Chapter 22
Jamie
I spend the rest of the day in my room, staring at the ceiling.
Flat on my back, throwing a ball straight up and catching it. Over and over. The rhythm of it the only thing keeping me from actually losing my mind.
Throw. Catch. Throw. Catch.
I fucking hate him.
But do I hate him enough to let it cost me everything I’ve worked toward since I was a kid?
No. Obviously not.
I sit up.
For exactly one second I consider a different sport. I play some soccer in my free time — badly, but I play it. Maybe a C-tier rec team somewhere. Low stakes. No captain. No title.
No. I hate soccer. Fuck.
I drop back onto the mattress and stare at the ceiling some more.
I love Fitch. I love hockey. I’ll keep my head down, do the work, stay under the radar, and earn my way back to captain whether Rhys Callahan exists in my life or not.
That’s the plan. That’s always been the plan and I am not letting one infuriating, smug, dark-eyed —
Throw. Catch.
I need to get out of my head. I need to not be in this room.
I need to — okay. Yeah. I know what I need.
A quick, clean, no-strings, no-risk release. Get the energy out, clear my head, come back focused. It’s not complicated. It’s just maintenance. And it’s been a while. I sit up, swing my legs over the edge of the bed, and grab my phone off the nightstand.
The room around me is exactly what it looks like — clean, simple, grey bedsheets on a single bed, a TV, a cabinet, everything in its place. Organized. Dependable. The room of a person who doesn’t leave things unfinished or out of order. Exactly me.
I open Grindr.
The account is old. Just my abs in the profile photo — no face, no school name, nothing that places me. The bio is blank. I’ve kept it that way intentionally, same way I keep most things about myself purposefully empty. Anonymous is the only way this works.
I set the distance to fifty miles minimum and start scrolling.
Left. Left. Left.
The overly sexual bios don’t do anything for me.
I know — Grindr, of all places — but I’m not looking for a show.
I’m looking for someone who gets it. Secret.
Simple. In and out, no complications, no one showing up at practice on Monday.
Messaging me all day. Telling other people. Confronting me at work about it.
I keep scrolling.
Then I stop.
Fifty miles out.
Mirror selfie. Low-hanging pants, v-cut on full display, bare skin, no tattoos, the kind of build that comes from actually doing something physical. No face. Bio reads: Busy. Tired. Here anyway. Bad at this, but enthusiastic.
I swipe right. My phone dings almost immediately.
Match.
Fifty miles means he’s probably at the other university — the one without a hockey team or anyone I know. Good. I can work with that. We set it up quickly, clean: his roommate’s out tonight, he sends me an address. About forty five minutes from campus.
I set my phone down and feel the tension in my shoulders drop about two degrees. It’s not a solution. I know that. But I’m wound up too tight and I need to fuck someone like I hate them enough to get this thing with Rhys out of my head.
Tonight is all I need it to be.
――――――――
I’m tense the entire drive. Grabbing the steering wheel so hard it’s going to crack.
Trees thin out into wide driveways and real landscaping and the kind of neighborhood that doesn’t feel like a college town anymore.
Nice. Expensive. Whoever this is lives well and far and has absolutely nothing to do with my life.
Perfect.
The house is at the end of a tree-lined street and it's — nice.
Actually nice. Not college nice. Nice nice.
Two stories, stone front, warm light coming through the windows, the kind of place that makes you understand immediately that whoever lives here did not grow up worrying about things the way most people worry about things.
I park on the street and sit there for a second.
Walk up and knock hesitantly.
The door opens.
The ground shifts under my feet.
Actually, I wish the ground would just swallow me whole.
――――――――
Rhys Callahan. No shirt. Abs and tattoos on full display. Grey sweatpants. Hair slightly messy. Looking at me with an expression that starts off blank and then — slowly, over three of the longest seconds of my life — becomes the most entertained I have ever seen another person be.
His dark eyes glitter with humor and his smile is wide, white teeth gleaming like a predator who’s just caught his prey. Like I just confirmed all of his suspicious. Like he was right about everything he said at the coffee shop.
“No,” I say, backing up.
“Hey—”
“No. What the fuck.” I take another step back. “What is this?”
“I live here.”
“Your distance said fifty miles—”
“I live about fifty minutes off campus.” He leans against the doorframe, relaxed, like this is a perfectly normal day. “I’m on campus all the time so it doesn’t really matter. I drive in once a day and leave at night. I like the neighborhood.”
“Your profile had no tattoos—” I gesture to his body. He’s covered in tattoos. A canvas filled with ink as chaotic as he is.
“That profile’s old.” A shrug. Casual. Unbothered. “You never asked about tattoos. You never even asked for my name, Jamie.” He’s so smug, I’m finding it harder to control myself.
“I shouldn’t have to—” I stop. “This is insane.”
“You wanna come in?”
“No.”
He steps back and holds the door open anyway.
I come in. I don’t know why I come in. Maybe because I’m incapable of forming a single thought right now.
The door swings shut behind me and I’m standing in his living room — high ceilings, real furniture, the kind of place that quietly announces that someone comes from money.
Actual art on the walls, not the cheap printed posters that live in every dorm room on campus.
Bookshelves that have actual books on them, chemistry textbooks mixed in with novels mixed in with what appears to be an entire shelf dedicated to hockey biographies. Hardwood floors.
