31. Rhett
RHETT
The team scheduled a press availability for Thursday, three days after the Bulldogs game. My shoulder was still sore as hell but the doctors had cleared me to stand upright and answer questions, which was apparently the bar for public appearances in this league.
The press was already waiting when we came out.
Of course they were. Forty thousand people had just watched us punch our ticket to the championship and half of them had phones.
By the time the locker room settled and Victoria finished whatever she needed to finish inside Caldwell Arena, the story was already everywhere.
I could see it in the way the crowd surged the second the side doors opened.
Cameras. Microphones. People shouting questions over one another in that particular aggressive overlap that stopped sounding like language after about four seconds.
Victoria didn’t even break stride.
That was the thing about her. She walked out of those doors and the whole world shifted to accommodate her without her asking it to.
Shoulders back. Chin up. Those heels hitting the pavement in that rhythm I’d spent years learning to track by sound alone.
She moved toward the press like she’d scheduled this meeting herself and they were running slightly late.
I fell into step beside her.
“Miss Caldwell! Can you comment on the forfeit—”
“The forfeit stands,” she said, not breaking stride. “The PHL office has the full incident report. Next.”
“Miss Caldwell, what about the Detroit—”
“Handled.” She didn’t even look at the man. “Next.”
“Coach Mercer’s relationship with your daughter—”
She stopped walking.
The whole crowd seemed to stop with her. I watched her turn toward the camera with the particular slow deliberateness of a woman who had decided exactly how much rope she was about to hand someone.
“My daughter,” she said, her voice carrying clean and clear over the noise, “is a grown woman who makes her own choices. I’d suggest the next question be a better one.”
Silence. Then someone had the nerve.
“Stone! Stone, over here! Any comment on the hit from their defenseman?”
I opened my mouth.
“Mr. Calloway is unavailable for comment tonight,” Victoria said, smooth as anything, half a second before I could speak. “He’ll be assessed by our medical team shortly.”
I looked at her sideways. She was already moving again, tablet in hand, scanning something with that focused downward pull between her brows that meant her brain was three conversations ahead of her mouth.
The cameras tracked her like she was the only thing worth looking at in the entire parking lot, which, honestly, fair.
Someone shouted something about the championship. Someone else asked about ticket prices for next season. Victoria handled them the way she handled everything, efficiently, without warmth, with the specific brand of authority that made people feel lucky to have gotten any answer at all.
And I stood there beside her and I thought about a flat tire in the dark.
About a couch and a Golden Girls rerun and her head on my shoulder before she caught herself.
About years of turned lefts. About her hand pressed flat against the boards and her eyes finding mine across the ice and her voice in the dark of a shower saying I love you, I love you, I love you like she was finally done carrying it alone.
I thought about how she was going to turn back to me in about thirty seconds with that composed, impassive face of hers and ask me something logistical.
About the medical team, or the press schedule, or the league filing, or any of the thousand things that lived in the clipboard she carried like armor.
And I thought: not yet.
“Rhett.” She turned toward me, tablet raised, already talking. “Seth needs you to—”
I leaned in close.
Not all the way. Not the way every cell in my body was screaming at me to.
Just close enough that her tablet stalled mid-sentence between us.
Just close enough that the press of cameras behind me caught their breath all at once, like forty journalists collectively forgot how to be journalists for the next four seconds.
Victoria tipped her chin up.
Just a fraction. The kind of tilt nobody else in the parking lot would have caught, because nobody else had spent three goddamn years cataloging every single involuntary thing this woman did when she stopped policing herself.
Her tablet drifted toward her hip. Her lips parted, just barely.
Her gray eyes flicked up to mine and held there.
And just like that, the rest of the world fell away.
I could have done it.
Holy hell, I could have done it. Three years of waiting. A flat tire and a couch and a shower and her voice in the dark saying it three times in a row. Six inches of cool Las Vegas night air between me and the cleanest answer I’d ever given anything in my life.
I didn’t do it.
Not here. Not tonight. Not in a damn parking lot after a semifinal win, with a championship game still ahead of us, and her franchise sitting square in the crosshairs of every news outlet in the country.
Fourteen years she’d spent building this team into something Ryan would have stood up and cheered for.
I wasn’t about to hand the press the headline before she’d finished writing the goddamn story herself.
