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Goalies have a short shelf life, is the thing.
Everyone’s always surprised when they find out that Cormac went to college.
Six semesters at Minnesota, two trips to the Frozen Four, and a solid enough GPA that he hadn’t even been that embarrassed when he was the only dude in his poetry seminar to nut up and declare for English Lit. But then he’d been drafted into the actual motherfucking NHL on a steady diet of Jane Eyre and Madame Bovary, and he’d barely had to make a choice. School was school, and he was okay at it, of course he was, he knew how to focus and he knew how to get shit done and he knew how to parse out the overarching narrative themes of a good gothic romance.
But hockey—hockey was everything.
And he fucking hates calling himself a drop-out, because that makes it sound like he’d quit, or something, and it wasn’t…he isn’t a quitter. He’s not. He commits to shit. That’s his trademark. He’d picked up a hockey stick when he was four years old, and he’d basically never put it down again. His loud roar of triumph after stopping the final puck in a championship shootout had resulted in a sick as hell nickname and an even sicker tattoo permanently inked across most of his upper body. He’d fallen in love with the smartest girl in the world when he was nineteen and too dumb to see all the ways she wasn’t going to love him back, and he’d been carrying around the admittedly pitiful remnants of that particular torch ever fucking since. He’s stubborn. He’s determined. He doesn’t fucking quit.
Which is why hockey—
Hockey was everything.
Hockey was forever.
Forever , it turns out, is approximately three and a half years.
Malfoy solemnly squints as he snaps his fingers next to Cormac’s ear.
“My peripheral vision’s gone, not my hearing,” Cormac says darkly, draining his pint of weak-ass Canadian beer. “You unbelievable fucking dick .”
Across the table, Potter winces, and then waves at the bartender for another round of drinks. “Nothing they can do about it?” he asks, because Potter’s a pretty solid dude, even if his taste in boyfriends is fucking horrifying. “There’s no, like, surgery, or anything?”
“Nah,” Cormac replies, directing a sleazy, mostly automatic grin at the waitress who delivers their tray of Jäger bombs. “Puck hit me at—uh, at a bad angle. One in a million, the doctor said. I’m done, man.”
Malfoy hiccups. “Okay, but, like, can you still skate? Or are you. Y’know. Broken. Permanently.”
Cormac drops his shot glass, watches the Jäger splash out and the Red Bull gently fizz, and he doesn’t really know how to respond. A fuck-ton of guys have it way worse than him, have ruptured Achilles and splintered orbital sockets and totally debilitating concussion symptoms that’ll never quite go away. But he’s only twenty-four. He’d wanted to keep hockey. He’d wanted to hold hockey’s hand and buy it a dozen red roses and take it home to meet his fucking mom during the off-season. Hockey just hadn’t wanted to stick around. Hockey hadn’t wanted him back.
“Yeah, I can still skate,” he says, wiping his hand over his mouth. “Why?”
Blaise Zabini is a retired ex-figure skater with two gold medals and the blankest, most dead-eyed serial killer shark stare that Cormac’s ever seen.
He sizes Cormac up like he’s a particularly questionable side of beef—and somehow, it makes sense to think of Zabini as a butcher with, like, unlimited access to a lot of sharp knives and bloody meat hooks and industrial cleaning supplies—but it only takes Zabini three or four minutes to finally crack a microscopic smile and turn his attention back to his Arnold Palmer.
“Good shoulders,” Zabini says, apropos of fucking nothing. “You’ll do.”
Cormac doesn’t go after girls like Hermione Granger anymore.
Girls with edges.
He picks up girls who are stacked and blonde and uncomplicated. Girls who laugh at his jokes and who smile at the appletinis he buys them and who don’t mind being fucked from behind because stacked and blonde and uncomplicated is actually really, really, really not his type, but the alternative isn’t an option, seriously, he’s not cut out for that level of self-flagellating masochistic bullshit.
And then he’s stepping inside the enormous private rink Zabini brings him to, gaping at the gorgeously polished cedar beams crisscrossing the ceiling, and he sees—he sees—
Pansy Parkinson is her name.
