Chapter 68: CHAPTER 68

Jax’s POV

The lock on the oak door didn’t rattle after the bolt cleared the strike plate; it just stayed there, a heavy, dead-weight horizontal bar of iron that smelled of dry graphite and seventy years of county keyways.

Outside, the concrete corridor of the west wing was still echoing with the low, rhythmic thrack-thud of the second line’s work boots dragging through the slush toward the equipment nets. Someone, probably Harrington was shouting about a missing skate guard, his voice thin and cracked, muffled by the three inches of seasoned timber and the thick green enamel that had sealed the frame since the winter of fifty-eight. Then a heavy door slammed down by the coal bunker, and the corridor went completely gray and quiet, leaving nothing but the low, electrical buzz-whir of the sixty-watt bulb hanging from its green cord in the center of the ceiling.

I didn't stand up right away. I stayed by the lock, my palm flat against the cold brass housing, my boots planted three feet apart on the gray linoleum where the trainer’s cart had left a long, greasy track of wheel oil.

My chest was still heaving under the damp canvas of my work jacket, short, ragged hitches that made the gold seams across my shoulders let out a dry, protesting scritch every time my ribs expanded. My knuckles were burning. The skin over my middle joint on the right hand had split clean open where I’d hit Liam’s jawline, the red blood already turning a dark, tacky brown as it mixed with the black coal grease from Fin’s garage. I didn't look for a towel. I just wiped the edge of my hand down the thigh of my breezers, leaving a long, irregular smear of rust-colored dust against the navy wool.

Julian was sitting on the edge of the high pine table.

His legs were hanging down between my knees, his long, white calves looking thin and bare in the harsh light from the bulb, his split travel shoes dangling three inches off the floorboards. He’d kept his blue socks on, but they were wet through the heels, the gray wool dripping a slow, rhythmic drip... drip onto the linoleum right between his soles. He wasn't looking at me. He had his head down, his chin pressed so hard against his collarbone that the wet, blonde mats of his hair had fallen forward over his eyes, hiding the small, dark line of blood that was still drying in the crease behind his left ear.

"Jaxom," he whispered.

His voice didn't have any weight to it. It was just a flat, dry whistling in his throat, the sound a radiator valve makes when the steam line goes cold in the middle of January.

"Shut up, Jules," I said.

I walked over to the small steel supply cabinet by the sink. My boots made a loud, sticky peel-peel sound on the gray linoleum, the rubber soles lifting the dried floor wax with every step. The shelves were mostly empty—just two old bottles of isopropyl alcohol with the labels peeling off, a box of rusted safety pins, and three rolls of the heavy, four-inch white athletic tape the association bought in bulk from the medical clearinghouse in Detroit.

I took the widest roll. The fabric was stiff, thick, and smelled of dry zinc oxide and old adhesive, the kind of tape they used to bind up horsehair pads when the leather split during a regional final.

I pulled a small wooden stool between his knees.

The pine legs gave a short, sharp creak as I dropped my weight onto the seat, my knees brushing against the wet wool of his socks, my broad chest blocking out the draft that was coming under the locked door from the ice rink. I didn't look at his face yet. I kept my eyes fixed on his left side, on that massive, six-inch grid of purplish-black skin that was still rising and falling with those shallow, frantic gasps.

"Lean forward," I muttered.

I reached out, my large, grease-darkened fingers catching the edge of the adhesive. The tape let out a loud, coarse shrrr-clack as I tore the first twelve inches off the roll, the sound massive and violent in the small, whitewashed room.

Julian didn't move his arms. He kept them lifted slightly away from his ribs, his long fingers trembling where they rested against the raw pine of the table, his skin so white under the sixty-watt bulb that I could see the tiny, blue branching of his veins running down to his wrists. When I laid my left hand against the small of his back to steady him, his whole frame gave a violent, involuntary shudder, not from the cold anymore, but from that deep, somatic exhaustion that had been eating his bones since we hit the stone gates at two in the morning.

"Easy," I whispered, my voice dropping into that low, permanent baseline. "I’m not going to hit the welt."

I brought the white tape around his right side first, my fingers moving with a slow, mechanical caution that didn't match the size of my hands. I didn't rush the wrap. I laid the adhesive flat against his skin, my thumb smoothing out the wrinkles in the cloth as I pulled it tight, not tight enough to cut off the little air he had left, but hard enough to lock the third and fourth ribs back into their slots so the bone couldn't shift when he took a breath.

Every time the tape cleared his chest, Julian let out a short, wet gasp, a sharp, catching sound in his throat that ended in a dry click against his teeth.

"Jax... the train," he murmured, his forehead dropping until it was almost resting against my shoulder, the wet blonde strands of his hair brushing the collar of my canvas jacket. "The registry... the Dean said nine o'clock for the clearance..."

