CHAPTER 6 — THE HIDDEN PHOTO #2
“You use everything against me,” I shot back, feeling my voice take on a roughness born from years of buildup.
“You use my name, my father, my return, my work, your fucking pain. You even use the fact that I took care of you today like it’s proof of a crime.
I touched you to keep your shoulder from seizing up, and you managed to turn that into an invasion. ”
“You invaded my life long before you touched my shoulder.”
“And you let me.”
The words came out too simple for the fire they started.
Damon closed the distance all at once, not fast enough to scare me, but decisive enough to make me feel every inch of difference between his body and mine.
My back found the hallway wall—whether because I’d retreated without realizing or because he’d guided me there with sheer presence, I couldn’t tell.
The impact was light, controlled, but there was nothing light about the proximity.
Damon stopped in front of me, one arm braced against the wall beside my head, the photo still clutched in his other hand, his face too close to mine.
There was no violence in the gesture. If I wanted to leave, I just had to push, turn to the side, tell him to back off.
Damon knew that. So did I. That awareness made everything worse, because my choice to stay couldn’t be mistaken for a trap.
I was leaning against the wall of my own free will, breathing the air he occupied, feeling the heat of his body bridge the short distance, my pulse hammering in my neck and my mouth dangerously aware that his was less than a handspan away.
“Careful what you insinuate,” he said, and his eyes dropped to my mouth before returning to mine. “You don’t know what I let go, what I lost, what I would’ve done if you’d stayed.”
“I know more than you think,” I said, and my voice came out low because anything louder would shatter whatever was still balanced between us.
“I know you wanted to kiss me in that photo, even while pretending you were annoyed by the cold. I know you kept it because you remember too. I know you hate me most when you realize none of this died the way you wanted it to.”
He curled his fingers against the wall near my head, and the movement made his left shoulder react.
I saw pain flash across his face before anger covered everything.
My body responded on instinct, my hand rising to stop him from tensing further.
I stopped before I touched him. My palm hung suspended near his t-shirt, in the narrow space between us, and Damon looked at my hand as if it were more dangerous than any accusation.
“Don’t start with that now,” he said, but he didn’t move away.
“Then stop using your body as a threat when it can barely hold up your anger,” I said, my fingers still frozen in the air, too close to his chest. “You’re going to make the spasm worse if you keep locking up like that.”
“Always the physical therapist.”
“Always the idiot who forces me to be one.”
His mouth almost touched mine in the silence that followed.
It wasn’t a full advance, it wasn’t a kiss, it wasn’t even a clear decision.
It was the slightest lean, a shared failure, his body yielding toward mine at the same instant my hand finally found the t-shirt over his chest. Technically, I could pretend it was to push him away.
The truth was uglier: my fingers closed on the fabric before pushing, and for half a second, they pulled.
Damon felt it. The sound that escaped his breath hit me straight in the gut.
“Noah,” he said, and my name in his mouth, in that tone, almost destroyed four years of carefully built walls.
I should say no. Should remember the injury, the internship, my father, Julian, the photo, the penthouse, the hallway—all the reasons why pressing my mouth to his would be like lighting a match in a building full of gas leaks.
Instead, I looked at Damon’s lips as if they were an old question, and he saw.
His expression shifted again, control cracking from the inside, anger losing its shape.
His thumb grazed the wall near my ear. The photo brushed lightly against my hip between us.
The phone rang inside my room.
The ordinary ringtone, insistent and ridiculously loud, cut through the hallway like an interruption calculated by some god with terrible timing.
Damon didn't move on the first ring. Neither did I.
We stood frozen in that almost, his breath mixing with mine and my hand still fisted in his shirt.
On the second ring, I saw my father's name light up on the screen—the phone on the bed, visible through the open door of the guest room.
Reality came crashing back. I let go of Damon and ducked under his arm before my courage could turn on me.
I walked into the room with flushed skin, a dry throat, and the absurd sensation that I'd left part of myself pressed against the hallway wall.
I grabbed the phone and answered on the fourth ring, not looking at Damon, though I knew he was standing in the doorway, the old photo still in his hand.
“Dad,” I said, trying to make my voice sound normal, professional, clean—anything that wouldn't betray that I'd almost kissed the injured captain who slept just feet from my room.
“Noah, I need you to listen carefully,” my father said, and there was nothing casual in his tone.
There was noise in the background—maybe papers, maybe people talking quietly—and the immediate tension in his voice pushed away some of the heat still burning under my skin.
“The team is traveling tomorrow in the late afternoon for the evaluation match against Hartwell.
Damon's recovery will be observed on the road, and Marjorie won't be able to accompany him because of her medical schedule.”
I closed my eyes for a second. I felt Damon watching me from the hallway, felt the photo between his fingers, felt the entire corridor still charged with what had almost happened.
I knew what was coming before my father said it, because Northaven seemed determined to turn every attempt to keep my distance into a cruel joke.
“No,” I said, before he could finish. “Dad, no.”
“You're going to accompany Damon on the trip,” Henry Bennett said, leaving no room for negotiation, using the coach voice I hated when it bled through the father.
“It's part of the internship, part of the recovery protocol, and part of your responsibility in the plan you started today. Team bus, hotel, assessments before and after the game. Marjorie has already authorized it.”
Behind me, Damon let out a low, humorless laugh, and I turned just enough to find him in the doorway.
He'd tucked the photo into his pants pocket, but its presence still hung between us.
His shoulder was rigid, his mouth tight with a frustration that might have matched my own, and his eyes had that dark gleam of someone who'd just been handed a new weapon and a new sentence at the same time.
“Understood,” I said into the phone, though nothing in me was at peace with it.
“And Noah,” my father added, his voice dropping, the coach giving way for a moment to the man who knew there was too much history in that penthouse. “Keep everything professional. Don't give Damon a reason to turn this into a war.”
I looked at Damon, still standing in my doorway, too close, too wounded, too beautiful for my own good.
The almost-kiss still lingered on my mouth, even though it hadn't happened.
The photo was still in his pocket. The trip now stretched between us like another narrow track where neither of us would have room to pretend we were keeping our distance.
“I think we're past that point,” I said, and hung up before my father could ask what I meant.