She swishes across the ice with the kind of grace that can only be taught—can only be bought—swift and serpentine and so, so sure, and Cormac’s hockey gear abruptly feels cumbersome and oddly heavy as he watches her move. Watches her glide.
He notices the rest of her in fragments.
Slight, small build. Slender arms, long legs, narrow waist. Glossy black hair, blunt-cut bangs and a sparkly purple headband. High cheekbones and ivory skin and scarlet lips. Emerald green leotard with a keyhole cutout between the wings of her collarbones, shimmery beige tights and boring white skates.
She comes to a halt next to where he’s standing with Zabini, icing them both pretty thoroughly, and, god, she barely even looks at Cormac, just props her hands on her hips and frowns at Zabini and jerks her chin towards Cormac before asking, in a tone that’s flat with derision—
“Who the fuck is he?”
She’s not even pleasant, Cormac thinks, helplessly dismayed by how much he already knows he doesn’t give a shit.
His palms are sweaty.
His mouth is dry.
His stomach is sinking.
He’s been here before.
Pansy Parkinson is not the smartest girl in the world.
She’s arrogant and she’s whiny and she’s entitled and she’s focused. She’s militant about being up before the sun rises, and she’s scathingly critical of everything from the calluses on his fingers to the lingering traces of middle-class Boston in his accent, and she’s unfailingly strict in her interpretation of her nutrition plan. She eats steel-cut oats steeped in flavorless raw almond milk for breakfast, piles leafy greens and grilled chicken and soft-boiled eggs onto her plate for lunch, and carefully weighs out her portion of whole-wheat pasta every night after they’ve studied the film Zabini seems to arbitrarily fucking choose for them.
She’s determined.
She’s competitive.
She’s carefully composed and hilariously self-absorbed and intensely, frustratingly enigmatic.
She listens to shitty pop music during their morning runs, and she flips through dog-eared back-issues of Vogue when they take their water breaks, and she carries herself like she’s simultaneously afraid of her own shadow and confident in her ability to take both him and Zabini in a fucking fist fight. She’s fascinating, and she’s clever, and she’s honestly kind of mean. She spends their first week together speaking very, very slowly, almost exclusively in monosyllables, and asking him if he’s absolutely certain he doesn’t need to keep wearing his hockey helmet.
“You’re lucky I’m not that sensitive,” Cormac tells her, twisting the cap off a bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade. He’s lying. He’s really fucking sensitive. He still cries every time he reads Emma. “Could give a guy a complex.”
“I doubt you need any help with that,” Pansy retorts sweetly.
She’s not wrong.
Skating to music is harder than Cormac thought it would be.
He’s been doing yoga and ballet and, like, jazzercise with Pansy every day, training his muscles to twitch and flex and stretch in ways they never really have before—but finding rhythm on the ice, in sleek black skates with unreliable laces and rickety little blades; it’s fucking rough.
“Jesus Christ,” Pansy hisses, shoving him backwards after he’s messed up some needlessly complicated footwork sequence for the fifth time in one day. “Count out loud if you have to, but get your shit together before you break your fucking ankle.”
“I’m a hockey player,” Cormac argues, annoyed by the defensive slant of his own posture. “There’s a learning curve, princess, we didn’t all grow up doing—whatever the fuck this—tap dancing Charlie Chaplin on ice bullshit is.”
“Yeah, well, there isn’t a learning curve at the Olympics,” she replies, coolly. “Which is where we’re going. Maybe. If you stop skating like a drunk toddler with an eye patch on.”
Cormac grits his teeth, unable to come up with a response that isn’t dumb and petulant and embarrassing, and the smirk that Pansy levels him with is as unimpressed as it is a challenge.
It’s then, though, that he registers a low-simmering onslaught of something—excitement and adrenaline and energy, cratering in his veins and punching at his sternum and reminding him, with vivid, vicious clarity, of suiting up before a game and reading the angle of a puck just right and winning. Being tackled into the boards by his team, by his brothers, after he’s managed another shutout. He’s fucking missed it. Missed this. And he doesn’t have a team anymore, but he does have Pansy. A partner. His partner.
