Chapter 16
LIAM
The flight to Dallas was three hours of sitting five rows in front of Anne and pretending I didn't know exactly where she was at every moment.
She'd walked past my seat when she boarded — just passing through to the training staff section, not even looking at me — and I'd caught her scent and spent the next hour staring at the seat back in front of me like it had done something to offend me.
Carter slid in beside me before we'd cleared the gate.
"You good?"
"Fine."
"You've been staring at that headrest for twenty minutes."
"I'm thinking."
"About?"
I didn't answer. Just pulled out my phone and scrolled through the photos Anne had sent this morning — Finn at breakfast, syrup on his chin, holding up a drawing he'd made. Three stick figures holding hands. Dark-haired ones on either side, smaller one in the middle.
He'd labeled them. *Daddy. Finn. Mommy.*
I'd stared at it for ten minutes before I could put my phone down.
"Finn?" Carter asked, reading my screen.
"He made a drawing. All three of us."
Carter looked at it. Said nothing for a moment. Then: "You know what you have to do."
"I know what I want to do. That's not the same thing."
"In this case it is." He pulled out his tablet. "Dallas is going to come at us hard tonight. Focus on that first."
He was right. I put my phone away and tried.
The hotel was standard team accommodations — Carter and I sharing a room, training staff on a separate floor. Anne was somewhere in this building and I was acutely aware of it every minute.
Team dinner in the hotel restaurant. I sat with Carter and a couple of the defensemen and ate without tasting anything, watching Anne across the room with the training staff.
She was laughing at something Marcus had said — a real laugh, head tipping back — and something twisted in my chest at the sound of it.
"Earth to O'Connell," Carter said.
"I'm here."
"You're somewhere else entirely." He followed my eyeline. Looked back at me. "After dinner. Do something about it."
"Tonight's a game night."
"Tomorrow then. But soon."
After dinner most of the team went to their rooms. I wasn't tired. I changed and went down to the hotel gym and ran on the treadmill until my legs ached, trying to burn off enough restless energy to sleep.
It didn't work.
Morning skate was light — getting familiar with the ice, running through systems, keeping it short before the game. Coach cut it at forty-five minutes and sent us to rest up.
In the locker room, pulling off my gear, one of the rookies — Jensen, twenty-two, Minnesota — dropped onto the bench beside me.
"Hey. Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"The PT. Anne." He kept his voice low, friendly. "You guys have history, right? Heard you dated back in college."
My jaw tightened. "Why?"
"Just checking. Because she's — I mean, she's incredible, right? Smart, funny, gorgeous. I was thinking about asking her to dinner tonight before the game. Wanted to make sure I wasn't stepping on anything."
Every muscle in my body went rigid.
Before I could respond, Travis leaned over from two stalls down. "Wait — are we talking about Anne? Because I've been thinking the same thing for weeks. Have you seen the way she?—"
"I called it first," Jensen said.
"You literally just said it thirty seconds ago?—"
"She's off limits." The words came out harder than I intended. Both of them looked at me.
"You just said you're not together," Jensen said carefully.
"I said we have history. That's not the same as not together."
"So you are together?"
"She's—" I stopped. Breathed. Looked at Jensen, who was watching me with the expression of someone who had accidentally stepped into something much bigger than he'd bargained for. "She's the mother of my son. So yeah. Off limits."
Dead silence in that corner of the locker room.
Jensen blinked. "I — yeah. Absolutely. Sorry, man. I had no idea."
"Nobody does. Keep it that way."
Carter materialized at my shoulder as Jensen found somewhere else to be. He said nothing, just handed me a water bottle and waited.
"Don't," I said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were thinking it very loudly."
"I was thinking that you just told a locker room full of guys that Anne is the mother of your son, which is either very brave or very stupid, and I haven't decided which yet." He paused. "Also that you need to stop waiting."
"I know."
"Tonight, after the game."
"Carter—"
"Tonight." He walked away.
