Page 11

“You’ll regret this,” she said, her voice going thin and mean under the crying, and there it was, the gear shift I’d been waiting for. “I’ll tell the papers.”

“They all try,” I said, disgust in every word.

Except it wasn’t her fault, at least not all of it, and I almost closed my eyes to block out the image of my mom.

“You’d be surprised what people will believe.” She had her dress half on by now, one strap still hanging, mascara tracking black down her cheeks. There was something almost pitiable about her if I let myself look at it that way, which I didn’t, because pity was exactly the door she wanted me to open. “It wouldn’t look good. Captain of the team, a woman crying in his apartment—”

“Get out,” I said again, and this time I did dial, holding the phone up so she could see the screen, see the numbers already filling in. “You have thirty seconds before I hit call, and then it’s not my problem what building security decides to do with you.”

She grabbed her shoes and the rest of her dignity in one motion, storming past me toward the door with one last look that was supposed to be venomous and mostly just looked tired.

The door slammed hard enough to rattle the picture frames I’d never bothered hanging straight, and then it was just me and the too-bright lamp and the couch I was never going to be able to look at the same way again.

I counted to ten before I moved.

Old habit, something Coach had drilled into all of us before he was Coach, back when he was still teaching junior hockey and I was still learning how to lose gracefully.

Count to ten before you say anything you can’t take back.

Then I pulled up my agent’s number and typed before I lost the nerve to make it real.

Woman named Melanie broke into my apartment tonight. Naked on my couch when I got home. Threatening press if I called security. Handle it. Whatever she wants—money, an NDA, whatever makes this disappear before Vegas—I don’t care. Just make her someone else’s problem.

The reply came back faster than I expected at that time of night.

On it. You good?

Fine, I typed, and it wasn’t even really a lie, not the way I meant it.

I was fine the way a rink was fine after the Zamboni had been through—smooth on the surface, nothing showing, and underneath, a whole history of scars getting buffed down into something that looked like it had never happened at all.

I locked the door behind the exchange, checked it twice out of some instinct I didn’t examine too closely, and headed for the shower because I needed the water running loudly enough to drown out my own head for ten minutes.

The water was too hot when it hit me, the way I liked it, the way that made my skin go pink and my shoulders finally drop from around my ears.

I braced both hands against the tile and let it beat down on the back of my neck, and of course, it was Ash who showed up behind my closed eyes instead of anything useful.

Not the anger from the video session. Not the flat, mean line about women who looked at me like I hung the moon, though that was in there too, sitting like a bruise I kept pressing on purpose.

What I saw instead was his face in the tunnel, before he shut it all down, before the mask slammed back into place. Those ninety seconds where something in him had gone soft and unguarded and almost young, like a kid caught out in the open without anywhere to hide.

I recognized that look.

I’d spent fifteen years making sure nobody ever caught me wearing it, and I’d seen it on him anyway, clear as day, gone as fast as it came.

I thought about the way he’d flinched when Melanie’s hand landed on my arm, not jealousy exactly, or not only that, but something closer to disgust, like he’d caught me at something shameful.

And maybe he had.

Maybe that was exactly what he’d caught me doing—engineering distance with somebody else’s body because it was easier than admitting that what I actually wanted was standing two feet away from me in a video room, close enough that our shoulders kept almost touching.

The water started to run cold before I moved, and I stood there a beat too long anyway, letting it turn from bracing to uncomfortable to genuinely cold because some small, punishing part of me thought I’d earned it.

Thirty-two years old, captain of a team with a real shot at going all the way this year, and I still didn’t know how to tell the truth to the one person I most wanted to hear it.

Three years, I reminded myself as I shut the water off and reached for a towel.

Three years and I was done, and none of this—the apartment, the women I didn’t want, the careful distance I kept manufacturing like it was a system that was actually working—would matter anymore.