Chapter 14
Jamie
Luca and Theo's apartment was the epitome of what happened when a meticulous Italian-American captain and a warm, chaotic bisexual winger built a home together.
It was beautiful without being cold, with clean lines and warm colors and books everywhere.
Luca kept the kitchen organized, and Theo kept it stocked with snacks.
The dining table was long enough for twelve. Tonight, there were eight of us. Luca, Theo, Kieran, Nico, Eriksson, Abbott, Volkov, and me.
I was fully on—the version of myself that made everyone feel comfortable. I made sure Nico sat near Kieran, Eriksson's glass was refilled, and Volkov's stories had an appreciative audience.
Abbott was across the table. He'd arrived with Kieran. They'd been at the facility together—something about equipment. I tried not to think about the fact that Abbott was doing things with other people besides me.
That was a new development. It was small—a shift that nobody would notice except the person who had spent years calibrating their day around someone else.
Theo cooked. This always surprised people who only knew his on-ice persona, the golden-eyed winger who played with reckless joy and charm.
Off the ice, Theo Callahan was an excellent cook.
He'd learned from his mother, who expressed love through food.
The pasta was homemade. The sauce was his grandmother's recipe.
Luca stood behind him at the stove at one point, putting his hand on the small of Theo's back—the intimacy of two people who'd stopped being careful about touching around other people.
Dinner was loud. Volkov told a story about a bar in Moscow that was (almost certainly) fictional.
Eriksson described his summer in Sweden with the quiet contentment of a man who missed home without being unhappy here.
Nico said something in Finnish to himself while eating the pasta, and Kieran glanced at him.
I tracked all of this. I enjoyed it. These were my people. The room was warm and the food was good. And I was doing what I did—making sure the ecosystem functioned.
Abbott caught my eye across the table once. The look lasted a second. His expression was neutral. It said nothing and meant everything.
I smiled—my automatic one.
He looked away.
Then the dishes were cleared, and Theo was pouring wine. The conversation had shifted to weekend plans and a movie someone had seen. It was the slow unwinding of people who spent their professional lives in high-pressure environments and needed spaces like this to remember they were human.
Theo leaned against Luca's shoulder, the way he'd been leaning against him for years. Theo's body had simply learned that Luca's body was his default resting position.
"I couldn't do this without you," Theo said to Luca.
It wasn't about dinner. It was about life. About everything they'd built together—the marriage, the home, the choice to be visible and together in a sport that had, not that long ago, demanded invisibility.
He said it simply, the way you say things that are so true they don't need emphasis.
Luca's mouth twitched. Which, on Luca, was everything.
I heard it from across the table. I couldn't do this without you. It wasn't directed at me. It wasn't about me.
I did all the right things. I smiled. I took a sip of wine. I said something to Eriksson about the upcoming schedule. But something inside me had gone completely still.
I couldn't do this without you.
Our found family had been building since Luca came out and Theo had loved him loud enough for the whole locker room to hear. Our irreplaceable ecosystem existed because every person in this room had chosen to be here, to be vulnerable, to let the team become something more than a roster.
Abbott was part of that ecosystem. Abbott's quiet presence—the observer in the corner, the man who saw things people didn't know they were showing—was woven into the fabric of this room as deeply as anyone's.
And he was considering leaving. Not because the fabric didn't matter, but because the professional math told him to go. And I had told him, Whatever you decide, we're good.
We're good. The most supportive, generous, insufficient sentence in the English language.
I drove home alone. Abbott had left with Kieran again. Maybe it was just the natural drift of two goalies who shared a position and a private language, or maybe Abbott was actively creating space between us and I was the only one who could feel it.
I pulled into my parking garage and turned off the engine.
My car ticked as the engine cooled. Somewhere above me, the elevator hummed.
I thought about Abbott leaving.
I let myself think about it—really think about it.
I thought about what this team would feel like without him in it.
I thought about Korean barbecue dinners with an empty seat.