"The Dean can sit on his pen, Jules," I said. I laid another strip of the white cloth over the first one, overlapping the seams by an inch to build the wall. "The train doesn't leave without the roster forms, and Clain’s still got the clipboard in her office. We have twenty minutes."

"I can't... I can't feel the blade," he whispered.

His hand came off the table, his long, cold fingers catching the sleeve of my jacket, his grip weak and loose, not like the grip he’d used to hold me back at the boardroom door, but a soft, desperate clawing that didn't have enough muscle behind it to bunch the canvas. "When I hit the wood... everything went white, Jaxom. I couldn't find the red line. I couldn't... I couldn't see your jersey."

"I was right there," I said. I smoothed the tape over his sternum, my large palm lingering for half a second over the quiet, frantic thudding of his heart. "I’m right here, Jules. I’ve got the steel locked."

The second roll of tape was half-gone before Julian spoke again.

He’d stopped trying to hold his arms up; he let his elbows drop until his forearms were resting flat against my shoulders, his weight leaning into my chest with a heavy, unresisting helplessness that felt entirely different from the Ice King who had stood at the head of the walnut table three hours ago. The smell of his sweat, the cold, sour sweat of a boy who has been running through the slush without his coat buttoned, was thick between us, mixing with the sharp copper tang from my knuckles and the dry zinc reek of the adhesive.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

His forehead was pressed flat against my collarbone now, his voice muffled by the rough canvas of my jacket.

"For what?" I asked, my thumb pressing the final seam of the wrap down against his right hip.

"The fight," he said, his breath hot and shallow against my neck. "Liam... the team. If I hadn't... if I hadn't brought the books up from the garage, the registry would have been level. You wouldn't have had to drop your gloves. You wouldn't have had to... to look at me like that on the ice."

I stopped my hand. I stayed sitting on the wooden stool, my knees locked around his calves, my large, blood-smeared palms resting on the white tape right below his ribs.

"Look at you like what, Jules?"

"Like I was dead," he murmured.

A small, violent shiver ran through his shoulders, his fingers tightening in the canvas of my jacket until his knuckles clicked against the cloth. "When I was sitting by the goal frame... I could hear the whistle, but I couldn't see the light. And then your boots came over the red circle. You looked... you looked like you were going to tear the boards off the wall just to get to the steel."

I didn't answer him with a speech. I couldn't. The gravel in my throat was too thick, my tongue feeling heavy and dry like a piece of old gasket rubber from the Cutlass.

I reached up with both hands, my palms catching his jawline, careful, so careful, my split thumb avoiding the small cut behind his left ear and lifted his head until his blue eyes were looking straight into mine through the gray light of the room. His face was entirely white, his lips gray and chapped where he’d been biting them to keep from screaming when the tape went tight.

I leaned my head forward until my forehead was pressed straight against his, the bridge of my nose touching his skin, our breath meeting in a single, hot, and ragged space between our mouths.

"I was terrified, Julian," I whispered.

The word came out of my chest like a dry rivet popping out of an engine frame, rough, heavy, and completely stripped of any of that local pride I used down at the center. "I saw your helmet hit the drain grate. I saw the gold jerseys closing in on the goal mouth, and I thought... I thought they’d finally broken you for good. I thought the Thorne name had finally taken the last three inches of play out of your steering."

"They didn't," he whispered, his eyes wide and brilliant in the shadow of my brow, his chapped lips brushing against mine with every shallow breath. "They didn't break it, Jaxom. The line is still level."

"It's not level," I growled, my fingers sliding into the wet blonde mats of his hair, pulling him half an inch closer until the heat of his skin was running straight into my palms. "But I don't care about the line. I don't care about the Detroit scouts, and I don't care about the regional trophy. I care about you standing up."

The high pine table didn't creak when I shifted my weight off the stool; the wood was thick enough to hold the weight of two hundred pounds of wet canvas and broken bone without letting out a single vibration.

I didn't take my boots off. I stayed in my skates, my steel runners planted flat on the linoleum to keep my balance as I leaned over him, my body creating a massive, dark shadow that shut out the light from the bare sixty-watt bulb completely.

My movements weren't the fast, violent rushes I used when I was clearing the crease or tackling Liam into the boards. They were slow, deliberate, and filled with a quiet, terrifying caution that made my heart beat against my ribs like an ungreased piston. I reached out, my large hand sliding under his neck to support the weight of his head as I guided his shoulders down onto the dark leather pad, my eyes tracking every rise and fall of the white tape around his ribs to make sure the adhesive wasn't catching on the swell of his bruise.

"Jules," I breathed against his mouth.

"I'm here," he whispered.