Rhys is leaning against the kitchen counter watching me take it all in with this expression on his face that is making my blood pressure fucking boil. He’s amused.
He is so deeply, privately amused, and he’s trying to dial it back and failing completely, and every second I stand here not saying anything gives him something more to laugh at. I’m fuming.
I turn on him.
“This doesn’t leave this room,” I say. “Not to your roommate, not to anyone on the team, not to Fitch. This didn’t happen and you don’t say a word.”
“Okay.” He says it too easily. A smile pulling at the corner of his mouth that he’s not quite suppressing.
“I mean it, Rhys.”
“I heard you.”
“Stop smiling—”
“I’m not smiling.”
“You are literally—” I drag a hand through my hair. “Wipe that look off your face.”
“What look?”
“That look.” I step toward him. “The one you’re doing right now. You think this is so funny.”
“I think,” he says carefully, the smile finally breaking through all the way, slow and wide and completely infuriating, “that you drove almost an hour. To my house. Not by accident.”
“It wasn’t—”
“Grindr.”
“Don’t.”
“Jamie.” He says my name like it’s the punchline to the best joke he’s ever heard. “You’re on Grindr.”
“Shut up.”
“You drove probably fifty minutes—”
“I swear to god if you say that one more time—”
“To my house. To fuck me.” He tilts his head, and something shifts behind his eyes then — the amusement is still there but something else is moving underneath it, something clicking into place, piece by piece, while I stand here watching it happen and being powerless to stop it. “Huh.”
That single syllable does something sour to my stomach.
“Don’t,” I say, on the verge of a panic attack. “Whatever you’re thinking right now — don’t.”
He looks at me. Really looks. The smile fading into something more focused, more deliberate. Like he’s doing math in his head and the answer keeps coming out the same way no matter how many times he runs it.
“You backed up every time I got close to you,” he says slowly.
“That’s not—”
“You punched me in a coffee shop.”
“That had nothing to do with—”
“You drove so far, after seeing me on Grindr.” He pushes off the counter. Takes one step toward me “After everything that happened.”
“Back up.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m telling you to.”
“Or what?” The smile is gone now. His voice is even. Certain. “You’re going to punch me again? Go ahead, Jamie. Give me another reason to walk into Fitch’s office. The way I see it, I own you right now.”
I go very still. There it is. Right there in the open between us. He knows it and I know it and the knowing is sitting on his face like something he’s just realized he can use. I step into his space. Close. Too close. My voice drops to almost nothing.
“You say one word,” I say. “One word to anyone about tonight, about any of this, and I will make the rest of your time on this team so miserable you’ll wish you’d stayed at Eldridge. Are we clear?”
Something flickers across his face at the mention of Eldridge. Gone fast. He holds my gaze and doesn’t move back an inch.
“Crystal,” he says. Dangerously.
I hold it for one more second.
Then I grab my keys off the table by the door where I apparently set them down like I was planning to stay, yank the door open, and walk out into the cold night air. I drive the forty five minutes back in complete silence. And I don’t think once.
Because if I think, I’ll have to admit what just happened in that house. And I’m not ready to do that yet. Not even close.
So I go home and immediately delete my profile.
I can’t sleep.
I’ve been staring at the ceiling for what feels like hours, the darkness doing absolutely nothing to quiet my brain, which has decided that tonight is a great night to replay every single second of the last couple hours on a loop.
That grin.
That specific, infuriating, knowing grin.
The way I see it, I own you right now.
He said it out loud. To my face. And the worst part — the part that’s keeping me awake and useless at whatever ungodly hour this is — is that he’s not wrong.
I toss over onto my side.
Toss back.
Okay. I need a plan. Something that doesn’t involve me killing Rhys Callahan with my bare hands, because that would definitely cost me captain permanently and probably also my freedom, and I’ve already lost one of those things this week.
I stare at the ceiling some more.
The universe hates me. That’s the only explanation that makes any sense at this point.
I’m gay, in a sport full of people who would love a reason to make my life difficult.
I was captain — was, past tense, temporarily, allegedly — and now I’m lying in the dark at midnight because I swiped right on my own teammate on a dating app I downloaded specifically to avoid anyone I could possibly know.
Out of millions of guys on Grindr.
Millions.
I swiped right on Rhys Callahan.
I’m a joke. I’m an actual joke. I should start volunteering somewhere — soup kitchens, animal shelters, anything — just to get some good karma back on my side because whatever I did in a past life to deserve this must have been terrible.
Criminal, probably. Or this is immediate payback for punching him.
Which, at this point, maybe I do deserve it then.
I toss over again.
At least he doesn’t think I’m homophobic anymore. Just closeted. I’m not sure which is worse, actually. Being hated for something I’m not, or being seen for something I am.
Those tattoos though. The abs. The arrogant way he was standing there. All of it — that whole image just —
I grab my pillow and press it over my face.
He looked really good. He looked infuriatingly, inconveniently, explicitly good standing in that doorway and I hate him for it.
I hate him for all of it. For the grin and the leverage and the way he said crystal like a threat wrapped in silk and the fact that I set my keys down on his table like I was planning to stay.
Fuck.
I press the pillow down harder. If I suffocate before morning I won’t have to see him at practice.
That’s basically a solution.