are the twenty where I almost lost."

"Almost?"

"The ones that taught me something." His hand came up. Slowly, like he was giving me time to stop him, which we both knew I wasn't going to do. His fingers traced my jaw, my chin, the edge of my lower lip. "You're going to be twenty-one."

I caught his wrist. Held it. His pulse hammered against my thumb, fast and hard and completely at odds with the controlled stillness of the rest of him.

"I thought you hated having me on your team," I said.

"I do."

"Then what is this?"

His thumb brushed across my lip. His eyes followed the movement with the focus of a man who had been watching this exact spot for weeks and was finally close enough to touch it.

"This," he said, "is the part where I stop pretending."

He leaned down.

My phone exploded.

Not a ring. An alarm. The emergency team notification, the one Coach Maddox only triggered for critical situations, blasting through the silence like a fire alarm through a cathedral.

Kael froze. His hand was still on my face. His mouth was three inches from mine. His phone was screaming from his bedroom down the hall, the same alarm, the same siren.

"Don't answer it," I whispered.

He closed his eyes. Pressed his forehead to mine for the second time that day. I felt his breath, his heartbeat through his wrist, the shudder of a man pulling himself back from something he wanted more than winning.

"I'm the captain," he said.

He pulled away. Stood up. Walked out of my room and answered his phone in the hallway with the voice of a man who hadn't just been three inches from unravelling.

"This is Thorne. What happened?"

I couldn't hear the response. But I watched his shadow through the open door. Watched it go still. Watched his posture change from tense to rigid to something I hadn't seen from him before.

He appeared in my doorway. His face was ashen.

"Get dressed," he said. "Now."

"What happened?"

"Holloway's in the hospital." His voice was steady but his hand was gripping the doorframe hard enough to whiten the wood. "Someone jumped him outside the arena. He's in surgery."

"Oh my God."

"That's not the worst part." He looked at me, and what I saw in his eyes turned my blood to ice. "Wren, he was wearing your jersey."