Chapter 11
ELEVEN
Jari
I woke to the dull grey of early morning pressing against the window of my permanent hotel space, the low, familiar hum of the air system threading through the room.
For a second, I didn’t know where I was, then last night snapped into place, and I smiled.
I can’t remember the last time I met a new day with a smile.
I lay there for a moment longer, staring at the ceiling, letting the feeling sit instead of pushing it away.
I’d begged him to suck me, but it hadn’t been about sex.
It had been about overload—about my head being too full, my body too tight, everything stacked too close together.
I’d needed something immediate. Physical.
Something that didn’t require me to explain myself.
What I hadn’t expected was the pause. Cam had stopped, waited, and given me space to decide what happened next.
The hesitation was everything, and it left me off-balance.
I was so damn happy, yes—but also unsettled in a way I couldn’t quite name.
I was used to controlling it by speed or distance, by getting in and getting out before things got heavy.
I’d needed what happened last night. I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. What I couldn’t figure out was why the part that stayed with me wasn’t the release, but the moment he’d stopped and waited for my answer.
That was usually the part where my instincts kicked in and shut everything down.
This time, they hadn’t. So, what was different? I groaned and hid my face in the pillow—why couldn’t I just accept it was fucking hot and that I’d wanted it?
Why did I have to overanalyze everything?
“Idiot!”
My phone buzzed on the bedside table, the sound cutting through the quiet. I reached for it before my brain fully caught up, thumb already moving, habit and hope tangled together.
Cam: Morning, beautiful
I smiled into the pillow, the reaction automatic, unguarded.
He called me beautiful. Fuck. I felt beautiful last night.
But now what should I say? That I thought he was handsome?
Sexy? Smart and so freaking capable? I loved what we did, and should I mention that I'd miss seeing his face for the next five days of road trips?
Hell, I'd managed a month when he was in Greece, I could do five days.
Right? I typed and backspaced, then typed some more, backspaced again, and finally pressed send on the lamest message ever.
Jari: Morning
I cringed. I may not have a college education, but I knew way more words than morning, for fuck’s sake.
Cam: Sorry if I woke you. I couldn't wait to text you.
That did something stupid to my chest, a warmth that had no business being there this early in the day.
Jari: I need to head out in an hour, so I’m awake—Raleigh, then on to Florida.
Cam: I know.
Jari: How?
Cam: I added the team calendar to my phone. I know everything now.
Of course, he had. That made me smile so damn hard.
Jari: Stalker.
Cam: Professional sporting curiosity.
I rolled onto my back, staring at the ceiling, the smile still there even as I tried to rein it in.
This was nothing. Just an easy conversation.
Just a check-in. Good morning. It would only be five days, and when he'd waved me off in the cab last night after a final kiss, even one night seemed too long without seeing him.
I needed a friend, but it turned out I needed kisses and blowjobs too.
Jari: Five days.
I typed and pressed send, and there was too much of a pause—not forever, but long enough to feel it. Maybe it didn’t matter to him? After all, it had just been one night of us being together. He probably regretted what we’d done.
Fuck. I’m spiraling. Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Came back, as if he was choosing his words carefully.
Cam: Text me when you land. I'll miss your face for the whole five days.
Jari: I will. I'll miss yours too.
Cam: Can we video call when you’re away?
Jari: Yes
My phone started ringing.
I didn’t look at the screen. I didn’t need to. I was already smiling as I lifted it to my ear, still caught in the conversation, expecting him to be calling.
“Hey,” I said, soft, easy.
Silence. Then—
“Jari.”
Fuck. My father. My stomach dropped so fast it felt like a physical blow. The smile slid off my face as if it had never been there at all, and I sat up, the sheets tangling around my legs, suddenly too warm, too confining.
“What do you want?” I asked my father in a voice that didn’t sound like mine.
“Rumor is,” he said, smooth as oil, “the Railers are signing you, and not to a two-way contract. Color me shocked, they want to keep you despite your lack of staying in one place for longer than a season.”
I closed my eyes. “Rumors,” I said. “That’s what you’re calling it now?”
