He laughed.
She laughed.
Then they finished their meals, chatting about favorite movies, discovering that more often than not, they had the same likes and dislikes. She was pretty and fun when she relaxed, with a self-deprecating edge that tempered her barbed wit. He liked her, liked her more with each minute he spent with her.
So much so, that by the time Liam paid and walked Mia back to her studio, he was half in love with her already.
So much so, that when he waved goodbye through the glass after somehow finagling her into giving him her number, he knew he’d be counting down the minutes until he could see her again.
So much so, that he sent her a text the moment he sat down in his car.
Too much?
Probably.
But just as he could tell that Mia needed to have a little fun, he also knew that she needed care.
And he was going to give it to her.
He shoved his feet into his skates, taking a few minutes to make sure the laces were perfectly tightened.
Too much would create something called skate bite, and it was brutal. It made the tops of the feet ache and burn, long after the skates were loosened to the proper tightness. Liam spent too much time with these blades strapped to his body to not have them just perfect.
So, not too tight.
And not too loose—because they wouldn’t give him enough support to sprint and change direction.
It was the Goldilocks syndrome of skate tying.
But thankfully, he’d been on the ice since he was just over a year old. First, with his dad holding him up as he just walked across the ice in the tiniest pair of skates imaginable. Flying by the time he was three. Fearless. Fast. The product of a hockey dynasty.
Ha.
Perhaps culmination was the proper term.
Either way—the ruin or realization—it meant that Liam had twenty-four years of skate tying experience—minus a few years, he supposed, before he’d learned how to do tie them himself.
Some might even say he was an expert.
He grinned, thinking that Mia would have had a pert comeback to that statement, just on principle.
“It’s nice to see you smiling.”
Blinking, he glanced up, saw Brit was looking at him. “Sorry, what?” he asked.
She bent, tying her own skates. “You’ve seemed a bit—” A shake of her head, words cut off. “Never mind me. I’m being nosy. The guys have corrupted me.”
Max, one of their defensemen, who’d been around the league, and the Gold, for years now, snorted and shook his head. “The guys have corrupted you?” he asked. “The guys? You’re the nosiest of them all.”
Blane was in the next stall down on Liam’s other side. “That’s a fine distinction in this room.”
Brit straightened, pointed a finger at Blane. “Hey! I grew up with you, but you’re older. So, if I’m nosy, then I learned those skills from you.”
“Whatever you say,” Blane muttered, standing and shrugging into his jersey.
“Words a woman dreams to hear,” Brit quipped.
A flash of a smile from Blane. “I know. Mandy”—his wife and one of the Gold’s physical therapists—“tells me that frequently.”
“The question is,” Liam said dryly, “do you listen?”
Quiet descended.
A long, uncomfortable silence that had Blane, Max, and Brit staring at him like he had two heads—or maybe that he’d overstepped, he realized with a sinking sensation. He was the newcomer here, hadn’t yet earned the right to tease or poke fun. Picked up just a few weeks ago, he definitely hadn’t been contributing to the scoresheet.
A black hole. A weak spot.
The words, in a familiar hard voice, pounded through his brain.
Liam opened his mouth, apology on the tip of his tongue.
“Holy. Shit,” Brit breathed. “You made a joke. I don’t believe it.”
Max started laughing. “Come on, he’s not that bad, just a little quiet.”
“I didn’t say he was bad,” Brit said. “I just said he made a joke, and it’s awesome.”
“I don’t believe you used the word awesome,” Max said.
“Okay, so maybe I didn’t use that exact word—”
“You didn’t,” Coop, their star forward, chimed in from a few spots down. “End of story.”
Brit scowled. “You—”
Max grinned. “Because I think you actually said—”
“Ah!” Brit jumped to her feet, one skate tied, the other with the laces dangling, and reached out, pretending like she was going to strangle him.
Liam fussed with his laces, even though they were already perfect.
The nudge on his right arm had him glancing up again, seeing that Blane had sat back down and was looking at him with a gaze that said he saw more than Liam had intended to show.
Fuck, he was a mess.
“It might have been a mediocre joke,” Blane said lightly, flashing a smile that had gotten him more than a few endorsement deals over the last years, “but I am glad you made it.” His voice dropped. “Have you settled in okay? You’ve seemed—”
Liam held his breath, waiting for the derision to sink into Blane’s tone. He’d heard enough of it over the years to know that it always did, and that even though someone might seem nice off the ice, in all of the media the various teams did, mean still crept through in the off the record moments.
“—sad,” Blane finished, which was pretty much the last adjective Liam had expected to hear. “Is everything okay home-wise? I know making a transition to a new team, a new state can be tough.”
Words.
They were hard sometimes.
He stared at Blane, trying to reconcile what the other man was saying with his expectations of what he’d thought he was about to hear. The Gold had a reputation for being like a family, for being a group of teammates who looked after one another. Except . . . Liam hadn’t really believed it. He’d played on teams who were supposed to be like family, and fuck, if they had been family, it had made his own semi-dysfunctional one look like the Brady Bunch.
He’d assumed the Gold was like that.
Creative marketing on the surface.
Plenty of fucked up beneath.
“Sorry,” Blane said, leaning back. “I’m getting to be as bad as that crew”—he nodded at Max and Brit, who were still bickering over something, though it sounded now like the argument had shifted from Liam to a playlist of some sort. Coop was mostly watching them fight, adding the odd comment here or there.
“It’s horrible,” Max moaned. “The whole playlist.”
“You know the rules,” Brit said. “The fastest gets to pick.”
“All well and good when you’re always the fastest,” Coop said, tone dry, though there was amusement in his expression.
“Them’s the rules,” she said.
“And who made the rules?” Max asked.
“Anyway,” she said, waving a hand and ignoring him. “My point is that the song makes me run faster.” A beat, lips twitching. “Thus, it has to stay in.”
“You don’t need to run faster,” Max muttered. “You’re already too damned fast as it is.”