I thought about practice where the backup net held someone else's pads.
I thought about locker room conversations where the quiet observer in the corner was a stranger who didn't know how my attention felt when it landed on them.
I thought about the mug. The blue one sitting on the shelf in its spot, front row, handle angled right. I thought about washing it and putting it back, knowing that the person it was for was in Denver, playing sixty games a season, making saves in a building I'd never been to.
I thought about the sound of my own voice in the hotel room, congratulating him.
I thought about the car, weeks ago. You ever get tired of being good at something that doesn't actually get you what you want?
I hadn't known what I meant when I asked it.
I knew now.
What I wanted was Clay Abbott. I wanted him as the person who took care of me, as the person I came home to, as the answer to every question I'd been too afraid to ask myself.
I'd been in love with him for years. I'd made my peace with it and built a good life around it and told myself it was enough—and it had been enough.
But now it wasn't. He was leaving and I was sitting in a parking garage at 11 PM knowing—irreversibly knowing—that the peace I'd made was a lie I'd told myself so well I'd believed it.
I sat in the car for ten minutes. I was not falling apart.
I went upstairs into my apartment. I stood in the kitchen and looked at the mug. For the first time since I'd put it on the shelf, I understood why I couldn't put it away.
Because putting it away meant it was over. It meant the possibility was closed, the space on the shelf, the space in my life that was shaped like Clay Abbott, was being voluntarily emptied.
And I wasn't capable of that—not because I was weak, but because the person who filled it was real, and the wanting that I'd spent years calling friendship was the biggest, most obvious truth I'd ever failed to acknowledge.
I stood in my kitchen with my hands on the counter and my head down. I breathed through the dull ache of having been wrong about myself for a very long time.
Then I picked up my phone and called Luca Moretti.
He answered on the second ring.
There was a long silence, the kind that existed between two men who had been through enough together that the silence itself was communication.
"I know," Luca said softly.
My throat closed.
"I've known since Game 3 of the playoffs two years ago." His voice was calm and certain. He'd been waiting for me to call. "You dove for a puck in the corner. Abbott stood up at the bench. I was on the ice—I saw it."
"He stood up."
"He stood up. It was the fastest I've ever seen a backup goalie move. There was no physical reason for it. You were thirty feet from the net. There was no play to make. He just—stood up."
I sank slowly onto my kitchen floor until I was sitting against the cabinets with my knees up and the phone pressed to my ear. The mug on the shelf sat above me like a third person in the conversation.
"What do I do?" I asked. My voice was so small.
Luca was quiet for a moment.
"What did you do?" I asked.
"When?"
"When it felt impossible."
There was another long silence. I could hear Theo in the background, the distant sound of dishes being done. The normal sounds of a life that had been impossible once and now wasn't.
"I almost let Theo leave," Luca confessed. "I almost let him walk out of my life because I was too afraid of what choosing him would cost. Then I decided that the risk of the impossible was better than the certainty of nothing."
Was it? But what about the certainty of enough, the security of a friendship that was real and sustaining and never, ever had the chance of becoming the thing I actually wanted it to be?
"He's leaving," I said. "Denver."
"Has he signed anything?"
"Not yet. But he told his agent he's leaning toward accepting."
"Then he hasn't left yet."
"Luca."
"Jamie."
I pressed my forehead against my knees.
"I've never asked anyone for anything," I said. "Not like this. Not for myself."
"I know." Luca's voice was gentle, which was not a word anyone used about Luca Moretti in any other context. "That's why it matters."
He hung up. Or I hung up. One of us ended the call and I sat on my kitchen floor for another twenty minutes, looking at the mug.
I thought about Luca almost letting Theo leave, and I thought about the impossible and the certain.
I thought about the man in that hotel room who had looked at me in that second before his phone rang.
His face had said everything he never would.
The question was whether I could do what I had never done. Whether the man who took care of everyone could, for once, take care of himself.