Chapter 37
TAYLOR
We won our game against Brooklyn. I knew I played because my legs were tired and sore afterward, but I couldn’t have described a single shift I was on the ice for.
Physically, I’d been in the arena, but mentally I was on the other side of town, where Sebastian was hunched over his laptop, searching for the sister he’d never known.
This morning, I found him in the business center when I went downstairs to meet the team for breakfast, his fingers jabbing at the keyboard while his bloodshot eyes darted across the screen. I’d only just managed to convince him to come back upstairs to get showered and changed.
Before I left for the arena, I’d begged him to take a nap instead of coming to watch me play.
He’d finally agreed to sleep, but I knew he wouldn’t.
The last image I had of him as I walked out the door was him sitting at the small desk in the corner of our room, a cup of cold coffee pushed to the side.
I hadn’t had the heart to point out that this woman almost certainly knew her father was billionaire Charles Carruthers—which meant she knew Sebastian existed, knew he was her brother, and had never once reached out.
Sebastian was already barely holding himself together. That particular truth could wait.
“Yo, T!” Cally called out, approaching my stall, where I was bent over, tying my shoes.
“What’s up?” I pushed to my feet, grabbed my coat from the hook, and shrugged into it.
“A few of us are heading out to get our drink on to celebrate the W. You should definitely come.”
I wouldn’t, not with Sebastian back at the hotel spiraling. But Cally didn’t need to know that.
I forced a grin. “I don’t know whether to be flattered that you think I can keep up with a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds, or be suspicious of why you want an old man like me there in the first place.”
He gave me a lopsided grin. “Shit. Was it that obvious?”
“Kinda, kid.” I turned and grabbed my wallet from the shelf, pulling out a wad of twenty-dollar bills and passing them to him. “First round’s on me.”
“Dude!” Cally launched himself forward, wrapping his arms around me and lifting me off the ground like I weighed nothing. I wasn’t the biggest guy on the team, but I wasn’t small either.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, patting his back and untangling myself from his grip. “Have fun, but not too much fun. Our flight leaves at nine, and I don’t want to see a repeat of Minneapolis.”
Ports, being from Minneapolis, had asked Coach if he and Cally could spend the night at his parents’ house instead of at the hotel.
Since Hendricks was secretly a big old softie, he’d said yes.
A couple of minutes before we were set to head to the airport the next morning, a red minivan came skidding to a stop alongside the team bus, the two rookies tumbling out with their hair wrecked and their clothes looking like they’d been put on in the dark.
When they passed me on the way to their seats, I saw that Ports had a hickey the size of a quarter visible above his collar.
I could only imagine what kind of debauchery they’d gotten into, and didn’t want to see a repeat performance here in New York.
Cally smirked, his cheeks and the tips of his ears turning pink. “Yes, Dad.”
A year ago, I’d been the guy who kept his head down and his mouth shut, grateful just to still be in the league.
Now I was handing out drink money and curfew reminders to the rookies, and they listened.
Huh. I’d spent the better part of a decade fading into the background of every locker room I’d ever been in, and somehow, somewhere along the way, I’d quietly stopped being that guy.
Bell sidled up alongside me, shaking his head with a fond smile, his eyes tracking Ports and Cally’s exit.
Ports had climbed onto Cally’s back, his arms draped over his shoulders, hands fisted in the front of his hoodie.
Cally had his arms hooked around Ports’s calves, his head tilted to the side and slightly back to see his face, that big goofy grin of his spread wide.
“I know I shouldn’t speculate,” Bell whispered under his breath, “but do you ever get, like … vibes … from those two?”
I watched them disappear through the door, Ports’s happy laugh ringing out.
“Could be a Gen Z thing.”
He nodded. “Could be, but like, if we ever found out there was more there, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
I thought back to how Sebastian and I had been right around that age. The easy comfort we’d shared. The way I felt like I always had to be touching him, and if we couldn’t touch, I had to be near him. How I felt like my best self whenever he was around.
And that was before anything had ever happened between us. Once I’d seen him naked, once I knew what it felt like to be with him in that way, the compulsions had been ten times worse. My body went warm with the memory.
“Sebastian and I were a lot like that.”
