Page 74 of Hockey Nanny

25

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Carissa

I found Dawson in his bedroom because that was the only place left to look.

The house had been restless all afternoon, the kind of tension that settled into the walls when everyone was waiting for the clock to move faster. Gear bags sat by the front door. A suit jacket was draped over the back of a chair like it had been abandoned mid-thought. Boone and Gage were somewhere downstairs, voices low, giving us space without saying so out loud.

Dawson’s door was half open.

I knocked anyway, because barging in felt like it would tip this into something I couldn’t pull back from.

“Yeah,” he said, distracted, already moving.

He was packing. Not frantically, not carelessly. Methodical. Socks folded into perfect rectangles. His suit laid out on the bed with surgical precision. He didn’t look at me when I stepped inside, just kept his focus on the bag like it had offended him and needed to be put in its place.

“We need to talk,” I said.

His shoulders shifted. Barely. Enough that I noticed.

“I’ve got a game,” he replied, voice even. Controlled. The same tone he used when reporters tried to corner him with loaded questions.

“I know,” I said. “That’s not an answer.”

He zipped the bag with a finality that made my stomach sink. Then he straightened, finally turning to face me, arms crossing over his chest like a barrier he’d practiced building.

“What is it you want, Carissa?”

There it was. Distance wrapped in politeness. Days of it condensed into six words.

I crossed the room, stopping short of the bed because it felt too intimate to sit on it right now. “I want to know why you’re shutting me out.”

“I’m not,” he said immediately.

I laughed, sharp and humorless. “Don’t insult me like that.”

His jaw tightened. A familiar tell. “This isn’t the time.”

“You’ve been saying that for days,” I shot back. “There’s always a game. A practice. A flight. A reason.”

He exhaled through his nose, a slow release that told me he was already done with this conversation. “I told you. I don’t want to complicate things.”

“You don’t get to decide that on your own,” I said, my voice shaking despite my effort to keep it steady. “You don’t get to rewrite what happened and pretend it didn’t matter.”

His gaze flicked away, just for a second, landing on the window. The sky outside was turning that flat gray that always came before evening storms.

“It mattered,” he said quietly. “That’s the problem.”

The words hit harder than I expected. I took a breath, grounding myself in the room. The faint scent of his soap. The muted hum of the house. The bedspread smoothed within an inch of its life.

“Then why are you treating me like I did something wrong?” I asked.

“You didn’t,” he said, too fast.

“Then why does it feel like I’m being punished?” My hands curled at my sides, nails biting into my palms. “I live here, Dawson. I work here. I can’t keep doing this thing where I pretend not to notice you avoiding me.”

His mouth pressed into a thin line. “You’re with Boone and Gage now.”