I played angry.
Not recklessly — I'd learned the difference years ago. Angry the right way, the productive way, channeling everything into every shift and every board battle and every inch of ice I fought for.
We were up against Dallas, who were fast and physical and had been playing playoff-level hockey since January. They weren't going to make it easy.
But in the second period I got a pass in the slot — clean look, goalie slightly cheating to his left — and put a one-timer top corner that hit the crossbar on the way in.
Red light.
The bench erupted.
Coach was on his feet. Carter hit me so hard I nearly went down. The crowd — whatever fraction of it was cheering for us — was loud enough to feel it through my skates.
We won 4-2.
In the locker room after, Carter was already dressed when I came out of the shower. He raised an eyebrow.
"Go," he said. "I'll be asleep in an hour. Don't come back until you've dealt with it."
"What if?—"
"She wants you back. I've watched her watch you all trip. Go."
I stood outside her door for longer than I'd like to admit. Hand raised. Not knocking.
Then I thought about Finn's drawing. Three stick figures holding hands. The labels he'd written in careful five-year-old letters.
I knocked.
Footsteps. The door opened.
She was in pajama pants and a t-shirt, hair back, no makeup. She looked at me with an expression that cycled through surprised and confused and something else before it landed on careful.
"Liam. Is everything okay?"
"No."
"Your shoulder?—"
"My shoulder is fine." I met her eyes. "Can I come in?"
She stepped back and let me through. The room was identical to mine — generic hotel furniture, nothing personal except her laptop open on the bed and a half-empty water bottle on the nightstand.
She crossed her arms, watching me.
"I told Jensen and Travis you were off limits today," I said.
"Carter told me. The mother of your son thing." She paused. "You didn't have to do that."
"I know I didn't have to. I wanted to." I took a step toward her. "Because the thought of anyone else taking you to dinner makes me want to put my fist through a wall. And I'm done pretending that's not true."
"Liam—"
"I'm still in love with you." The words came out steadier than I expected, like they'd been waiting a long time to be said correctly.
"I've been in love with you since I was twenty years old.
I tried to stop. After the breakup, after finding out about Finn, I tried so hard to stop.
But I can't. I don't think I ever could. "
Her eyes were glistening.
"I don't know how to forget what happened," I said.
"I'm not going to pretend I do. But I know that I spent the last two weeks being so focused on being hurt that I almost missed the fact that you're right here.
That Finn is right here. That everything I actually want is right in front of me and I've been choosing anger over it.
" I stopped. "I don't want to do that anymore. "
She pressed her hand over her mouth for a second.
"I'm not asking you to forget," she said. "I'm asking you to try. To let me prove that I can be honest. That I can stay." She took a shaky breath. "No more secrets. No more running. I promise you that."
"What if it gets hard again? What if you get scared?"
"Then I tell you I'm scared. And you tell me if you're angry. And we figure it out together instead of separately." She looked at me. "We fight if we have to. But we don't disappear."
I crossed the room and took her face in my hands.
"I scored tonight," I said quietly. "And all I wanted to do was find you. Tell you. Have you tell me it was good." I pressed my forehead to hers. "I'm tired of wanting things I'm not letting myself have."
"Then stop not letting yourself."
I kissed her.
It was nothing like the first time. That had been many years of hunger finally given somewhere to go — desperate and urgent and half-grief. This was different. Slower. Both of us fully present, fully choosing, no secrets between us and nothing left unsaid.
She kissed me back like she meant it completely.
I took my time.
That mattered to me — taking my time. The first night in my apartment had been everything we'd been holding back for years, finally unleashed. This was something else. I wanted her to feel every deliberate choice I was making.
I walked her back toward the bed, hands gentle on her waist. She pulled my shirt over my head and I did the same with hers, and then we were on the bed together and I was moving over her slowly, watching her face.
“This is where we need to be”, I said.
“This feels so good.” She pulled me down. "Don't stop."
I didn't stop.