“Again,” Cormac eventually says, holding Pansy’s gaze for a second too long. “Let’s do it again.”
A month into training, Cormac’s dick gets involved.
Zabini’s there, ostensibly to teach Cormac how to propel Pansy into some kind of spinning twirling death-defying lift that, yeah, okay, looks hella fucking rad on grainy Soviet-era film, but—gravity? Gravity’s a thing. Cormac went to college. He knows his shit.
“How,” Cormac starts, scratching at the back of neck.
Zabini gestures absently to Pansy’s thighs, not even bothering to look up from his phone. “Just pick her up.”
Cormac tilts his head to the side. “Uh. Just—where, exactly, am I touching her?” He clears his throat. Adds, again, deliberately plaintive, “Exactly?”
Pansy huffs, and then sighs, and then reaches for Cormac’s wrists, dragging his hands to the space between her thighs. And he just—
He freezes, thumbs and forefingers framing the cradle of her…pelvis? He doesn’t think it’s her pelvis. He’s, like, eighty percent sure, actually, that it isn’t.
But his brain’s not quite firing on all cylinders, and his chest is rippling tight and tense and hot like he’s been crosschecked into a fucking bonfire, and his hands look so fucking big like this, fingers long and thick, palms broad and callused, and she’s tiny, of course she’s tiny, he’s been aware of that—painfully, viscerally aware—since that very first day, that very first moment, except the way his gut is clenching and his skin is tingling and his pulse is racing—it’s new, and it’s familiar, and he aches with how badly he wants to move his hands. A little farther up. A little farther in. He wants to trace the center seam of her leggings with his fingernail, wants to tease her, get her wet, make her gasp, wants to flick his tongue out and swipe his fingers down and press an open-mouthed kiss to the mound of her cunt, grip her hips and hold her—
“—hold her up, man,” Zabini is drawling, sounding bored. “Gotta get used to her sense of balance.”
Cormac blinks.
He’s half-hard in his Under Armour, and it’s as jarring as it is mortifying to realize that touching Pansy like this—learning her body, memorizing the shape of it and the bend of it and the strength of it—this is his fucking job now. He’s here to win. To skate. To take ballet lessons and pack on a lot of unnecessary muscle and grope Pansy fucking Parkinson in exchange for an Olympic gold medal. Nothing else.
Still.
He glances up.
He meets Pansy’s eyes.
He doesn’t think he’s imagining the faint hint of pink that’s blossoming across her cheeks.
It gets worse, after that.
They suck at Worlds.
They suck hard.
Cormac trips over the fucking snaggletooth murder traps on the fronts of his skates, skids into the boards while the crescendo of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony echoes around the rafters of the rink, and he hasn’t eaten ice like that since he was twelve, training with Zabini notwithstanding, and he’s taken aback, almost, by how fucking infuriating it is.
To work and sweat and bleed and still not be good enough.
Somewhere, Hermione Granger is writing her fucking dissertation on emotional manipulation and fucking laughing at him.
Again.
But Pansy’s a professional, of course, and so she skates on, footwork beautiful and timing impeccable, but there’s a rigidity to her movements, a stiffness in her spine and a wariness clouding her jumps, that doesn’t translate well. And Cormac heaves himself up, hurries to join her, tries to get the counts right in his head, but he’s not used to this, still doesn’t hear the nuances of the music quite like he should, and he’s a visible half-beat behind her for the rest of their long program.
Pansy doesn’t look at him afterwards.
She lifts her chin, clutches his hand, pastes a smile on her face, graciously accepts the scattered flowers and the slightly subdued applause; but her lower lip is trembling, and her eyes are suspiciously glassy underneath the false lashes and the metric fuck-ton of glitter, and Cormac feels guilt, gross and thick and vaguely acidic, begin to eat at his insides. It’s shitty. He’s shitty.
“I’m sorry,” he blurts out when they get back to their dressing room.
Pansy yanks at the laces of her skates. “For what?”
