CLAUSE 6. PUBLIC AFFECTION. In public, the parties shall appear affectionate. Any kiss exceeding a brief touch to the cheek or temple shall be preceded by forty-eight (48) hours' written notice.

Kasper retaped his left stick twice, and then stood in the tunnel holding it, and thought about a church.

He had not told anyone about the church. He had not known there was a church. For nine years he had stood at the edge of the ice for one still second before every game, every practice, every empty morning skate, and he had never once thought about why, until a woman in a gray jacket had set down a forkful of pasta at Teo's table and described it back to him in a quiet, steady voice. Like someone at the door of a church.

It was a hell of a thing to learn about yourself from the person you were supposed to be pretending with.

"Cap," said a voice behind him. "You're doing the face."

He turned. Rennick Okoro stood in the shadows of the tunnel, a tall, gaunt, graceful man in a teal warm-up jacket, with his stick under his arm and an expression of perfect neutrality. Rennick had spoken perhaps a hundred words to Kasper in the whole of the previous season. Most of them had been "pass."

"What face?"

"The one where you're thinking."

"I'm always thinking."

"No," Rennick said gently. "You're usually calculating. This is different." He tilted his head. "It's a good look. It's very unfamiliar."

He walked off down the tunnel before Kasper could reply, which was, he reflected, a deeply unfair habit in a teammate.

The Tideline on the night before the home opener was a different animal. It was not the real thing. It was the Wolves Welcome Night, a yearly tradition: a charity scrimmage, Wolves against a squad of retired veterans, with proceeds to the children's hospital and the whole city invited to come down and be sentimental. Nine thousand seats were full. The arena glowed teal. The big screen over center ice flashed WELCOME BACK, WOLVES in huge looping script, and somebody in the production booth had apparently decided to run a ten-year highlight reel at a volume that rattled his teeth.

He skated out to a roar that went through him like a warm wind.

It was always the same. It never stopped being strange. Nine thousand people on their feet, all of them making a noise that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with a jersey he happened to be wearing, and for a moment he forgot to be tired. The ice was clean and bright. He stood at the edge of it, as he always did, for exactly one second.

Then, with a start, he looked up into the family section.

She was there.

He had not known she would be. She had said she'd be working, a call about the sponsors, a contract with a clause she wanted to renegotiate, but there she sat, in the second row of the family seats behind the glass, between Bea Marchetti and a very small boy in an oversized Wolves jersey, with a teal scarf wound twice around her neck. Her hair was down. It lay loose on the shoulders of a dark green coat, and she was clapping, a little shyly, the way a person claps who is not used to being in a crowd that wants her to. She looked up, and found him looking, and her mouth curved, slowly, at one corner.

She lifted her hand about two inches. It was not a wave. It was a small, private, strictly professional gesture, a Fiancée acknowledging a Captain, and it hit him in the sternum like a puck.

He nodded. He dropped his head, and the whole building swam.

Then, with the grim, clear, startled certainty of a man who has just remembered something he should not have forgotten, he lifted it again, and kept it up for the whole of the first period.

The scrimmage was loose and ridiculous. The veterans had belly laughs, bad knees and perfect hands, and they played the Wolves with the cheerful ruthlessness of men who had nothing left to lose. Teo let in three goals in the first ten minutes and then, with a roar, shut the door, stopping a shot that should not have been stoppable and then hopping on one leg in a circle. Kasper scored once on a pass from Jonah that curled into the top corner like a thrown ribbon. The crowd went wild. He glanced at the family section, and she was on her feet.

She was laughing. Not for anyone. She had one hand pressed to her mouth, and her shoulders shook, and the little boy beside her was bouncing on his seat and tugging her sleeve, and she looked, at that moment, so completely and unselfconsciously delighted that his skates nearly forgot the ice.

He thought: I am in so much trouble.

Then the horn went for the intermission, and the building began to rearrange itself.

The Welcome Night had one more tradition. At the first intermission, the players went up into the stands. They did it in their warm-up jackets, in twos and threes, shaking hands with season ticket holders, signing programs, letting children touch their sticks. It was warm and chaotic and mildly mortifying, and Kasper loved it with an uncomplicated fervor he would never have admitted to anyone.