A gentle exhale down the line. Amused. Satisfied. “Your agent mentioned it.”
My jaw clenched. Emmet Hughes didn’t report to my father. Not officially. But Dad had always had a way of making people think they did. I didn’t like Emmet; he was yet another product of my dad’s intervention in my career, and I’d been too tired to argue.
“I need a new agent,” I muttered under my breath.
“How much?” he went on. “They don’t trade a player like you just to bury him. A million? Less?” This wasn’t about pride. Or legacy. Or even hockey. This was about money. I stayed silent. “Whatever they offer,” he said, “you’ll need to start paying down what you owe me.”
I laughed, short and sharp. “We had a deal,” I said before he could feed me more bullshit. “I’d play hockey. I’d wear your name and number. I wouldn’t talk about you. And you’d cover Mom’s care.”
“So, you’d leave your own mother vulnerable?” he said, the chuckle tender and almost indulgent, as if he were humoring a child who didn’t understand the rules yet. He let the words hang there, heavy and deliberate, daring me to argue.
I hissed out a breath. “I do everything for her. Everything,” I said.
I was playing this fucking game because she was everything to me.
I took the hits, the trades, the bullshit—because it kept her safe.
Because my time playing covered what my asshole of a father paid for nurses and the meds and the quiet she needed. My hand tightened around the phone.
“Well, I'm sad to report that she’s had an exacerbation. You know what that means.”
A relapse, a flare, her MS worsening one awful scene at a time. “Why did no one call me?” I asked. My voice came out rough. “I’m on her emergency contact list.”
“But it’s not you who pays the bills, son.”
I desperately wanted to cover everything, but I wasn’t good enough on any team I was on; I’d never get rid of the weight around my neck, the slurs, the hatred, and the damage I wrought on myself with my messed-up brain.
“Any money I earn will go directly to her,” I said.
“You’ll never get a percentage of my life.
” I remembered the whole story about Trick and his father, and how he’d paid a large portion of his salary to his father's ministry. That was not happening here. The more I earned, the more I could pay for my mom’s care and the less I'd need to rely on Aarni Lankinen.
“We’ll see,” he said. “Contracts have numbers. Numbers can be discussed. Or maybe we should discuss taking your momma out of that place and caring for her in our marital home.”
The line went dead. The ultimate threat.
He’d never loved her. She certainly didn’t love him, and she needed help.
He wouldn’t give her help. He’d… ignore her, hurt her…
no. I stared at my phone, my hand shaking now.
It was barely six in the morning here. In Finland, it would be early afternoon—just past one.
She’d be awake. She wouldn’t be asleep or disoriented.
That mattered. I connected with the private facility where my mom lived within seconds of his finishing.
The phone rang twice before the receptionist picked up and transferred me.
“?iti?” I said, already standing, already pacing. “ ?”
“I’m fine, sweetheart,” she said, quick and practiced in English—her first language.
She’d kept her American passport after marrying my father and later added a Finnish one, but English was the language she had given me.
No matter how much my father forced Finnish into my mouth, she nudged me back toward English, gentle but insistent, as if reminding me where I came from mattered.
I was born in the US to an American mom.
That should have been simple. But being half Finnish meant Aarni, and Aarni poisoned everything he touched.
I’d tried—God, I’d tried—to love Finland.
I visited every summer, loved the lakes, the quiet, the honesty of one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
A country that deserved better than the way it had been used as a cage for my mom by my controlling father.
Now, all it was to me was the place that trapped my mother, the place Aarni’s shadow still ruled, and I hated that more than I hated him.
“Just another small flare, is all.”
I heard the tremor beneath the words, the careful spacing of her breaths, the fatigue she was trying not to give voice to.
“I wish you’d called me. I wish I were there,” I said, the words coming out rougher than I meant them to. “I want to be there.”
I wish you were here with me in the US, Mom.
“Oh, Jari,” she said softly, and I could picture her smile, the one she used when she wanted to make every awful thing feel smaller than it was. “You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be with your career and playing the game you love, and you'll see me in the summer.”