Chapter Eighteen
Felix
The word was there.
It had been there for a long time. Two years, if I was being conservative. Longer, if I was being precise, which I usually was in every area except this one. It sat just behind my teeth now, the way a puck sits on a stick blade when you’ve overhandled it and there’s nowhere left to go but the net.
Shay looked at me.
“The reason for what, Felix?” he said.
Not sharp. Not pleading. Just clean. Exact.
The apartment was very quiet.
The dead plant on the windowsill. The throw blanket on the couch. The faint city noise through the glass. All the details I had catalogued for years , the system I had built around not saying this word , and none of them were useful now.
Henry’s voice, unhelpfully, arrived in my head.
The window doesn’t stay open forever.
I opened my mouth.
“I,”
My throat closed.
This was ridiculous. I had said difficult things before.
To coaches. To GMs. To reporters. To my father, once, in a conversation I had no intention of repeating.
I had said no to bad contracts and yes to systems changes and we need to fix the neutral zone to a room full of men who did not like hearing it.
This was one syllable.
“You didn’t want it to be the reason,” Shay said. He was watching me with the particular steadiness he got when he’d decided, finally, to stop performing for me. “The reason for what.”
“For,” I tried again. “For why I,”
My jaw did the thing. I could feel it. It had never felt this obvious before, like an actual mechanical failure I could reach up and adjust.
He didn’t move. Didn’t look away. He just waited.
He had been waiting for two years.
The system had not protected him.
The trade rumor. The GM’s office. If they trade me, it won’t be because of my game.
The way he’d said that in the parking lot and stood there in the cold with Charlie’s arm around him and no sound.
The way he had come to this apartment and told me the truth and closed the door quietly.
The way the locker room had gone silent when he stopped filling it.
I had been protecting myself from a cost he had already been paying.
The word was there.
I stopped trying to structure it.
It came out wrong, the way things do when you pull them out of a place they’ve been sitting for too long.
“I love you,” I said.
It startled me, hearing it in my own voice. Smaller than I’d expected. Rougher.
Shay didn’t move.
I kept going, because stopping now would be worse than anything.
“I love you,” I said again, clearer this time, like repetition could correct for the first attempt. “I have for,” I stopped counting. “For a long time.”
The room did not explode. The ceiling did not crack. The world outside the windows continued to exist.
“I’ve been terrified of what that costs,” I said.
The sentence had been running in me for months; now that it was moving, it didn’t want to stop.
“The team, management, the microscope, the line. All of it. I,” I had to breathe.
“I built an entire system around not letting this become a bigger thing because I didn’t know how to handle the version where it was real, where it affected more than just me. ”
Shay’s face didn’t change much. It didn’t have to. I could see it anyway , the small, precise shifts at the corners of his mouth, the way his hands had gone still on the couch arm.
“And I’ve been punishing you for it,” I said.
That was the worst part. It felt like a tooth pulling, sharp and clean.
“Every time I said we can’t instead of I’m afraid.
Every time I let you carry the distance, or pretended it was fine when you were the one making it fine for me.
Every time you gave me room and I called it professionalism instead of realizing it was you trying to keep me safe.
” The words were landing faster now, less controlled, the way pucks come when a game breaks open.
“I’ve been making you pay for a cost that was mine, and I’m,” I swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
I meant it. I had said sorry before , for missed coverage, for bad passes, for the occasional penalty I’d actually earned , but not like this, not with this particular hollow feeling in my chest, like I was finally admitting to the exact damage I’d done.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said.
It came out quieter. Honest in a way I didn’t like being, even with myself.
“I don’t,” I repeated. “I don’t know how to be the person who,” I gestured, uselessly, at the space between us, at the couch, at the years. “Who has this. Who lets himself have this and keeps the rest of it. The team. The game. The life I’ve built around not needing anything I couldn’t control.”
Silence.
I made myself look at him. Not at the floor, not at the plant, not at the ceiling. At him.
“But I know,” I said, “that I don’t want you to leave.”
That was the whole thing, distillable down to one sentence. If everything else was variables, that was the constant.
“I don’t want you traded,” I said. “I don’t want you on another team.
I don’t want to watch some other line figure out the timing it took us four years to build.
I don’t want to walk into a locker room where you’re not in it.
