Page 11 of Take Two

“You alright?” Derrick asks, lowering himself onto the bench beside me, eyes still tracking Sebastian’s movement across the room for a moment before turning on me with something more careful in them.

I lean forward, brace my elbows on my knees, and tilt my head sideways to look at him. “I’m fine.”

Derrick huffs, quiet and unconvinced. “Jamie. You’re still fully suited up. Your skates are still on your feet. I don’t make it my business to memorize people’s routines as a general rule, but by now you would have been halfway to the car.” He says it without accusation, just plain observation, which somehow makes it worse.

I can’t help the laugh that escapes me because he isn’t wrong, and I know he isn’t wrong. I am a creature of habit to my core. In and out of the locker room with clean efficiency, always the first to report to PR for post-game obligations, first onto the bus, first on the plane. I don’t linger. I don’t dally. Tonight I’ve been sitting here in full gear like the game forgot to end.

“That transparent, huh?” I shake my head slowly.

“Nah.” He waves that off. “I just see you sitting over here like you’re stranded somewhere inside your own head.” He makes a gesture around me with one hand, a slow orbit, as though I am a small island that has drifted away from the mainland. Looking at him looking at me, I suppose that’s not entirely wrong.

“I saw a ghost tonight,” I confess, the words out before I’ve consciously decided to say them. I don’t quite have it in me to walk it back.

Derrick’s brow lifts. “A ghost?”

I turn it over for a second, looking for a way to say enough without saying too much. “Someone I met years ago, by chance. It was a one-night thing. Seeing him here tonight, in this building, it was a bit of a shock. That’s all.” I wave my hand like I’m dismissing it, like it meant nothing, when the truth is that seeing him tonight has tilted my entire world a few degrees off its axis and I’m still trying to find my footing.

Derrick’s expression shifts, his eyebrows climb his forehead with slow, deliberate significance. “Him? Well, Jamie Maxwell.” He draws it out like he’s settling in for a long evening. “You have some explaining to do. All of the tea. Every last drop. Right now.”

My mouth falls open, and for the second time tonight a genuine laugh escapes me, brief and startled.

“Shaw. Devan is rubbing off on you in ways that should concern both of you. The tea is that there is no tea.” I say it firmly, looking him straight in the eye. My sexuality is not a secret to my team, but I keep my business under wraps usually. So, I shouldn’t be surprised at his need for said tea. “I will probably never see him again. And whatever happened between us, I want to keep it exactly where it is. Locked away.”

Derrick nods slowly, something affirming in his expression that reads as genuine understanding rather than performance. Before he can press further, Sebastian approaches across the room, towel secured around his hips, eyes going straight to Derrick like a compass finding north. Derrick loses the thread of our conversation almost immediately, his entire attention pivoting toward his husband with the kind of effortless totality that I’ve learned is simply how Derrick Shaw operates when Sebastian Bergeron is in the room.

I clear my throat.

Derrick turns back to me with the sheepishness of a man who isn’t remotely sorry. “Sorry, Jamie, but I am only human.”

I get up from the bench and give him a firm nudge toward where he clearly wants to be. “Go. I’ve got cold sweat pooling and I need to shower. You’re not needed here.”

He resists just enough to look at me with a genuine furrow between his brows. “You sure? You didn’t even tell me who your mystery man is yet. I’m already emotionally invested in this story.”

“Another time. Like I said, it’s in the past. And given who he was here with tonight, I doubt our paths are going to cross again.” I shrug, keeping my voice measured and easy.

“Wait. . .hold on. Are you talking about⁠—”

“Nope.” I cut him off clean, pulling my jersey up over my head in one swift movement. “Go to your husband, Shaw.”

“Jamie—” he tries again. His voice carries the certainty of someone who has already drawn the same line between the dots that I have spent years trying not to draw for myself.

I refuse to answer. I won’t get into it. I can’t. I have carried this quietly for years, kept it tucked away and undisturbed, and I’ve already said more tonight than I intended.

“Princesse. Leave Maxwell alone.” Sebastian’s voice drifts across from his locker, warm and unhurried, and he punctuates it with a knowing wink aimed directly at me as I drop my compression shirt onto the bench with a sodden, heavy slap. “Come here, please.” He adds the last part entirely for Derrick.

Derrick exhales, long-suffering and theatrical, then turns and points a finger at me. “Be glad I am easily redirected by attractive things.” He laughs, and then the humor drops out of his expression just slightly, replaced by something quieter and more honest. “Seriously, though. Talking helps. You know where I am.”

I watch him cross the room toward his husband, and I feel the familiar tightness in my chest that I always feel when I watch Derrick Shaw, now Derrick Shaw-Bergeron, live his life with this much fullness. The accident is never far from the surface for me. The incident that could have taken his career, that I have never fully stopped feeling responsible for, regardless of every reassurance I was given from every direction. Teammates, coaches, Derrick himself. It doesn’t fully lift, but then I look at him, skating beside the man he loves, playing on the same position, building something real inside the life that nearly came apart, and something in me calms. Some things happen for a reason. That has to mean something.

I strip out of my remaining pads and gear with quiet efficiency, shower quickly, and dress for the walk to my SUV. I’m grateful tonight that there is no press waiting on me specifically, no cameras to arrange my face for. When I finally step out of the locker room, I find myself scanning the hallway before I mean to. My eyes make a slow pass along the thinning corridor, the few remaining photographers, a couple of lingering journalists packing up equipment, the ordinary end-of-night quiet settling in.

He isn’t there.

I hold my head up, keep my stride even, and walk myself out of the arena and into the cold night air. I try not to examine too closely why some small, foolish part of me was hoping otherwise. After all this time, wasn’t he even a little curious? Did he carry any version of that night the way I have carried mine? Did he think about me even occasionally, the way I have thought about him without particularly meaning to, without ever quite managing to stop?

The empty hallway gave me the only answer I was going to get tonight.

Cyaire Reed belongs in the past.