He worked his way along the lower bowl with a marker in his hand and a small girl on one hip, signing a sweater, a cast, a hat, a baby's bib. His shoulders ached pleasantly. Somewhere up ahead Teo was holding a toddler over his head like a trophy, bellowing the team song in a deep and entirely unmusical bass. Jonah Ames was being photographed with a table of very old women who kept pinching his cheeks.

It was while he was handing the little girl back to her father that the music changed.

He knew the sound. Everyone in the building knew the sound. It was a slow, swooping, saccharine instrumental, something between a wedding march and a game-show jingle, and it came out of the speakers with the air of a trap being lowered over a field. The big screen dimmed. A heart-shaped frame rolled onto it, outlined in pink, flashing. And above it, in cheerful, bouncing, retro letters:

KISS CAM!

A great delighted groan rolled around the arena.

"Oh, no," Kasper said, to nobody.

The camera began its slow tour. It found an elderly couple in the upper deck, a pair of silver-haired gentlemen in matching Wolves sweaters, who looked at each other for a moment with enormous dignity and then kissed on the mouth with the unhurried expertise of fifty years. The crowd roared. The camera found two teenagers, who shrieked and hid behind a popcorn tub. It found a man proposing, to the surprise of everyone, including his girlfriend, who said yes at the top of her lungs. It found Teo, who kissed Bea so thoroughly that half the section started to chant.

Kasper stood in the aisle with his marker in his hand and began, slowly, to move toward the exit.

"Captain Lindqvist!" said a voice at his elbow.

It was Jonah Ames, wide-eyed, with a look of intense and tender horror. He was pointing, with his program, at something above Kasper's left shoulder.

He turned around.

The screen showed a young woman in a dark green coat and a teal scarf, in the second row of the family section, looking directly into the lens with her mouth open.

Under her, in letters six inches high, the production booth had added a caption. Somebody up there was having the best night of their life.

CAPTAIN'S FIANCÉE!

The building came apart.

It was the sound of a roof coming off. Nine thousand people, on their feet, shrieking, stamping, a wave of noise that hit him in the face like heat from an oven. The cameras swung. There was the sensation of a hundred phones lifted at once, a field of tiny white lights. Over the whole uproar a single voice, rich and enormous and unmistakable, bellowed from somewhere near the bottom of the lower bowl, "KISS HER, YOU COWARD!"

Teo. Of course it was Teo.

The big screen cut to a second feed, and there was his own face, forty feet high, pale beneath the stubble, a man with a marker in his hand and every ounce of blood drained out of him.

He was already walking.

He did not decide to. His legs simply began, up the steps, one at a time, with the grim, steady, stunned persistence of a man ascending a scaffold. People reached out to slap his shoulder as he passed. He saw their faces as a long unfocused smear. He could hear the music, still swooping, and the chanting, a deep, rolling, delighted KISS, KISS, KISS that seemed to come out of the floor, and he reached the second row and stopped in front of her, and for a moment neither of them could do anything but look.

She had stood up.

She was so pale. In the white glare of the cameras her eyes looked enormous, bright hazel with a gold ring, and she was holding the end of her scarf in both hands, wringing it, like a woman in a Victorian novel. She was breathing very fast. She looked, he thought, entirely terrified, and also, helplessly, as though she were about to laugh.

"Hi," he said, which was possibly the stupidest thing he had ever said into a crowd of nine thousand.

"Hi."

"This wasn't..."

"I know. Nobody sent a memo." Her voice shook. She leaned a fraction closer, so that only he could hear, and he caught the smell of her, a clean, soft scent of lemon and wool and rain. Her lips barely moved. "Kasper. Clause six."

"I know."

"Forty-eight hours' notice."

"I know."

"We are, technically, in breach of a very clearly drafted..."

"Brandt," said Kasper.

She stopped.

The crowd was still screaming. The chant had become a kind of monsoon. And in the middle of it, in an odd little pocket of stillness, he looked at her, at the faint pink in her cheeks and the loosened hair and the ring on her hand throwing back the light from the screen, and said, very quietly, with something close to wonder:

"Consider this a waiver."

He saw her eyes widen.

Then he put his hand against the side of her face, and bent his head, and kissed her.