I don’t want a life where this,” I let out a breath, “was the closest I ever got because I was too afraid of a cost you were willing to pay.”
I realized, distantly, that my hands were shaking.
I made them stop.
“I love you,” I said again, because if I was finally going to ruin my system I might as well make the data set robust. “And I’m sorry it took this long. And I don’t know how to do this. But if you’ll let me, I want to figure it out with you. I want to stay. I want you to stay.”
The room was very, very quiet.
Shay didn’t fill it.
He had filled every silence I’d ever been in with him. The bar, the locker room, the hotel rooms, the Tuesday couch. He had always stepped into the gap, made noise so I didn’t have to. Now he didn’t.
He just looked at me.
The seconds stretched. Ten. Fifteen. Long enough for my brain to start trying to spin up versions again , damage control, exit routes, alternate futures where this conversation hadn’t happened.
I didn’t let it.
For once, I just stood there and held the thing I’d put in the air.
Shay exhaled.
Not a dramatic sound. Just the breath of someone who had been holding theirs for a very long time.
“You’re going to have to be loud sometimes,” he said.
His voice was steady. Not flat. Not the careful evenness of the past weeks. Just steady.
“For me,” he added.
I blinked.
“Because I need to know you’re choosing this,” he said.
He didn’t say over the team or over your career. He didn’t have to. We both knew that wasn’t the equation. He meant: over fear. Over silence. Over the version of himself that never asked for anything.
I nodded, once.
“I know,” I said.
I did. That was the worst part and the easiest. I knew exactly what he was asking for. Not grand gestures. Not public declarations. Just visibility. For me to stop hiding behind the system and act, occasionally, like a man who could say what he wanted and live with the consequences.
Shay watched me for another moment.
I could see him weighing it. Not my words , he’d heard enough words from me to know their limitations , but the fact that I was standing in his apartment saying the thing I had been refusing to say, and not taking it back, and not dressing it in caveats or conditions.
He looked like he was testing the structure to see if it held.
It did.
“Okay,” he said.
The same word.
Not the same weight.
This was not the okay from the couch with the water stain, the one with no bottom that had sounded like surrender. Not the flat okay in my apartment, when he’d decided to accept a number he didn’t like because he thought I was giving him nothing else.
This one landed somewhere solid.
I felt it.
“Okay?” I said.
I needed to hear it again, from him, with the new weight.
He huffed out something that was almost a laugh, almost a sob, neither of those things exactly.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
He sat down on the couch.
It was such an ordinary motion that, for a second, my brain stuttered. I had just said the most destabilizing sentence of my adult life and he was sitting on his couch like we were about to watch film.
He looked up at me.
“You can sit down,” he said. “You look like you’re about to run drills.”
I sat.
On my usual forty percent of his couch.
For once, the fraction didn’t feel like distance. It felt like habit , something we could change later, or not, because the important part wasn’t where we were sitting, it was what had just been said in this room.
We were quiet for a moment.
My heart was still going too fast. I suspected it would be for a while.
“So,” Shay said eventually. “What did the GM say?”
I blinked.
“I just told you I love you,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “We’re circling back to it. I just need to know if I should be packing boxes while we have this conversation.”
I made a sound that might have been a laugh, which was absurd under the circumstances and apparently unavoidable around him.
“The case is strong,” I said. “He’s taking it to ownership. He used the word likely less than he did the first time.” I hesitated. “I can’t promise they won’t consider it. But I made sure they understood what they’d be losing.”
Shay nodded slowly.
“Thank you,” he said.
He meant it. Not just for the numbers.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
We sat there a little longer.
The dead plant. The throw blanket. The city outside. All the same details. All different now, because they were in a room where the word had been said and had not been taken back.
“You’re going to have to be loud sometimes,” Shay said again, more lightly this time, like it was already a bit between us. “Just so we’re clear.”
I looked at him.
He was watching me with that same steady, unperformed attention. The look from the dinner table. The bar. The balcony. The parking lot. Except this time, there was no question in it.
He knew the answer now.
“Then I’ll be loud,” I said.
It felt like an impossible promise.
It felt like the only one worth making.
He smiled.
Not the big, room,holding grin. Not the practiced, story,telling one. Something smaller. Quieter. The version he saved for two AM texts and Henry’s kitchen and, apparently, for me, in his living room.
“Okay,” he said again.
And this time, I believed him.