Cormac hesitates. “For, uh, fucking that up? Like, the whole thing?”
She shrugs. Fiddles with the zipper on her Team USA jacket. Still doesn’t look at him. “It happens,” she says, shortly.
“Well, yeah,” he replies, tugging at the over-starched cuffs of his shirt. It’s an ugly fucking shirt, interlocking shades of grey superimposed by a ragged slash of purposely illegible graffiti. “But, like. I’m still—I’m sorry, I guess, that you’ll have to. You know. Find someone else to skate with.”
Pansy goes dangerously still, a travel pack of cucumber-scented exfoliating wipes crinkling between her fingertips. “Excuse me?”
“Uh,” he hedges, licking his lips, “I’m sorry? I just—this shit was a lot easier during practice, you know, and I’m really…there’s still a few months left before San Jose, you could probably find another dude to—”
“What the fuck?” she interrupts. “What are you talking about?”
“I—I’m just—isn’t that how this goes?” Cormac asks, cracking his knuckles. His forehead is itchy where his sweat’s dried, caking the thin layer of bronze powder the makeup artist had dusted all over his face. “You got rid of…your other partners, the ones before me, and I don’t really expect—I mean—I’m not even a figure skater, you know? You don’t have to. Keep me around, or whatever. It’s okay.”
“Right,” she exhales, and that’s—that’s anger, he can hear it now. Anger and consternation and just the tiniest bit of fear. She’s finally looking at him. “I’m only going to say this once.”
“Uh.”
“You are not expendable,” Pansy snaps, enunciating each word so, so clearly, so crisply, like she’s convinced that if she doesn’t—convinced that if she slurs, or if she stumbles, or if she stutters—he might not get it. It makes her sound frantic. It makes her sound fierce. And he wonders at that, at her, just for a second; has to, absolutely, because she’s the most rigidly self-contained person he’s ever met, and this is unprecedented. This is. This is. “One subpar performance isn’t—it happens, you know that, but you—you’re not going anywhere, you’re not—you’re not temporary. Okay?”
Cormac swallows. He feels a little wrung out, like his skin’s stretched too thin and his bones are too spongey. Like—he’s exposed. Nerves raw, tonsils scratchy. It isn’t bad. Not really. He thinks he could get used to it, actually, if she needed him to. Asked him to.
“Okay,” he murmurs. “Okay.”
On New Year’s Eve, they’re sitting cross-legged on his living room floor, three iPods and Zabini’s laptop and a wine-stained yellow legal pad spread out between them. Cormac’s never really had strong opinions about classical music before, but they’ve been arguing about this shit for three and a half hours, and he has a fucking headache. He deserves a drink. He deserves a Stanley Cup.
“I’ve got it,” he says, popping the cork on a bottle of Bollinger. “ Def Leppard.”
Pansy chews on the inside of her mouth. “I know you think you’re joking, but that’s actually—that might not be a bad idea.”
Cormac skips the crystal stemware and grabs two custom black beer steins emblazoned with his old jersey number. “What, asking the Olympic Committee to install a stripper pole on the ice?”
“No, I meant—going rogue, with the music and the costumes and the—the routine, maybe, your technique is garbage, but—wait, what are you doing? What is that?”
“Champagne,” he says, holding out a mug for her.
She doesn’t take it. “I don’t drink.”
He rears back. “What? How do you live?”
“With excellent liver function and a spotless criminal record,” she simpers.
He pauses. “You read my Wikipedia page,” he says, kind of accusingly.
“You punched a math major.”
Cormac makes sure to gulp down most of his mug of champagne before he deigns to answer.
Midnight comes and goes.
They give up on making a decision about the music for their short program, and Cormac turns on a holiday marathon of Love It or List It. Pansy scrunches her toes into the carpet, toys with the hem of her tank top, gradually shifts closer and closer and closer; and the minutes seem to grind to a slick, syrupy halt as the weight of this—the expectation—suddenly becomes realer. More tangible.
It’s not a surprise when their lips finally brush.
It is a surprise, though, that Pansy’s so tentative about it.