It began as a performance. That was important. He would hold on to that afterward, in the long hours when he went over it. It began as a good and careful and strictly professional act: his mouth on hers, light, brief, the gentle press of a man who has been told to deliver a kiss and means to do it well. He was aware of the cameras. He was aware of the noise. He felt her go still, just for an instant, like a hand closing around something fragile.

And then she kissed him back.

It was a small movement. A little tilt of her chin, a soft catch of breath, her hand coming up to rest, very lightly, against the front of his jacket. Nothing more. But it went through him like a struck bell, and the performance simply stopped being one. He felt his eyes close. He felt the world do something strange and slow around the edges, the shrieking and the lights and the heat all falling away into a kind of warm, distant roar, like the sound of the sea in a shell. There was only the shape of her mouth, soft and a little uncertain, tasting faintly of coffee and the ghost of a mint. There was her hand, curling into the lapel of his jacket as though she needed something to hold. There was the sudden, helpless, tender recognition, like a thing remembered from a dream, that this was exactly what he had been trying not to think about for three weeks.

He slid his thumb along the line of her jaw. She made a very small sound, barely a breath, and he felt her sway toward him. His other hand found the small of her back, over the green wool, and he drew her in, and she came, easily, the whole warm slight length of her fitting against him as if the space had been left for her.

He had forgotten the crowd. He had forgotten the camera, the contract, the clauses, his own name. He had forgotten, entirely, that there was any reason in the world why he should not go on doing this for the rest of the night.

It might have been three seconds. It might have been nine.

He was the one who pulled back. It took more strength than he would have thought possible. He lifted his head by an inch, and their foreheads touched, and he opened his eyes and found hers already open, a few inches away, dark and startled and shining, as though she had been caught in the act of falling off a very high wall.

The noise came back all at once.

It was deafening. It rolled over them in a tide of whistles and cheers, a stamping, delirious, joyful roar. Somebody was crying. Somebody had thrown a program. High above them the big screen showed the two of them in extreme close-up, enormous, frozen, hugging, in a pink heart-shaped frame. In the aisle Teo was pounding the back of a bewildered usher with the flat of his hand and shouting, "I TOLD YOU. I TOLD YOU, BEA."

Kasper straightened slowly. He felt like a man who had been hit on the head with something soft and large. He looked out over the crowd, at the sea of delighted faces, and some old reflex took over, some old smooth public skill. He raised his hand, palm out, for quiet. The arena obliged, a little.

"I'd like to apologize," he said, into the roar, in a voice that carried far further than he intended, "to my fiancée. She's very strict about her paperwork."

The building laughed, a huge warm wave of it. Noelle, beside him, made a small strangled noise and covered her face with both hands. He saw her shoulders shaking. He realized that she was laughing, helplessly, silently, the kind of laughter that is half hysteria, and the sight of it did something to his chest that he could not afterward describe.

He put his arm around her. She leaned into it, her face turned into his jacket, and for a long moment they stood together in the glare of nine thousand people, a captain and a woman with a ring, looking, to every eye in the building, exactly like two people in love.

The corridor behind section 112 was cool and white and blessedly empty.

It smelled of popcorn and concrete and the particular chill of a room where nobody lived. There was a vending machine humming to itself in an alcove, and a fire door with a pushbar, and a poster of the Wolves' 2019 championship parade peeling at one corner. Out in the bowl the music had resumed, muffled by the wall. Somebody was announcing the second period.

Noelle stood with her back against the cinderblock and her hands flat behind her.

She was still flushed. Her scarf had come undone and hung from one shoulder. Her lipstick was gone entirely. She was looking at the ceiling with the careful, glassy, contemplative expression of someone examining a stain.

"That," she said, "was acceptable."

He nearly choked. "Acceptable?"

"It was well within tolerances." Her voice was perfectly steady. It was the most steady thing about her. "The crowd response was excellent. We'll get a bump. Social will love it, you made the paperwork joke, which I frankly resent, since I'd have written a better one. But the instinct was sound."

"Brandt."

"I'm giving you notes."

"You're giving me notes," said Kasper, "on a kiss."

"It's what I do."

"I thought it was fairly good."

"It was fairly good." She finally looked at him. Her eyes were very bright. "It was a fairly good kiss, Captain. It was a perfectly professional kiss."

