Chapter 17
Abbott
I accepted the trade on Thursday.
Marty handled the paperwork. I sat in my apartment and signed the documents digitally. I felt a flatness as I watched them upload. The decision should have felt like a beginning. Instead it felt like a door closing.
Two years. Three and a half million. Starter guaranteed. It was what I'd wanted for a decade.
My apartment was quiet.
Jamie's book was still on the second shelf. I hadn't moved it.
I texted him.
Me: Can you come over?
Three dots.
Jamie: When?
Me: Now. If you can.
Jamie: On my way.
I put my phone down.
I stood in my kitchen and looked around.
Jamie showed up everywhere I looked. The green mug in the cupboard I'd bought without consciously deciding, the same size and weight as the blue one in Jamie's kitchen.
The coffee that I didn't drink. The sparkling water that appeared in my fridge the way Jamie appeared in every space he occupied.
I was going to tell him in person. That was the plan. I owed him an honest, face-to-face conversation, because this would change both our lives. I owed him that.
I owed him more than that, but this was what I had.
Except I kept coming back to Kieran's words.
He's never going to ask. That's not how he's built.
I kept coming back to the look on Jamie's face in the hotel room, and to the coffee shop where he'd said, Whatever you decide, we're good, with the voice of a man who was being destroyed by his own generosity.
I'd accepted the trade because Jamie didn't ask me not to.
And sitting in my apartment, waiting for the buzzer, I understood with complete clarity that this was the stupidest decision I had ever made.
Not because Denver was wrong. Denver was right—professionally, financially—in every measurable way.
But I hadn't made the decision based on measurement, I'd made it based on the absence of permission I'd been waiting for, the one word from Jamie that would have changed the equation.
I'd made it because the man I loved hadn't fought for me, and I'd taken that as evidence that there was nothing to fight for.
But I'd seen his face.
His face said everything, suspended in that second before the phone rang. He'd lost his ability to pretend, and what was underneath was so clear and unmistakable that I'd carried it in my chest for weeks like a second heartbeat.
I'd accepted the trade. The paperwork was filed.
I sat on my couch and waited.
The buzzer sounded. I crossed to the intercom, pressed the button, and unlocked the building door. The footsteps in the hallway were fast—faster than Jamie's usual unhurried pace. He was almost running.
I opened the apartment door.
He was standing in the hallway wearing jeans and a jacket he'd thrown on in a hurry. His hair was a mess from his hands running through it. It was a stress gesture I'd never seen him make before tonight.
He looked like a man who'd run out of ways to be fine.
His eyes were bright—not with tears, but with the intensity of having made a decision without having time to build the performance around it. His jaw was set.
"Don't go," he said.
Just two words, raw and direct, stripped of everything.
Don't go.
I stood in the doorway of my apartment and looked at Jamie Hayes. He'd spent his entire life taking care of everyone and asking for nothing.
Now he was asking for something for the first time—standing in the hallway in a jacket he'd thrown on in a hurry, with his hair a mess and his composure gone, his face baring all. The wanting, the fear, the desperate hope of a man who had finally decided to reach for what he wanted.
"I saw your face," I said, "in the hotel room before I answered the phone."
He went still. "I know."
"You weren't going to say anything."
"No."
"Why not?"
He took a breath. "Because I was okay. I had you and that was— It was enough. Having you in my life, in whatever form, at whatever distance, that was enough. I made my peace with it years ago. And then you were leaving and—all of a sudden, it wasn't enough."
"When?"
"When did it stop being enough?" He almost smiled.
"I think it stopped being enough the day I realized I couldn't put your mug away.
I tried. I put it in the cupboard. I took it back out.
I put it in the cupboard again. I stood in my kitchen at 2 in the morning holding a mug that belongs to you.
I couldn't put it away because putting it away meant letting go of you. "
My throat was tight. My hands were steady—goalies always had steady hands—but the rest of me was far from it.
"I accepted the trade," I said.
"I know. Theo said you planned to."
"The paperwork is filed."
"I don't care," he said with raw certainty. "I don't care about the paperwork. I care about you. I'm asking you—" He swallowed. "I'm asking you, Abbott. I have never in my life asked anyone like this. Don't go."
I stepped back from the doorway.
Jamie stepped in.
The door closed behind him.
The apartment was quiet. We stood in my hallway two feet apart with everything we'd built was falling away.
What was left was just us. Just the thing we'd both known and neither of us had been willing to acknowledge out loud.
"I've been watching you for years," I said quietly.
"I know how your laugh sounds when it's real.
I know how your face changes when you're tired versus when you're acting like you have energy you don't. I know which shoulder gets tight after long games and I know you go quiet in cars.
I know the exact moment you decided that what we had was enough, because I saw it happen.
I've been waiting for you to change your mind ever since. "
"I'm here now."
"Jamie." I said his name. "I accepted the trade because you didn't ask me not to. That's the only reason."
He looked at me for a long moment. The distance between us was two feet and closing.
"I'm asking," he said. "Don't go."
The distance between us closed. His hand came up and touched the side of my face with shaking fingers. I turned my head into his palm and relished in the warmth of it against my jaw, closing my eyes.
He leaned his forehead against mine. We stood there, the sound of our breathing the only noise in the apartment.
"Stay," he whispered, his mouth almost against mine.
"I'm staying."
He kissed me.
The first time Jamie Hayes kissed me, it was with the gentleness of a man who was doing something for the first time he'd been wanting to do for years. His lips were soft, his hand still on my face, and he pulled back half an inch.
"Hi," he said, like we were meeting for the first time.
"Hi."
"I should have done this a long time ago."
"Yeah," I said. "You should have."
He laughed. It started in his chest and filled the room.
I kissed him again, because the sound of Jamie Hayes laughing in my apartment was the best sound I'd ever heard—and I was done, permanently and completely done, with pretending otherwise.