Page 12 of Take Two

I intend to leave him there.

Chapter 5

Cyaire

(Two Months Later)

The automatic doors slide open and I immediately understand why Seattle takes hockey so seriously.

A massive banner stretches across the arrivals concourse, impossible to miss even if I wanted to. WELCOME TO SEATTLE runs across the top in bold lettering, and beneath it is a photograph large enough to dominate the entire wall. The Seattle Vipers stand clustered around the Stanley Cup, championship hats tilted on their heads, smiles frozen in the exact moment victory became real.

My feet slow before I consciously decide to stop moving.

Because, of course, he’s the first face I see.

My eyes find Jamie almost immediately, like some embarrassing internal compass I’ve given up pretending doesn’t exist. He’s standing near the center of the photograph with one hand resting on the Cup and the other wrapped around a teammate’s shoulder. The smile on his face is completely unguarded, and for a moment a foolish part of me wants nothing more than to have that smile aimed directly at me. I find myself staring at it longer than I probably should, my mind drifting back to that night when that smile was given to me and only me for just a little while. Yep. I’m fully, completely, embarrassingly crazy in my newfound knowledge, and I have apparently made peace with that.

The ridiculous part is that for almost three years, Jamie existed as a question I never managed to answer.

Back then, he wasn’t Jamie Maxwell, Stanley Cup champion and forward for the Seattle Vipers. He wasn’t the guy whose highlights I’d watched at two in the morning when I should have been sleeping, or the player whose playoff interviews somehow kept finding their way onto my phone like the algorithm itself had decided to make my life difficult. He was simply the man from New York. The man from the hotel bar. The man whose name I never learned and whose face stayed with me far longer than it had any right to, long after I had told myself the memory would naturally dissolve the way most things do when time and distance get involved.

For the first year after that night, I thought about him more often than I ever admitted to anyone. Usually, it happened when I was alone in my new apartment. I’d be lying awake, staring at whatever ceiling as I contemplated the drastic change in my own life, wondering what happened after I left. Did he wake up angry? Did he think the whole thing was what it was? A one-night stand. Did he spend even a fraction of the time thinking about me that I spent thinking about him? I ran through every possible version of the morning after, played each one out in enough detail that I probably could have written the whole thing as a scene and handed it to a director. The stranger with no name. The story with no ending.

I never got answers to any of those questions.

Eventually life moved forward the way it always does, at a pace that doesn’t particularly care about unresolved feelings you’re too proud to admit you’re carrying. New auditions turned into new opportunities, opportunities turned into roles, and roles turned into a career I’d had no idea would blossom into something so large so quickly. Relationships came and went. Projects came and went. Press junkets and promotional cycles and early call times consumed entire months. Years passed with that particular acceleration that fame seems to impose on time, where you look up expecting it to be Tuesday and discover an entire season has dissolved.

Then two months ago I walked into Climate Pledge Arena with my father, Julian, and Malik, fully expecting to spend the evening with my family.

Instead, I looked up and found myself staring at the one person I had never expected to see again.

The mystery disappeared in an instant.

The man from New York wasn’t a mystery at all. He was Jamie Maxwell, and somehow I had spent three years failing to realize that the person who had occupied an embarrassing amount of space inside my head played professional hockey for one of the most recognizable franchises in North America. He was right there. He had been right there. He had apparently been right there the whole time, with a name and a jersey number and an entire publicly documented career, and I had simply never known where to look.

Life has a twisted sense of humor sometimes.

Because once I knew who he was, I started seeing him everywhere.

I’d be halfway through reading a script and somehow end up watching playoff highlights instead, justifying it as research for absolutely nothing. I’d walk through a hotel lobby and catch one of his post-game interviews playing silently on a television mounted above the bar, and I would slow my pace just enough to read his lips. Sports websites I had absolutely no business visiting suddenly became part of my regular routine, and before I fully understood what was happening I had watched enough Seattle Vipers hockey to recognize half the roster on sight and form opinions about line changes I had no business forming.

By the time they lifted the Stanley Cup a few weeks ago, I knew more about hockey than I had during the previous twenty-eight years of my life combined. My dad was genuinely impressed by my newfound dedication, which was both gratifying and deeply humiliating. Julian only laughed. He laughed because he knew exactly why I was watching the television with the intensity of a man whose life depended on the outcome.

I still haven’t decided whether any of this is impressive or deeply embarrassing. Probably both. Definitely both.

“Cyaire.”

Cameron’s voice pulls me back to the present.

I glance up to find my bodyguard standing several yards ahead of me beside the luggage carousel, one hand resting on the handle of my suitcase while he watches me with the long-suffering patience of someone who has made a career out of managing my particular brand of nonsense. He doesn’t look annoyed. He looks resigned, which is somehow worse.

“You planning on joining me sometime today?” Cameron asks as he reaches for his own bag and saddles the huge satchel over his shoulder.

I cast one last glance up at the banner before pulling myself together and making my way over to him.

“I got distracted.” I shrug as I fall into step beside him, keeping my voice casual in the way that has never once worked on Cameron.

“So, I noticed.” He rolls his eyes and adjusts his grip on my suitcase, pivoting toward the exit with a purposeful stride, eyes on a constant swivel.