Chapter 6 COLD WATER AND HOT SCREENS

Caleb's pov

I stood under the shower until the water turned so cold it stopped feeling like anything at all.

An hour. Maybe longer. I lost track somewhere between the tenth time I replayed the kiss in my head and the twentieth time I told myself it meant nothing.

It meant nothing, I told myself, pressing my forehead against the wet tile. It was just the bond talking. Not me.

My wolf disagreed. Loudly.

She let you go, he growled inside my skull. You should have held on tighter.

"She's a he," I muttered out loud, my voice bouncing off the shower walls. "He. Jordan is a he. To the whole pack, anyway."

My wolf didn't care about semantics. He only cared that Jordan's scent was gone from the room now, and that made him restless, pacing back and forth in my head like a caged animal.

I turned the water off, wrapped a towel around my waist, and walked back into my bedroom. The sheets on my bed were still wrinkled from earlier. The whole room still smelled faintly like pine and vanilla, like Jordan had never actually left.

I sat down on the edge of the mattress and stared at the wall for a long time.

I am not gay, I thought again, for what felt like the thousandth time that week. This is just a mistake. The Moon Goddess made a mistake.

But even as I thought it, I knew it sounded weak. Mates weren't mistakes. Every wolf in this pack had been told that since birth. The bond didn't lie, and it didn't pick wrong. It picked exactly who it was supposed to.

It just happened to pick someone with a female body hidden under twenty years of lies.

I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and sat back against the headboard, my jaw already tight with dread over what I was about to do. I'd tried this before, twice already this week, and both times I'd made it about a minute before I had to throw the phone across the room.

Tonight I was going to try longer.

I opened the browser, typed in a search I'd never admit to another living soul, and pressed play on the first video that came up.

Ten seconds in, my stomach turned.

I forced myself to keep watching, gripping the phone so hard my knuckles went white. My wolf recoiled instantly, snarling and clawing at the inside of my skull like I'd just dunked him in acid.

Wrong, he snapped. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Not what we want.

"I know," I muttered through gritted teeth. "I'm trying to fix that."

You can't fix wanting the wrong thing by watching more of it.

"Watch me."

I made it forty seconds before I had to close the video and set the phone face down on the mattress, breathing hard like I'd just finished a full shift on the ice. My stomach rolled, and for a second I thought I might actually be sick.

I picked the phone back up anyway and tried a different video.

Same result. Worse, actually. My skin crawled, my wolf howled in protest, and somewhere around the thirty second mark I had to shut my eyes and remind myself that Jordan's face, not some stranger's on a screen, was the only thing that had ever made my body react like that.

That thought made everything worse.

"This is stupid," I said out loud, dropping the phone onto the bed and dragging both hands down my face. "This is so stupid."

You keep trying to train yourself into something you already are, my wolf said, quieter now, almost gentle. It isn't the body that pulled you. It's her.

"Don't call Jordan her. Not out loud. Not ever."

Fine. Then stop lying to yourself about the rest of it.

I didn't have an answer for that.

I tried three more videos over the next two hours, each one worse than the last, until my stomach was in actual knots and my head throbbed from clenching my jaw so hard. Around three in the morning, I finally gave up, threw the phone onto the nightstand, and lay back against my pillows, staring up at the ceiling.

Maybe I didn't need to train myself into anything.

Maybe I just needed to stop fighting a body that already knew exactly who it wanted, even if my head refused to catch up.

I didn't sleep. Not really. I drifted in and out for a couple of hours, catching flashes of the kiss every time I closed my eyes, until the first gray light of morning crept through my curtains and my phone buzzed against the nightstand.

I grabbed it, expecting a text from one of my teammates. Instead, it was a pack-wide calendar alert.

MANDATORY JOINT TRAINING

TIME: 7:00 AM

LOCATION: MAIN ARENA

NOTE:  ALL SENIOR PLAYERS ARE REQUIRED.

I stared at the screen for a long moment.

Joint training meant both teams. Both teams meant Jordan.

"Perfect," I muttered, tossing the phone onto the bed. "Absolutely perfect timing."

I dragged myself out of bed, pulled on my gear, and skipped breakfast entirely because my stomach was still too twisted from the night before to handle food. By the time I walked out of the pack house, the sun was barely up, the sky still streaked gray and pink over the trees.

The arena was a short walk from the pack house, but it felt longer than usual, every step dragging like my boots were made of lead instead of leather. I kept running through what I'd say if Jordan brought up the kiss in front of the team. I kept running through what I'd say if he didn't.

I didn't have an answer for either one.

When I reached the arena doors, I stopped for a second, one hand on the cold metal handle, and took a breath.

Get it together, I told myself. It's just practice. You've survived worse than an awkward practice.

I pushed the doors open.

The arena was already lit, bright fluorescent light bouncing off the fresh ice, and the sound of skates cutting across it echoed through the empty stands.

Jordan was already out there, alone, running warm-up laps around the rink, his stick tapping the ice in a steady rhythm.

The second our eyes met across the arena, my whole body locked up.

My wolf slammed against my control so hard I had to grab the door frame to keep myself upright, his claws tearing at the inside of my skull, desperate to break free right there in front of the entire arriving team.