Allie & Dean

Allie hates the moment right after the crowd leaves.

The rink empties in layers—first the roar, then the leftover echoes, then the thin squeak of a lone skate blade cutting across ice like an afterthought. When she steps out of the stands and down toward the tunnel, the air sharpens. Cold crawls into her sleeves and makes her wish she’d brought the scarf Dean stole last week and forgot to return.

She spots him before he sees her.

Dean stands at the edge of the bench area with his helmet off, hair flattened and damp, cheeks pink from exertion. He’s laughing at something a teammate says, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He keeps rolling his shoulders like he’s trying to shake something loose. When his gaze finally finds Allie, it flickers—relief, hunger, and then that careful look that always shows up right before a conversation he doesn’t want.

“Allie Cat,” he says, and the nickname lands warm in her chest despite everything. He closes the distance, still smelling like ice and sweat and the faint citrus of cheap locker-room soap. He leans in, and for a second she thinks he’s going to kiss her like he means it—like he used to, without measuring the room.

Instead, he presses his mouth to her temple. A near-miss.

Allie’s smile holds, because she’s good at holding things. “Maverick,” she replies, letting the teasing edge do the work her nerves don’t want to do. “You were on fire tonight.”

Dean’s hand rests at her waist, secure and familiar, but his thumb keeps moving—back and forth like a metronome. Like he’s counting down.

“Yeah,” he says. “About that.”

That phrase can mean a lot of things. It can mean: I got a penalty and I’m mad. It can mean: I’m starving. It can mean: Let’s go home.

It can also mean: something changed while you weren’t looking.

Allie looks past him to the tunnel wall where old photos are framed under buzzing fluorescent lights—teams frozen in black-and-white, smiling like nothing ever breaks. A maintenance worker drags a trash bin by, wheels clattering. Somewhere behind a door, someone’s voice rises in celebration.

Dean’s phone buzzes in his duffel. Once. Twice. He doesn’t reach for it.

“What’s going on?” Allie asks, keeping her tone light, but her body already knows. Her shoulders go tight. Her stomach tilts.

Dean’s jaw flexes. He glances toward the hallway that leads deeper into the facility—off-limits without the right pass, without the right last name, without the right future. “Can we talk somewhere?”

Allie studies his face the way she’s learned to—like reading weather. He isn’t drunk. He isn’t angry. He looks…pulled.

“Sure,” she says, even as a small, stubborn part of her wants to plant her feet and demand the truth right here under the ugly lights. She’s done being the girl who waits politely while someone else decides what her life is.

Dean shifts closer, voice dropping. “I got an offer. It’s—” He swallows, and for the first time tonight, his eyes go fully to hers. “It’s happening faster than I thought.”

Allie’s heart gives one hard beat, like it’s testing the walls.

Faster means a lot of things, too. It means distance. It means cameras. It means everyone having an opinion on what she should be to him.

And it means the fragile, ordinary happiness they’ve built might not survive being handled by the world.

Dean’s hand tightens at her waist, not controlling—anchoring. “I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else,” he says. “But my agent’s blowing up my phone, and my dad—” He stops, and the stop is its own confession.

Allie feels the choice forming inside her like a fork in a road she didn’t ask to be on.

If she pushes, she might crack him open.

If she steadies him, she might lose her chance to say what she needs.

Dean breathes out, slow. “Allie Cat,” he murmurs, like he’s asking permission to ruin their quiet.

She lifts her chin. “Okay,” she says, and it doesn’t sound like surrender. It sounds like the start of something neither of them can undo.