He didn't try to pull away. He lay flat against the leather, his long legs draped over the sides of the table, his hips shifting by a fraction of an inch to make room for my thigh as I braced my weight against the wood. The wet wool of his socks was cold against my shins, but the skin of his chest, where the white tape met the bare, white flesh of his throat, was burning hot, a thick, clean heat that felt like the bricks of the boiler house after the midnight shift.

I laid my mouth against his collarbone first, just a slow, soft pressure that didn't have any of the locker-room force behind it, my lips finding the small, hollow spot right above his sternum where his pulse was still running at that frantic, high-frequency rate.

He let out a long, shuddering sigh, not a gasp of pain, but a deep, slow drainage of the tension that had been keeping his spine straight since we cleared the gates. His long fingers came up to catch my ears, his touch light and wet with the condensation from the ice, his thumbs smoothing the rough, unshaven skin along my jawline with a slow, rhythmic stroke that made my breathing slow down to match his own.

"You're safe, Jules," I whispered into the skin of his neck, my mouth moving down to the first line of the white tape, my lips mapping out the shape of his ribs through the stiff cloth. "I’ve got the lock on the door. The team’s down by the gatehouse, and the gate is closed."

"I know," he murmured.

I moved with absolute, agonizing caution, my body suspended three inches above his left side, my left forearm braced against the pine frame of the table to keep my chest protector from pressing into his swollen flesh. Every kiss I laid against his skin, from the soft, pale hollow of his hip up to the dark gray smudge of grease on his shoulder, was a silent, heavy promise, a slow accumulation of weight that didn't need any family lawyers or options agents to verify the clearance.

Julian’s eyes were closed now, his long blonde lashes throwing two separate, delicate shadows across his white cheekbones, his mouth slightly open as he took in the quiet, hot air of the room. He didn't look like the Ice King, and he didn't look like the Thorne heir who had unpinned his silver "C" upstairs. He was just a twenty-two-year-old boy lying on a rusted training table in a locked room behind a coal yard, his body covered in white medical tape and split leather, his hand holding onto the sleeve of a mechanic’s jacket like it was the only thing that kept the world from turning into gray river mud.

The clock on the wall didn't make a sound when the second hand hit eleven-forty-five; it just let out that same low, electric buzz-whir that had been running through the plaster since eight o'clock.

I stayed lying next to him on the narrow table, my arm tucked under his head, my chin resting against the wet, blonde mats of his hair. The navy polyester of his torn jersey was draped over his legs to keep the chill off his shins, the blue cloth looking dark and heavy against the white of the leather pad.

Julian turned his head slowly, his blue eyes finding mine through the yellow light from the bulb.

"We have to go, Jax," he said.

His voice was still thin, but the dry whistling was gone, replaced by that flat, stubborn steel that had been sitting in his bones since we sat on the stone wall behind the greenhouse.

"You can't play, Jules," I said, my hand closing over the white tape on his shoulder, my fingers feeling the rigid, unyielding stiffness of the wrap. "Fin said the three-line is floating. One hit from the State defense, one winger dropping his shoulder in the neutral zone and you’re sitting in the Grand Rapids ward for six months."

"I'm playing," Julian said.

He didn't look at the torn jersey on his legs. He looked at the locked oak door, then back at my face, his fingers tightening in my sleeve until the wet wool let out a sharp, metallic clink against the brass buckle of my harness.

"We have twenty-four dollars in the pocket of my trousers, Jaxom," he said, his blue eyes brilliant and completely level under the sixty-watt light. "We have an old Cutlass with three inches of play in the steering box and a bag of Graf skates in the back of the bay. If we don't take the ice tomorrow night, if we don't clear the margin for the association before the Detroit train leaves the gatehouse, we're just two boys who got run out of the county by a three-line options clerk."

He stopped, his throat working on a slow, deliberate swallow, his hand sliding up to my jawline.

"I’d rather have the lung collapse at the red line than spend the next twenty years standing in Fin’s garage, watching the blue jerseys clear the gate without us," Julian whispered. "I’m going to the Semifinals, Jax. No matter what the ledger says."

I looked at him for five long seconds, at the white tape around his ribs, at the dry line of blood behind his ear, and at that flat, royal steel in his jaw that was too heavy for any Thorne estate to purchase.

"Then I'll clear the lane for you," I growled, my mouth dropping down to catch his chapped lips one last time, my large hand locking onto his hip to hold him steady against the pine. "If anyone drops a shoulder within three feet of your left side, Jules, they’ll have to carry him off the sheet in the same box they used for the options."

The whistle didn't blow down the corridor. But as we stood up to reach for our skates, the first rumble of the noon train to Detroit began to shake the concrete foundation below our boots, and the ice was finally clear.

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A/N: I hope we liked it?

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