"Then why are your hands shaking?"

She glanced down. They were. Both of them, held flat against the wall, visibly trembling. She pressed them harder against the concrete and lifted her chin, and he thought, in a flash of helpless tenderness, that she looked like someone bracing for a very large wave.

"It was a surprise," said Noelle. "That's all. I don't like surprises."

"You should write a clause."

"I did. It was Clause Six. It was ignored."

"It was waived."

"It was ambushed," said Noelle, but without heat, and a reluctant smile was tugging at the corner of her mouth. She pushed away from the wall and began, with great concentration, to re-wind her scarf. "So. For the future. We'll need a protocol."

"A protocol."

"Some kind of notice system. Forty-eight hours isn't workable. Obviously. Not if the venue decides to put us on a screen. But we need something."

"A signal."

"A signal." She nodded briskly. "A text message. Two words. Something neutral. Something that doesn't alarm anyone."

"Heads up."

"Heads up."

"I'll send you a heads up," said Kasper gravely, "before I kiss you."

"Not before. If possible. A bit earlier than before. Several minutes."

"How long do you need?"

"I'll let you know," said Noelle, and looked away, and he saw the color rise in her cheeks, a slow, rosy, unfightable tide that went all the way to her ears.

They stood there. The distant music thumped. The vending machine hummed.

"Kasper."

"Yes?"

"You didn't have to... go that far." She was looking at the floor. She said it very low. "It could've been a kiss on the cheek. People would've been satisfied. A kiss on the temple. A hand."

"I know."

"So why?"

He did not know what to say. He had a hundred answers, and all of them were terrible, and the only true one sat in the middle of his chest like an egg.

"The crowd wanted it," he said finally.

"The crowd."

"Yes."

"It was the crowd." She looked up. Her eyes held his for a long, searching second. "I see. Well. That's very... that's very professional of you."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "I should go back. Bea's holding my seat."

"Yes."

"And the little boy. He'll want an autograph."

"Of course."

She turned. She took three steps down the corridor, her heels loud on the concrete. Then she stopped, and without turning around, in a voice that was almost inaudible, said, "It was a good kiss, Kasper."

And she went through the door and was gone.

He stood in the empty corridor in his warm-up jacket for a long time, with his hand against the wall where she had been.

Clause Six, he thought. Not him. Not her. The arena. The arena had breached it. The arena, and nine thousand people, and a booth full of strangers with a spotlight and a bad sense of humor. Nobody had given notice, and nobody had been asked, and the contract was, strictly speaking, intact.

He did not believe a word of it.

He watched the clip that night.

He did not mean to. He was lying on the bed in the dark with his phone held over his face, thumbing through the usual flood of messages, Teo's seventeen exclamation marks, Helena's brief and radiant approval, a text from Gideon that said, in its entirety, WOW, and then the video was simply there, auto-playing, thirty-one seconds long, from the official Wolves account. It had four million views. It had been posted two hours ago.

He watched it once, with his heart in his throat. He watched the screen light, and the crowd, and the cut to the two of them, and then he made himself slow down, and go back, and watch it frame by frame, as he might watch a tape of his own worst turnover.

There was the moment the camera found her. There was her face on the big screen, wide-eyed, startled, caught in the pink heart. There was the second when he arrived in front of her. There was the kiss.

And then, because the Wolves' social team had stitched in a second angle, a fan's phone video shot from the aisle, there was the thing the big screen had never shown.

He ran it back.

In that angle, a few frames before the kiss, Noelle stood in the second row with the scarf in her hands, looking up at him as he took the last steps. The big camera had already swung to his face. Nobody in the building was watching her. For those two seconds she was entirely unobserved. A performer, in that moment, would have been watching the lens. A professional would have been calculating the angle, the light, the beat.

Noelle was watching him come.

And her eyes were closing.

It happened before he reached her. Before he said Consider this a waiver. Before he touched her face. Her lashes came down, slowly, as he took the last two steps, in the way of someone who has already decided and is simply waiting for the world to catch up. She had closed her eyes first.

He lay in the dark for a very long time with the phone against his chest, and the glow of it throwing a small blue light on the ceiling, and the thought lay on him like a hand.

She had closed her eyes first.