Chapter 6
Jamie
One bed.
The hotel was a Marriott in Columbus. The team had taken over the fifth floor, doubling up rooms because the front office had been tightening the travel budget since the new CBA kicked in.
Volkov and Bishop were next door. The muffled sound of Bishop threatening Volkov's life over a pillow dispute filtered through the wall.
One king bed. Not two queens. Not a suite with a pullout. One king bed, centered against the wall, white sheets, four pillows, and a nightstand on each side with identical lamps.
"Booking error," Abbott said, reading the confirmation on his phone. He stood in the doorway with his bag over one shoulder, looking at the bed.
I glanced at the confirmation over his shoulder. Standard Marriott king. I'd seen the team's block reservation form, it definitely said double queen. Whether this was a genuine hotel mistake or the universe's idea of irony, I couldn't tell. I wasn't going to examine it, either.
"It's fine," I said. "We're adults."
"We are adults."
"I'll take the left side."
"You always take the left side."
That was true. In every hotel room we'd shared over the years—there had been several, because travel budgets and easy companionship made us the default pairing—I took the left side. I didn't realize he noticed that. But of course he did.
Abbott tracked everything.
We unpacked in silence. We'd done this more times that I could count.
Bags went on the luggage rack, toiletries in the bathroom, phone chargers claimed the nightstand outlets.
Abbott hung his jacket in the closet, which I found unreasonably endearing.
The man was staying three nights and he hung his jacket up like this was a permanent residence.
The road trip had started that morning. We took the bus to O'Hare, a flight to Columbus, and a shuttle to the hotel.
Twelve hours of transit shoved twenty-four men into a shared timeline of bad airport food, cramped plane seats, and the exhaustion of travel that made everyone quieter and more honest than they normally were.
On the plane, Theo had fallen asleep on Luca's shoulder.
Morrison sat alone with earbuds in. Mikkola stared out the window with the wide-eyed wonder of a rookie who'd never flown charter.
Abbott had been in the row behind me. I'd felt him there the entire flight.
I didn't need to look for him, I was just always aware of his presence.
It was a constant low-level signal I'd stopped trying to tune out.
Now we were here sharing a room with a single bed. For ten days.
I showered first. I came out in shorts and a t-shirt with my hair still damp, and found Abbott sitting on the edge of the bed looking at his phone. He'd changed into sweats and a grey shirt that was soft. It hugged his body just right.
"Volkov just sent sixteen texts to the group chat about Bishop's snoring," I said, climbing onto my side of the bed.
The mattress dipped under my weight. I felt every shift when Abbott climbed onto the other side a minute later.
"Apparently it sounds like—and I'm quoting—'a bear trying to eat a motorcycle. '"
"Accurate." Abbott settled against the headboard, legs stretched out and his ankles crossed. He was reading something on his phone, the blue light catching the line of his jaw. I looked at the ceiling instead. "I've heard it on the plane."
"Everyone's heard it on the plane."
I pulled up the group chat. Theo had responded to Volkov's complaints with a string of bear emojis. Bishop had responded with a single thumbs-up. Luca hadn't responded, which was the norm whenever possible.
"Theo wants to know if we want to get breakfast before the skate tomorrow," I said. "There's a diner three blocks east that has 'extremely mediocre pancakes,' which he apparently considers a selling point."
"Theo would consider mediocre pancakes a selling point."
"He's from a family that treats breakfast as a competitive sport. His standards are different."
Abbott almost smiled. I caught it in the phone light, the smallest shift in his expression—he was actually amused.
"Sure," he said. "Pancakes."
He turned off his phone. The room went dark.
The blackout curtains did their job. The only light was the thin glow from Abbott's phone screen fading to sleep mode.
The mattress was good. I lay on my back with my hands behind my head, listening to the building's nighttime sounds—the elevator down the hall and the hum of the HVAC, the muffled bass of someone's TV through the wall.
