Chapter 28 #2
Alycia is watching me just long enough for me to see the crack in her expression.
A tightening around her mouth. A flicker in her eyes.
Another tiny fracture. It detonates something inside me because she is trying to do the professional, safe thing, and it’s tearing her up the same way it is me.
For the first time in forty-eight hours, the crushing weight in my chest shifts.
Not to hope, more like the seed of something I’m terrified to name and even more terrified to lose.
The whistle finally blows for the end of drills, and I skate toward the bench with legs heavy from two days of hauling this around. The boards feel cool beneath my palms when I brace against them, head bowed, each inhale dragging across something raw inside my ribs.
I don’t have to look up to know my brothers are watching.
I can feel three versions of the same instinct tuned to me, the way it’s been since we were kids.
Cole glides toward the bench first, stick tapping the ice in a soft rhythm, the same pattern he used to knock on my door with before barging in when he knew I’d been crying.
Beau hangs near the crease, nudging the net back into place like he needs a task before stepping into a conversation he knows I’m not ready for.
Cooper stands at center ice, whistle hanging from his fingers, gauging how hard he can push without breaking something fragile.
“Kyle,” Cooper calls, voice steady but edged. “Off-ice recovery. Hydrate. We’ll regroup in the locker room.”
I nod, helmet tipping forward, throat too tight to speak.
Skating off the ice feels like wading through molasses, each step pulling more of me down, but the instant the blades leave the frozen surface and hit the rubber mats, the air shifts around me, almost claustrophobically.
My shoulders tighten beneath my pads, and I force myself toward the tunnel with my gear hanging off me like extra weight.
Cole appears beside me almost immediately, matching my pace without comment, his silence doing more to unravel me than any words could have.
He’s smart enough to know better than to ask me if I’m okay, but he also doesn’t walk away.
His presence alone was enough to steady me through hell in the past; today, it barely puts a dent in the chaos churning behind my sternum.
We step into the locker room, the heavy door swinging shut behind us with a dull thud.
The space smells of sweat and the underlying scent of detergent that never quite manages to drown out the grit of hockey.
Racks of drying gear line the walls. A few players are already at their stalls, stripping off pads, the rumble of their conversation blurred against the static in my head.
I drop onto the bench in front of my stall, elbows braced on my knees as I unbuckle my shin guards.
When I pull my helmet off, the cold air hits the back of my neck and sends a chill straight down my spine.
Cole stands in front of me, his gloves off, his dark hair stuck in damp points around his forehead.
“Okay,” he says quietly, letting the word hang in the air like a line cast out to see if I’ll take it. “What the hell is going on with you?”
I tug off my left elbow pad, dropping it beside me with a hollow thud. “I said I’m fine.”
“Bullshit.”
Cole crouches, securing himself so he’s directly in my line of sight, forcing my eyes to meet his. “Kyle. You missed three gap reads today. Three. You never miss gap reads.”
I swallow, my throat feeling like sandpaper. “I was off.”
“Yeah, you were off—the ice, the drills, and the fucking planet—but don’t pretend it’s random. You’re not a rookie having a bad day. Something is messing with your head.”
Before I can pull myself together enough to answer, Beau walks in from the tunnel. His eyes land on me, and concern wrapped in protective instinct that hasn’t dimmed since we were kids flashes in his eyes.
“You were skating too high on your edges,” Beau says as he reaches us, leaning one shoulder against a locker. “You almost rolled your ankle on that first rep.”
“I know,” I mutter.
“And your stick was dropping low in transitions.”
“I know.”
“And you misread Diaz’s weight shift twice.”
“I fucking know, okay?” I snap, loud enough that a couple of guys at nearby stalls glance over.
Beau’s voice softens just a fraction. “Then what’s going on?”
I look away, staring at the laces of my skates. “I just…” The words die in my throat, locked behind something I can’t force open.
Cole exhales slowly, nodding once like he’s piecing things together on a chalkboard behind his eyes. “Did something happen between you and Alycia?”
A muscle in my jaw ticks as I look away again, focusing on the lockers across from me. The familiar Timberwolves decals stuck slightly crooked on a few of them. I don’t move or even blink for a full second. And in that tiny pocket of silence, Cole gets his answer.