When I kissed Victoria Caldwell in front of cameras for the first time, it was going to be on her terms.
Not theirs.
Not the league’s. Not the PHL conduct committee’s. Not Hargrove’s. Not a single soul in this parking lot or behind it.
Hers.
I leaned in just enough that only she could hear me.
“Later, Miss C,” I murmured against her ear.
Her breath caught.
I pulled back. Took half a step away. Slid my hands into the pockets of my dress slacks like a man who had not just held himself dead still on the edge of doing the one thing he’d wanted to do for three solid goddamn years.
Cameras kept clicking around us, hungry as hell, having clocked something they couldn’t quite name.
Victoria stared at me for one more beat.
Then the corner of her mouth lifted. Just the corner. That tiny private smile she did when she was making a decision behind her own eyes and had no intention of telling the room about it.
Yeah.
She got the message.
She turned away from the cameras. Turned back toward the arena doors. And as she passed me, close enough that I caught the faint scent of her perfume under the cool night air, she said, quietly, just for me, “Medical team. Now.”
I grinned at the pavement.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Behind us, the cameras kept going.
I followed her back inside.
The door closed behind us and the noise dropped from something physical to something muffled and distant, like the whole world got pushed behind glass.
The corridor was empty. Just the two of us and the hum of the building and the particular stillness that settled over Caldwell Arena when the crowds had gone and the lights had shifted and it stopped being a place where things happened and became just a building again.
Victoria was already moving. Of course she was.
Tablet up, heels clicking, brain somewhere three steps ahead of her feet.
She turned the corner toward the administrative wing and I fell into step beside her without being asked, the same way I always did, the same way I always had, only this time the cameras weren’t following us and there was no crowd noise to fill the silence between us and nowhere either of us had to be in the next thirty seconds.
She felt it too. I could tell by the way her stride slowed, almost imperceptibly, just a fraction off the pace she kept everywhere else. Like her body knew something had changed even if her brain was still catching up to it.
We stopped outside her office door.
She stood there for a moment with her hand on the frame, not quite going in, not quite turning around. I watched her take one long breath through her nose. The composure thing she did. The reset.
Then she turned to face me.
Her lipstick was faded. The game, probably.
The press scrum after. Her hair had a strand loose that she hadn’t bothered to fix and her glasses had left a faint mark at the bridge of her nose from where she’d pushed them up one too many times during the game.
She looked nothing like the woman who had walked into that press scrum forty minutes ago like she owned everything the cameras could see.
She looked like Victoria.
Just Victoria.
“You almost did it,” she said. Not angry. Not really. More like a woman running a post-mortem on something she hadn’t quite decided was over.
“Probably,” I said.
“Every outlet in the country had a camera on us.”
“I know.”
“The PHL conduct policy—”
“I know.”
She looked at me for a moment. “You don’t seem particularly concerned.”
“I’m not.”
“Rhett.”
“Victoria.” I took a step toward her. Just the one, just enough to close some of the distance without taking the choice away from her.
“We won tonight. Forty thousand people just watched fourteen years of your work pay off in front of God and everybody. And we’ve got one more game between us and the rest of our goddamn lives, free and clear, with nobody able to say a single word about how we got there. ”
I held her gaze.
“Whatever the press wants to do with tonight, we deal with it. Together. But I’ll be real honest with you, Miss C.
I waited three years to almost kiss you in front of those cameras tonight.
Another week ain’t gonna kill me. And when I do it for real, you’re not gonna have a single doubt left in that brilliant goddamn head of yours about whether I meant it. ”
She looked at me for a long time.
Something moved behind her eyes that she didn’t try to stop.
“Go see the medical team,” she said quietly.
“Going right now.”
She nodded. Her hand pressed flat against the doorframe once, the way it always did when she was finishing a thought she wasn’t going to say out loud. Then she turned and went into her office.
I stood in the corridor for a second.
Forty thousand people. Cameras going off like a storm. The whole city watching.
And what I kept replaying in my head the whole way down that hallway was the half-second she’d tipped her chin up.
The way she’d gone completely still when I leaned in.
Not frozen. Not scared. Still like a woman who’d been waiting for something to show up and finally saw it walking through the door.
She’d been waiting too.
I smiled at the floor the whole way down the hall.