Chapter 20
Carrie
The office was empty at eight PM. Just me and Kyle, working through a backlog that had been growing teeth since the awards ceremony.
Press releases. Social media content. Interview requests from outlets that wanted the White Hearts' comment on everything from roster changes to the parking-lot photos that refused to die.
Eleven hours at a screen. My eyes burned. My ankle throbbed under the desk in a dull, rhythmic reminder that I was held together with wrap and willpower.
Kyle cracked his neck. "I'm starving. Chinese?"
"Sure."
He ordered enough for four people. That was Kyle. Everything excessive, everything performed, everything slightly too much in a way that dared you to call it out.
The food arrived. We spread containers across the conference table. He dug in. I picked at a spring roll and tried to remember if I'd eaten lunch. Couldn't.
"Have you seen these?" He turned his laptop toward me.
The photos. Again. Me in the black dress crossing the ballroom.
Me leaning into Matt's ear. Matt looking up at me with that expression I'd manufactured and couldn't stop seeing.
The parking lot. The belt. Kyle shaking his hand.
And me walking away with that grin on my face, the one that lived on the internet now, the one that looked like a woman who knew exactly what she was doing.
I did know what I was doing. That was the part I couldn't get past. Not the ignorance of the bigger plan. The smaller truth, that I'd walked into that ballroom in a dress chosen to stop a specific man's heart, and it had worked, and part of me had enjoyed it.
Looking at the photos now, from the other side of what they'd cost, the woman in them was someone I recognized but didn't want to be.
"You two look incredible together," Kyle said, scrolling with obvious satisfaction. "The chemistry is off the charts. You can see exactly what he's thinking." He zoomed in on Matt's face. Surprised. Hopeful. Open.
"Kyle—"
"This is exactly what we needed. Weeks of speculation. Transfer rumors everywhere. Boston's locker room tearing itself apart. Perfect execution."
"I didn't know that was the plan."
"I know. That's what made it work. Your chemistry sold it because it was real." He pointed a chopstick at me. "Brilliant strategy, even if you didn't realize you were running it."
I stared at the screen. At the woman I'd been that night. At the man she'd hurt.
"Do you ever feel bad about it?" I asked. "The propaganda. Using people like game pieces."
Kyle laughed. Not a dark laugh, not a villain laugh.
A genuine, delighted laugh, the laugh of a man who'd been asked whether water was wet.
"The media has always been in the business of propaganda, Carrie.
That's what we do. Shape narratives. Control stories.
Influence perception." He leaned back. "You can call it manipulation.
I call it strategy. Game theory. And the people who win are the ones who play without getting sentimental. "
I heard my own vocabulary coming out of his mouth.
Narrative. Strategy. Perception. The words I'd used to build my career, the words I'd used to justify the awards ceremony, the words I'd used to frame what I'd done to Matt as "just a meeting.
" Hearing Kyle say them felt like looking in a mirror and seeing the version of myself that existed five years down this road. Polished, successful, and hollowed out.
"I still feel bad about the whole thing," I said. "About what those photos did to him."
"You'll get over it." Kyle waved a chopstick dismissively. "First time you feel guilty, second time less so, third time it's just Tuesday. Give it a few months."
I didn't want a few months. I didn't want the callus he was describing, the professional scar tissue that let you destroy someone's reputation before lunch and order Chinese by dinner.
I wanted the guilt to stay, because the guilt was the only evidence I had that I wasn't already the person he was telling me to become.
"And don't be surprised when Matt reaches out to you for sex," Kyle added, casual as weather.
I nearly choked. "What?"
"Come on. The body language in these photos? That's not anger, that's want. Professional athletes run on ego and testosterone. I've seen this play out too many times." He tapped the screen. "He'll reach out. They always do."
My face heated. If Kyle had any idea that we'd already crossed that line. That we were dating. That I was falling for this man in a way that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the fact that he'd bought my dog a leash with paw prints on it.
"I don't think—"
"I'm not judging." Kyle leaned forward, and the amusement on his face sharpened into something more calculating.
"If anything, I'd encourage it. The more involved you get, the better for us.
More story. More angles. More access." He paused.
"Pillow talk is excellent intelligence gathering.
You'd be surprised what people let slip when they're vulnerable. "
The sentence sat in the air between us and I felt my stomach curdle. He wanted me to turn private moments into corporate espionage. To take whatever Matt whispered to me in the dark and carry it back to this conference room and spread it across the table next to the kung pao chicken.
He stood up. Grabbed the remote. Flipped on the office TV.
The evening game. Boston Bruins versus Detroit.
Of course.
I watched the screen and found Matt within seconds, even in full gear, even from the aerial angle.
The way he moved. That combination of control and explosiveness, the same energy I'd felt when he'd pinned me against his door, the same body that held mine like I was the most important thing on his schedule.
He had the puck. Dodged a defender. Passed. Got it back on a perfect give-and-go. Wound up and shot.
Top shelf. Red light. Goal.
The horn went off. His teammates mobbed him. And even through a TV screen in a conference room that smelled like soy sauce, I could see his smile. That real one. The one I'd been collecting like evidence since the gas station.
My chest ached with something that wasn't guilt and wasn't pride and was probably just the specific pain of watching someone you're falling for do the thing they were born to do, and knowing that the room you're sitting in is full of people who'd use that brilliance against him if they could.
Kyle turned to me. The grin was different now. Sharper. The grin of a man running a calculation he'd already finished.
"Tell me, Carrie. If Matt wanted you, would you fuck him?"
The crudeness of it landed like a slap. Not because I was naive.
Because he was sitting there reducing the most genuine thing in my life to a tactical advantage, and the casual cruelty of it, the complete absence of any recognition that Matt was a person with feelings and not a chess piece, made me understand something I should have understood weeks ago.
Kyle wasn't a mentor. Kyle was a warning. He was the finished version of the path I was walking, and if I stayed on it long enough, I'd end up right where he was, ordering Chinese in an empty office, talking about people's bodies like assets to be deployed.
"You're stuttering," he observed.
"I'm thinking."
"Don't overthink it." He threw his legs on the conference table. "If I were in your shoes, I'd absolutely do it. Get close. Build trust. See what he lets slip about Boston's playbook, their contract situations, coaching tensions." He shrugged. "It's all part of the game."
I looked at him. At the man I reported to. At the career I'd wanted so badly I'd crossed every line I'd drawn for myself to get it.
"I need some air," I said.
My phone rang before I reached the door.
I stepped into the hallway and answered without checking the screen, grateful for any voice that wasn't Kyle's.
"Carrie?" Male. Stressed. The kind of stressed that lives at the edge of scared. "It's Frank. Matt's brother."
My stomach dropped through the floor. Not Matt. Not an injury. Not the man I'd just watched score on national television lying on the ice somewhere.
"Frank? What's wrong?"
"I need help." His voice cracked on the second word, the bravado I'd seen in Matt's apartment gone, replaced by something raw and young and afraid. "Please. I didn't know who else to call."
I was already reaching for my coat.