“Oh, shit,” he murmurs, realization settling in.
Beau’s gaze snaps to mine. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Something,” Cole says. “Definitely something.”
I drag both hands over my face, pressing my palms to my eyes until the pressure sparks behind my eyelids. “She ended it.”
Cole straightens slowly. “Ended… what?”
I drop my hands, staring at the floor as if the cracked rubber mats can give me an explanation I don’t have for myself. “Everything, whatever it almost was, that is.”
“You two weren’t even…” Beau shifts closer.
“No,” I say, the word falling out of me like it’s weighted. “Nothing happened. At least not the way you’re thinking.”
“Then why are you walking around acting like someone ripped your chest open?” Cole asks, tone surprisingly gentle.
I let out a breath that trembles despite everything I do to steady it. “Because it wasn’t about what happened. It was about… everything between the lines. And she just—” My voice breaks for a moment, a small fracture I can’t catch in time. “She shut it down.”
Beau lowers himself onto the bench across from me, hands laced loosely between his knees. “Why?”
Because she’s scared and thinks choosing me means ruining her career.
She thinks that being with me means she has to give up everything she’s built because we live in a world where we’ve been told loving anyone in the spotlight is dangerous, but being loved by one is worse.
She’s running away from me because she thinks she needs to sacrifice her heart long before anyone else gets the chance to break it.
“She said it couldn’t be real,” I say instead, voice quiet enough that it almost disappears. “That she’d lose everything she’s built, and it wasn’t worth the risk.”
Cole curses under his breath as Cooper finally enters. His footsteps echo across the tile in a slow, measured rhythm. It’s ridiculous how something as simple as his presence still hits me with a force I can feel in my chest.
He doesn’t speak at first. He just stands there, assessing the chaos I’ve been trying to keep contained inside my ribs.
He takes in the scene in a single sweeping glance—my posture collapsed, Cole’s worry, Beau’s quiet—before walking over and lowering himself onto the bench beside me.
He doesn’t crowd me, just gives me the quiet space he knows I’ve never been able to ask for.
“Look at me, Kyle.”
It’s not a command, but it lands like one.
Cooper isn’t just the oldest. He is the one who held us together when our father’s shadow hung too long in the room.
He is the one who taught me how to tape my stick, how to keep my head up when I felt small, and how to absorb a hit without letting it define me.
He is also the one I never want to disappoint, and that’s what makes this moment so fucking hard.
I lift my eyes slowly, reluctantly, because facing Cooper when I’m hurt has never been easy. He sees too much. With most people, I can hide behind charm or humor, but he reaches into the quiet parts of me I spend half my life burying and holds them up to the light.
His gaze finds mine, steady and impossibly patient, and my throat closes around the words I’ve been avoiding for two days. I feel the burn of something like shame rising from my chest because the version of me he believes in is miles away from the one sitting in front of him right now.
When he finally speaks, his voice is quiet, stripped of all the sharp edges he uses on the ice. “You’re not yourself, and this team needs you grounded. Your brothers need you grounded. You need you grounded.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know you are,” Cooper says softly. “But you don’t have to do it alone.”
The words crack straight through the part of me I’ve tried hardest to hold together. He’s not talking about my skating or the scrimmage. He’s talking about me. The version of myself I’m supposed to be, the one I’ve been chasing and clinging to because I know I’m not steady.
I feel it in the way the last forty-eight hours have sat like a stone behind my ribs.
Wanting her and losing her at the same time feels like being pulled in opposite directions with nowhere to brace.
All the things I never learned how to handle are landing at once, and I don’t know how to stop any of it long enough to breathe.
My fingers curl into the bench until my knuckles go white. I can’t hold on to her, so I hold on to this. “I don’t know how to fix this.”
“Maybe it’s not about fixing it,” Cole says, dropping an arm over my shoulder.
“Maybe it’s about understanding it,” Beau adds.
Cooper studies me, caught between coach, captain, and brother. “Maybe it’s about giving her the space she thinks she needs, without sitting in the dark, convincing yourself she doesn’t care.”
“She acted like I was nothing out there,” I whisper, my heart hammering.
“No,” Beau says gently. “She acted like she’s protecting herself.”
“I saw it in her eyes. She’s not fine,” Cole adds.