Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
Rebound - A loose puck that comes back into play after a shot is saved.
Cinder
The morning was gray and cold in a way that felt personal.
I'd woken to an empty bed, which shouldn't have surprised me but did.
Taz's side was cool, the sheets smoothed flat with the kind of deliberate neatness that suggested he'd been gone for a while.
A note on the kitchen counter, written in his precise, angular handwriting: Early skate. Didn't want to wake you.
No sign-off. No name. No casual endearment slipped in at the end, the way he'd started doing recently, like he was testing whether tenderness could survive being committed to paper.
Just instructions.
I stared at the note for longer than it deserved, turning it over in my hands as if the back might contain something he'd been too careful to put on the front. It didn't. I folded it, tucked it into my pocket for reasons I didn't want to examine, and locked up behind me when I left.
I pulled into my usual spot, killed the engine, and sat for a moment in the silence. Normal. Everything normal. The world continuing to function as if the last seventy-two hours hadn't rearranged my view of reality.
I grabbed my bag from the passenger seat and pushed the door open.
"Cinder."
The voice came from behind me, between the concrete pillars, and every nerve in my body fired at once.
I knew that voice. I knew it the way you knew the sound of a smoke alarm or a car horn or a scream in the dark.
Gavin stood ten feet away, half-hidden by the shadow of a support column.
He looked terrible. Not the polished, controlled terrible of a man who'd carefully curated his cruelty behind pressed shirts and a gym membership.
This was something disintegrating. His hair was unwashed, standing up in patches where he'd clearly been raking his hands through it.
His jacket was wrinkled, hanging open over a shirt that looked slept in.
His shoes were scuffed in a way the old Gavin would never have tolerated.
And the smell hit me even at this distance.
Liquor. Not the faint whiff of someone who'd had a drink with dinner, but the dense, sour reek of someone who'd been drinking for hours, maybe days, the alcohol seeping out through his pores like something his body couldn't process fast enough to contain. And at eight in the morning.
I scanned the lot behind him. No blue sedan. No car at all that I didn’t recognize, which meant he'd either parked on the street, taken a cab, or walked. None of those options made me feel better.
"You need to leave," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. Clinical. The triage voice, the one that assessed threats and allocated resources and didn't flinch. "You're not authorized to be here."
"I know." He took a step forward, and I took one back, maintaining the distance between us with the kind of spatial awareness I usually reserved for patients in psychotic breaks.
"I know I'm not supposed to be here. I know you don't want to see me.
But you won't answer my calls, and I didn't know where else to go. "
"That's not my problem, Gavin."
"Please." The word cracked in the middle, and something in his face collapsed.
Not the controlled mask. Something underneath it, something I hadn't seen in the entire time we were together.
Desperation, maybe. Or exhaustion so total it had eaten through every layer of performance he'd ever built.
"Please, just listen to me. Five minutes. That's all I'm asking."
You ran us off the road. I wanted to scream the words, but I still couldn’t prove it, and to be honest, he looked unhinged. I was on my own. Where was security? Or even better, where was Taz? But Taz had left without me.
"I know you broke into my apartment," I said, keeping my voice level. "I know you've been following me. I know about the gambling debts, Gavin."
The color drained from his face. For a second he looked like a patient going into shock, that particular gray-white pallor that preceded a crash.
"Who told you that?" His voice changed. Harder.
The softness evaporating like it had never been there, and there it was.
There was the man I remembered. The one who'd held my wrist too tight at dinner parties and called it affection.
The one who'd monitored my phone and called it concern.
The one who'd made me believe, for nearly five years, that his control was the same thing as love.
"It doesn't matter who told me," I said. "What matters is that you're standing in a restricted parking lot at eight in the morning, smelling like a distillery, and you need to leave before security finds you."
"Security." He laughed, a wet, ugly sound. "That's what I am to you now? A security problem?"
"You've been a security problem since you showed up at my apartment uninvited."
His expression cycled through something I'd seen a hundred times during our relationship.
The rapid-fire shift from wounded to furious to wounded again, each emotion deployed like a tool, tested and discarded depending on which one got the reaction he wanted.
I used to fall for it every time. I used to scramble to fix whatever I'd said that triggered the shift, rearranging myself into smaller and smaller shapes until I fit inside whatever version of me he needed.
Not anymore.
"I love you," he said, and I just managed to contain my scoff. "I know you don't believe that. I know I messed up. But everything I did was because I couldn't stand losing you."
"You broke into my home."
"I wanted to talk to you!"
He lurched forward another step, and I felt my back hit the side of my car.
The metal was cold through my jacket. I gripped my bag strap, calculating distances, and tried to slide my hand into my back pocket for my phone.
The security office was inside the main entrance, maybe two hundred feet.
There were no other people in the lot. Not yet. It was too early.
"You don't understand," he said, and his voice dropped into that register I hated most. The one that was supposed to sound intimate but always felt like a hand closing around my throat.
"I'm in trouble. Real trouble. And the people I owe money to, they don't care about excuses.
They want what I promised them, and if I don't deliver—"
"That is not my problem."
"It could be." The shift happened so fast I almost missed it.
One second he was pleading, eyes wet, shoulders hunched in that practiced posture of vulnerability.
The next, something cold and calculating slid behind his gaze like a door opening onto a room I wasn't supposed to see.
"You have no idea what trouble I can cause you. "
My blood went cold. Not Taz's kind of cold. The human kind. The kind that meant danger.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
"Yes, you do." He smiled, and it was terrible. A parody of the charming grin he'd used on our first date, twisted now by desperation and whatever was left of the liquid courage that had gotten him here.
"Hey!"
The shout came from behind me, sharp and authoritative, and Gavin's head snapped up. I turned to see two arena security guards striding across the lot, their postures alert, one of them already reaching for the radio on his belt.
"Sir, you need to step away," the taller one called. "This is a restricted area. Authorized personnel only."
Gavin's expression cycled one final time. Fury, despair, and then something that made me want to vomit, but he stumbled away before they reached us. Thanking the guards, I rushed inside. Should I find Taz?
Did he even want to know?
My chest clenched.
Something had been wrong since the bar. Since the celebration last night, since the victory, since the moment that should have been the brightest point in both our lives.
I'd felt it—the way you felt a weather system moving in before the clouds arrived.
A pressure change. A chill that had nothing to do with his nature and everything to do with distance.
He'd claimed tiredness when we got home.
And he was tired—I'd seen the exhaustion carved into the lines around his eyes, the way his body moved like it had given everything on the ice and had nothing left.
I'd believed it. Of course I had. Thirty-three saves.
A playoff spot. The man had earned his exhaustion.
But he hadn't reached for me.
That was the thing. The small, devastating thing I'd cataloged without meaning to, the way I cataloged everything, because my brain was a machine that never stopped taking vitals, even when the patient was the man lying beside me in the dark.
Every night since we'd been together—every single night—Taz had reached for me.
Not always sexually. Sometimes it was just his hand on my hip, or his cold nose pressed against the back of my neck, or his fingers finding mine under the covers like a reflex.
Contact. Connection. The physical language of a man who'd spent decades touch-starved and was finally allowing himself to need someone.
Last night, he'd lain on his side of the bed. Three inches of mattress between us that might as well have been a canyon.
I'd told myself it was nothing. Postgame fatigue. Overstimulation. The crash that came after adrenaline, when your body finally stopped performing and demanded payment. And this morning he’d left before I woke up.
Michael Dunn’s assistant didn’t smile when she told me he wanted to see me. Michael Dunn—the Athletic Director—was my boss’s boss. That should have been my first clue.