I kissed her again — the places that made her breath catch, the way she said my name when she was close, the particular sound she made when I got something exactly right. She was more open this time, less urgent, letting herself feel everything instead of pushing toward the finish.
I wanted her to feel everything.
When she came apart it was slow and complete, her whole body releasing, her hands in my hair, my name soft in her mouth like something she'd been keeping safe.
I followed her not long after, face pressed to her shoulder, breathing her in.
For a long time neither of us moved.
Her fingers traced slow patterns on my back. I pressed my lips to her temple. Outside the window Dallas was doing whatever Dallas did at night and none of it existed.
"Hey," she said finally.
I lifted my head to look at her.
She was looking at me with an expression I hadn't seen since Cornell. Open and unguarded and not running from anything.
"We're doing this," she said. Not a question.
"Yeah." I brushed the hair off her face. "We're doing this."
She smiled — a real one, the kind that reached her eyes.
"Finn drew us holding hands," she said.
"I saw. He labeled everyone."
"He's been drawing that picture for two years. Different versions. Always three people."
Something moved in my chest that I didn't have a name for.
"We're going to make that drawing real," I said.
"We already are."
I kissed her again, and she curled into my side, and I texted Carter one line before I put my phone face down on the nightstand.
His response came back in thirty seconds.
Told you. Get some sleep. We fly home at nine.
I put the phone down.
Anne was already half asleep, one hand flat on my chest, breathing slowing. I lay in the dark of a Dallas hotel room and thought about a drawing made by a five-year-old kid who'd been waiting his whole life for this exact moment to exist.
We were going to be okay.
All three of us.
I woke up to my phone alarm and Anne already in the shower.
I lay there for approximately thirty seconds before I got up and knocked on the bathroom door.
"Yeah?" she called over the water.
"Room for two?"
A pause. Then: "The door's unlocked."
The bathroom was already steamed up, the mirror fogged, and she was standing under the spray with her hair wet and her eyes bright when I stepped in.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi." I reached past her to adjust the temperature. "Sleep okay?"
"Best I've slept in weeks." She tilted her face up. "You?"
"Same."
She smiled — that particular smile, the one she'd had at Cornell that I'd spent years trying to forget — and something in my chest just went completely loose.
I kissed her under the hot water, her hands coming up to my shoulders, and she tasted like sleep and warmth and something that was just Anne. My hands found her waist, her hips, pulled her closer until there was no space left between us.
She made a soft sound against my mouth when my hands moved over her — thumbs grazing her nipples, feeling them harden under the hot spray — and pressed herself into my palms like she'd been waiting for exactly that.
"Good morning," she murmured.
"Getting better."
I walked her back against the tile, cool against her shoulders, steam rising around us, and her hand wrapped around me — already hard, had been since I'd knocked on the door — and stroked slowly, deliberately, the way she knew I liked.
"Anne—"
“Feels so good!” She tilted her hips toward me.
No urgency. No grief underneath it. Just her, just me, just the particular luxury of a morning with nowhere to be for another hour.
I lifted her slightly and she wrapped her legs around me and we found the rhythm easily — easy in a way that last night hadn't quite been yet, the newness of it worn off enough that we could just be here, just feel this, just enjoy each other without the weight of everything underneath.
She came with her face pressed to my neck and my name barely a sound, shaking against the tile, fingers digging into my shoulders. I followed a minute later, both hands braced against the wall, her legs still locked around me.
We stood there for a moment afterward, catching our breath, the shower still running hot around us.
She pressed her lips to my jaw.
"We have a flight at nine," I said.
"It's not nine yet."
I laughed — a real one, surprised out of me — and she grinned like she'd won something.
We were late to breakfast.
Carter looked at us across the hotel restaurant, looked back down at his eggs, and said nothing whatsoever. The tips of his ears were red from trying not to smile.
I poured coffee and sat down and felt, for the first time in longer than I could remember, like everything was exactly where it was supposed to be.