Chapter 16
Jamie
I found out from Theo.
Not through the group chat, not from Abbott, not through any of the channels that would have given me time to prepare. Theo casually dropped it in the locker room the way people delivered news they didn't know was devastating.
"Did Abbott tell you about Denver? Kieran mentioned he's going to accept it."
I was lacing my skates. My hands kept lacing. My fingers threaded the lace through the eyelet and pulled it tight and threaded the next one and the next one. The rhythm was automatic, muscle memory built over twenty years of hockey. My hands kept going while the rest of me stopped.
"Yeah," I swallowed. "He mentioned it."
"That's huge for him, right? Starter money. He deserves it, especially after that road trip game." Theo said brightly. He saw good news and responded to it accordingly. "Sucks to lose him though. The room's going to be different."
"Yeah."
"You okay?"
"I'm great." I finished lacing and pulled both boots tight. I tapped the toes against the floor. "Ready to skate."
I practiced. I ran drills. I played the game inside the game, reading the ice, finding the pass, doing the things that added value to this team. I was focused. This was the version of me that functioned at the highest level.
It was my default. Everything else was noise.
After practice I showered and changed. I said the right things to the right people. I confirmed the next team dinner with Eriksson. I checked in with Morrison, who was having a better week. I texted Mikkola about a drill adjustment.
Then I drove home.
And then I just stopped managing everything. I walked into my apartment and closed the door.
And simply shut down.
I stood still in the hallway of my apartment. I didn't take off my shoes. I didn't turn on the lights. I stood in the grey afternoon light coming through the windows and let myself feel what I'd been avoiding for years.
I was in love with Clay Abbott.
Not the friendship-is-enough kind that I'd been telling myself for so long.
The real kind. The kind that made your chest hurt and your hands shake.
I was in love with him and he was leaving.
I walked to the kitchen. His mug was still on the shelf. I thought about every morning I'd washed it and put it back. Every evening Abbott had wrapped his hands around it and every time I'd told myself that having this—the mug, the routine, the quiet evenings in my kitchen—was enough.
It had never been enough. That was the thing I finally let myself accept. The peace I'd made with it wasn't true peace. It was the absence of honesty. It was a decision not to want something dressed up as contentment.
I thought about the hotel room.
For a suspended second, his face had been close enough I could feel his breath on mine.
I thought about the coffee shop. Whatever you decide, we're good.
It was the most supportive, generous, cowardly sentence I'd ever spoken. The utterance of a man who would rather lose the person he loved than risk the friendship by saying so.
Luca's voice on the phone came back to me. I almost let Theo leave. And then I decided the risk of the impossible was better than the certainty of nothing.
I had built a house around that—our friendship being enough.
I had furnished it and decorated it and invited people over. It was warm and full. People saw me taking care of everyone else, and no one noticed that the house had no foundation.
That would have required me to say, out loud to another human being, that I wanted something for myself.
I sank onto the kitchen floor again. The tiles were cold.
I understood, sitting there, that this was the moment. This was the hinge. Everything I'd built, the peace, the life I'd organized around a love I couldn't name, was breaking.
It was breaking because the person at the center of it was walking away, and I had told him to go.
I had told him to go.
Whatever you decide, we're good.
I had told the person I loved to leave because telling him to stay would have required me to say why.
It would have meant asking for something, and I had never in my life asked anyone for anything. Asking meant wanting, and wanting meant risk. It was the one thing I didn't know if I could handle.
The kitchen floor was cold. Abbott was somewhere in this city, making plans to be somewhere else—making plans to be a starter for a team that wasn't mine.
He was making plans to leave the space I'd built for him—on my shelf, in my car, in my life—and fill it with something else.
Unless—
The word arrived like a shot off the crossbar.
Unless.
Unless I did something impossible. Unless I—who never asked for anything—asked for the one thing that mattered.
I didn't know if I could.
I was the one who opened doors for other people. I didn't know how to walk through one myself.
But Abbott was leaving. And I couldn't let him go without a fight.