So uncertain.
She has her eyes squeezed shut, and her hands bunched into fists around the fabric of his henley, and the movement of her mouth against his is mechanical, slow and soft and wet, yeah, but almost like those are things that she’s mentally checking off a list. Commonly Accepted Attributes of a First Kiss. Lean in. Arch up. Meld. Melt. Tease. Her tongue flicks out, just once, and she tastes cold and tart, like lemon water and peppermint, and Cormac groans, threading his fingers through the ends of her hair, cupping the nape of her neck and tilting her head a little farther back and—she relaxes, slightly.
“Yeah?” he breathes.
Her nails scrape against his skin. “Yeah.”
Twenty minutes later, they’re upstairs.
Pansy’s naked, sitting on the end of his bed with her knees pressed together and her face flushed a seriously satisfying shade of pink. And Cormac’s trying to get his own clothes off, really, he is, but she’s leaning back on her elbows, right, and her tits are small, obviously, she’s small, but they’re round and firm and perfect and the movement sort of thrusts them forward, drawing his attention to the tight peachy-beige buds of her nipples, and they’re—she’s—distracting. He’s distracted.
“Jesus Christ, are you going to fuck me or not?” she demands.
Cormac yanks his boxers off so fast that his cock slaps against his lower abdomen. “Don’t worry,” he assures her when her eyebrows fly up, “it’ll fit.”
Pansy’s jaw goes slack, and then she’s snorting out a laugh that’s deep and throaty and remarkably genuine, actually, nothing at all like the audibly artificial giggling she’d done at their last presser. And Cormac—he doesn’t care, he decides, that this laugh had come at his expense. He doesn’t. He’d say awful, humiliating, utterly moronic shit for the rest of his life, probably, if it would get her to laugh like that again. Which is a problem. Definitely. That he’ll totally address. At some point. Definitely. In the far, far, far off future.
“Who have you been sleeping with?” she asks, sounding mystified.
“No one, lately,” he replies, maybe a little too honestly, before pushing her backwards, dragging his hands from her shoulders to her waist to her hips.
Her lashes flutter as she clamps her bottom lip between her teeth. “Oh,” she says, but then she’s flashing him a smile, small and subtle and pleased, and her knees are falling open, and she’s repeating, much more quietly, much more intimately—
“Oh.”
They’re waiting to board their charter to South Korea when she grabs his wrist.
“Cormac.”
“Hmm?” he answers, scowling at an email from Malfoy that contains an inexplicably snide lol and absolutely nothing else. “What?”
Pansy glances over at him, crossing and uncrossing her legs. She’s wearing leggings and an oversized cashmere sweater and fluffy brown Uggs with the tops folded down. She looks fucking ridiculous.
“So…are you…are we…?” she asks, sounding—not indifferent, exactly, but maybe like she’s trying incredibly hard to pretend that she is. “All in?”
And Cormac—
Cormac forgets, sometimes, that other people have feelings, too. Feelings like he does. He shies away from words like “inadequate” and “unremarkable”, hasn’t ever let himself go there, even in his own head, because that’s a slippery fucking slope and he’s a big believer in faking shit until he doesn’t have to anymore. Until he’s tricked himself into thinking that it’s real.
He’s never had to do that with Pansy.
Not once.
And he doesn’t want her to have to do that, either. Second-guess herself, or him, or his place in her life. She’d told him he wasn’t temporary, wasn’t expendable, and she’d meant it, she’d made sure that he knew she meant it, and all he’d done in return was give her orgasms. He could do better. He would do better. He’d get her a gold medal and he’d curate her fucking library and he’d teach her how to play hockey. He’d love her, eventually. He would.
For now, though, he just twists his wrist around, slides his hand up, presses the flat of his palm to the flat of Pansy’s, and he—he marvels for a second. At how tiny she is compared to him. How fragile, and how not fragile, and how much of a fundamental fucking contradiction she’s been all along.
He then laces their fingers together, and he feels her brief tremor of surprise. Feels how she stills, and how she steadies, and how she settles.
“All in,” he promises.