“Don’t.” His voice is tight and he doesn’t open his eyes. “Fucking. Touch me.”
I pull my hand back. “I’m just trying to see if you’re—”
“I said I’m fine.” He shifts, wincing against the pain, sweat already dotting his forehead. “Back the fuck off.” The team is crowding around him now. Fitch is already off the bench moving fast, calling for space. I stand up.
He won’t look at me. Won’t even let me near him. I try to help and he flinches away like I’m the last person he wants close and I don’t know why that lands the way it does — we’re not anything, we’ve established we’re not anything, so I have no right to feel it — but I do. There’s no winning with him and this is starting to feel familiar.
I step back. Watch Fitch get to him, hand on his back, guiding him carefully toward the bench. I turn and skate to the other end of the ice before anyone can see my face. I was trying to be decent for once. Every time we almost become real, one of us ruins it. Fuck him.
Chapter 34
Jamie
Small rotator cuff sprain, further aggravated by weeks of playing through it without rest. The trainer says it like it’s a simple sentence. Like it doesn’t contain the full weight of every decision I’ve made since Rhys.
Mistake after mistake.
I sit on the table and listen and nod. Two weeks off the ice. Mandatory. Non-negotiable.
I know I should be more upset about it. I know I should be arguing, bargaining, laying out exactly how much I need those games and what missing them costs me. That’s what the old version of me would do — the version that had everything under control, that knew exactly what mattered and exactly how to protect it.
Instead I nod.
Because this is my fault. All of it. I played through an injury I should have rested because I was distracted and too proud to admit either of those things, and the result is I’m sitting here in a compression sleeve being told I can’t play. It’s not my shoulder that’s the problem. I’m the problem. I ignored it through pure force.
I’m the one who can’t stay away. Can’t stop thinking about him. Can’t seem to keep the walls up long enough for them to actually do anything useful. Rhys Callahan has gotten under my skin in a way that nothing and nobody has managed to do intwenty-one years of my very deliberately constructed life and the evidence is sitting right here in this shoulder that I ruined because I wasn’t paying attention to anything I was supposed to be paying attention to. Because I have been trying to prove something to myself and my father and have been failing at both. And Fitch was already disappointed in me. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I had to be out a couple of games.
Hockey. That’s all there is. That’s all there has ever been.
I’ve never had a boyfriend. Never wanted one. Never had the time or the space or honestly the capacity for it — hockey takes everything and I give everything willingly because that’s the deal I made with myself and my father a long time ago and it has always been enough.
But maybe I’m lying to myself and the real reason I’ve never had a relationship is because I don’t allow myself to get close to anyone. I don’t allow anyone to get to know me.
The rest I work out on Grindr. Anonymous and clean and gone by morning. That’s the system. That’s always been the system.
I’ve watched what love does to people.
I’ve watched great men — men with everything, with talent and discipline and the whole world arranged in front of them — get absolutely leveled by it. One wrong person at the wrong time and none of the rest of it matters. The thing you built your entire life around becomes secondary to something you can’t control and can’t explain and can’t put down.
My father was not a soft man.
He was an old fashioned man. A hard man. The kind of man who could skate at forty like he was twenty, who never missed a practice in his life, who could silence a room by walking into it. He taught me discipline before I knew the word for it. Toughness. Focus. The understanding that nothing worth having comes without cost and the cost is always paid in full, no exceptions, no shortcuts.
He also taught me, without ever saying it directly, what happened to men like me when we let the wrong thing get too close. I know what he would say if he could see the last couple months of my life. I know what he would do.
He’d beat it out of me.
I am not my father.
But I am the man he raised. And that man does not let anything — not a pretty smile, not a pair of dark eyes, not the way he says my name in an empty locker room — get between me and the thing I came here to do.
Period.
And if he knew what me and Rhys have been doing—I know I’m not a weak little kid anymore. But some things are deeply ingrained in you, like a second skin, like a phantom wound on my back between my shoulders that says I still feel pain here when I think of men in the way I’m not supposed to.
Multiple meetings later — with Fitch and Josh, the student athletic assistant who I’m fairly certain is in his second year and learning as he goes but is trying his best — I’m cleared to return to play after two weeks.
I walk out of the athletic building into the cold afternoon air and I just start moving. Not running. Jogging. There’s a difference. Running is panic. Jogging is clearing your head, which is what I’m telling myself this is as I go through the trees and across the parking lot and around the small pond by the quad and keep going, one foot in front of the other, breath in and out, steady pace.