Abbott was still. He lay on his back, an arm's length away, breathing evenly. I couldn't see his face in the dark. I could feel the heat of him, though, his body warmth permeating the space between us. It was the simple fact of another person in my bed that no amount of hotel-sharing made ordinary.
"Can I ask you something?" I asked.
"You're going to regardless."
"Is something going on with your contract?"
Silence. It was the weighted pause of a man choosing between deflection and truth. I knew Abbott's silences the way I knew his humor: by texture, by duration, by what they held.
"What makes you ask?" he said.
"Because you've been off for two weeks. Not in a way most people would notice, but you've been checking your phone more than usual, and you get this look when you put it away. Like you're thinking."
He was silent longer this time.
"I'm in my last year," he said. "There's always interest."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer I have right now."
I should have pushed. I was good at pushing, the gentle kind that didn't feel like pushing because I genuinely cared. I should have said, You can tell me, or I'm here if you need to talk, or any of the things I said to teammates when I sensed something sitting underneath the surface.
I didn't push—because the dark hotel room, a single bed with Abbott a foot away from me, was not the same as the locker room or the dinner table. This was the stripped-down version of a space with no room to manage, no social temperature to read, no performance required for an audience of zero.
It was just us—whatever we were when nobody was watching.
"Okay," I said.
"You're not going to push?"
"Do you want me to push?"
He was quiet for a long moment. "Not tonight."
"Then not tonight."
We lay there in the dark. I could hear him breathing. I was aware of how close his hand was to mine on the mattress—not touching, but close enough that I could feel the heat of his skin. Close enough that a shift of two inches would close the gap.
"Hayes."
"Yeah?"
"What you asked me in the car, about being good at something that doesn't get you what you want…"
My pulse kicked, a single thud that I felt in my throat. "What about it?"
"Were you talking about ice time?"
The dark made it easier, not having to manage my expression. I just laid there and felt the question, letting the answer come to the surface when it was ready.
"I thought I was," I said.
He didn't respond. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence—Abbott's silence never was. It held space like his presence held space, with attention and with patience, but no need for resolution.
"What did you think I was talking about?" I asked.
"I don't know." His voice was quiet. He was so close to me. "But it didn't sound like ice time."
My chest was tight—not painful, just full, the way a room gets when you've been filling it for years without noticing. I stared at a ceiling I couldn't see.
I thought about the question I'd asked, the question underneath it, and the door in the back of my mind that I'd been so careful to keep closed.
"Abbott."
"Yeah."
"Whatever's going on with your contract—you'd tell me, right? If it was something real?"
This silence was the longest yet. I'd asked the question that mattered in a room where there was nowhere to hide.
"I'd tell you," he said.
I knew he was lying. Not maliciously, though. The way you lie to someone you're protecting when you haven't figured something out yet. Or the way you lie to someone because the truth would require you to look at something you've both decided to keep in the dark.
"Okay," I said quietly. "Good."
We lay in the quiet. My body was tired from travel but my mind was running. Something was off with Abbott. It had been off before the road trip. I couldn't figure out if it was about his contract or about the two of us. Maybe they were the same thing.
Abbott's breathing slowed into sleep. I lay awake beside him in the dark, listening to the sound of the man I'd organized my entire life around.
He'd asked whether I was really talking about ice time, and I hadn't really answered.
This was how it worked. This was how it had always worked with us—two people lying side by side, saying everything without saying it. Changing it was the one risk that I couldn't make myself take.
I fell asleep eventually. When I woke up at 3 AM to use the bathroom, Abbott had turned toward my side in his sleep, one hand resting on the mattress between us, palm up, fingers loosely curled.
I didn't reach for him. I stood there in the dark, looking at his hand.
This wasn't new. It was older than this road trip, older than this season—older than the car conversation and the mug on my shelf.
I'd decided this was enough. I'd made my peace with it.
But standing in the bathroom doorway at 3 AM looking at Clay Abbott's hand reaching for me, I realized that making peace and living truth were not the same thing.
I crawled back into bed and lay on my side, watching him.