Bell huffed out a laugh. “Not Ethan and me. It was always fucking or fighting—sometimes fighting that led to fucking. None of that sweet shit for us.”
I nudged him with my shoulder. “You’re disgustingly sweet now.”
His eyes went wide with mock offense. “Take that back.”
I laughed. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”
He smiled and clapped his hand on my shoulder, squeezing once. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
The room was mostly dark when I pushed the door open, the sole light coming from Sebastian’s laptop screen.
He was sitting exactly where I’d left him.
The bed was still made, and there wasn’t any evidence he’d ever eaten anything—no dirty dishes, no room service tray.
He hadn’t slept or eaten. Hadn’t done anything in the four hours I’d been gone but sit in the dark and chase a ghost.
The worst part was that I understood. Knew that the search for his sister was the only thing standing between him and everything he wasn’t ready to face yet. My heart ached for him.
“Hey,” I whispered, crouching down next to him, my hand landing on his thigh.
It took him a few long seconds to acknowledge me. When he finally dragged his gaze from his screen to my face, his eyes were red-rimmed and swollen.
Fuck. He’d been crying.
I wanted to kill his goddamn parents.
“Baby.”
He exhaled slowly and turned his laptop toward me, the screen showing two photographs side by side—the first featured a curvy, dark-haired woman, maybe in her late forties or early fifties, standing next to his dad at what looked to be a black-tie charity event.
The second was an older image, the quality much grainier, showing the same woman, only much younger, Charles’s hand at the small of her back.
“These were taken seventeen years apart. You see it, right—that’s the same woman?” His eyes moved back and forth across my face, blinking rapidly, the whites shot through with red.
“Yeah, I think so,” I said, licking my lips.
He nodded, turning the computer back toward him before typing something into the search bar. “I’ve got a first name from one of the captions, but I haven’t been able to uncover a last name yet. I’m close, though. I can feel it.”
“Sebastian,” I said, squeezing his knee. “Hey, look at me.”
He dropped his head forward, twisting slightly to catch my eye. “What?"
"Have you taken a break today?"
"No."
"Maybe you should."
"Look. I know what you're thinking.”
“What am I thinking?” I asked, my voice soft.
“Like I can’t deal with the actual problem, so I’m inventing smaller ones to solve instead.
” He spun to face me fully, blowing out a breath.
“I just ... if I stop looking, if I close this laptop and let myself sit with the knowledge—” He cut himself off, his voice cracking.
“Everything they ever asked me to do. Every goddamn charity event I smiled through, every time I kept my mouth shut about who I was because I didn’t want to blow up my relationship with them.
” He flattened his lips, tipping his head back, his throat working.
When he eventually tilted his face forward, his eyes were wet, tears clinging to his lashes but not falling.
I didn’t have words to describe what seeing him like this did to me. How much it hurt to watch him fighting to hold himself together. I hated his parents—and Wyatt, too—for the influence they’d wielded against him. For the way they'd sacrificed him for their own gains.
I took his hands in mine, lacing our fingers together. “I’m so sorry.”
“What a fucking waste,” he whispered, his voice trembling.
I bent my head, kissing the knuckles on each of his hands, once, then again.
Sebastian choked out a sad-sounding laugh. “The truly absurd thing is it wasn’t just my dad—I had a secret life, too. A whole decade of pretending to be someone I wasn’t.” He paused, his mouth twisting. “Guess it runs in the family.”
“You’re nothing like him,” I said, untangling our fingers to settle a hand on the side of his face.
Sebastian curled into my touch, his eyes dropping closed. He looked so damn tired and defeated.
I leaned in and pressed my lips to his forehead, holding them there for a moment, then moved to his temple and the wet curve of his lashes. The sharp line of his cheekbone. Just loving him. Just being there for him.
“What can I do, baby?”
He hummed softly, but otherwise stayed quiet.
I hated the silence.
“Tell me what you need from me.”
He opened his eyes. “I need …” He swallowed hard, tired eyes tracing over my face. “I just … I want to make you feel good.”
I pulled back enough to look at him. “I’ll do anything you want, but it has to be about what you need—not me.”
“I want out of my head. I want to forget, at least for a little while, that I’m the same person I was when I woke up yesterday morning.”