CHAPTER 14 — PAIN DOESNT LIE #3
“I don’t know how.”
The confession came so quietly that maybe he’d hate it if I reacted.
So I didn’t. I just kept my hand on the back of his neck, fingers still, and let the silence hold the words without crushing them.
After a few seconds, he pulled back—not suddenly, not like escape—but enough to reclaim his composure. His eyes were darker, less cold.
“You’re staying out of full contact,” I said, because I needed to get back to ground I could control.
“But I’ll put together a plan to maintain your conditioning, game sense, and strategic presence.
You won’t disappear from the team. You just won’t destroy yourself to prove you deserve to be on it. ”
He looked at me too long. “You make it sound simple.”
“It’s not. It’s just necessary.”
“Easy for you to decide when it’s not your career.”
The words could have hurt if they’d come with cruelty. They came with fear. That difference mattered. I picked up the new tape and started applying lighter, more precise support, leaving room for the skin to breathe. Damon watched my hands.
“My career depends on this too,” I said.
“If I clear you when I shouldn’t, I become part of the problem I promised to fight.
If I hold you back too long without reason, I become someone using power over your body to control something else.
So no, Damon, it’s not easy. It just looks easy because I learned not to shake when I’m scared. ”
He didn’t respond. The white tape wrapped around his shoulder, firm but not constricting.
When I finished, I ran my fingers over the edge to check the seal, and the touch lasted half a second longer than necessary.
Damon noticed, but didn’t make a joke. That lack of teasing was, somehow, more intimate.
“Come with me,” he said, after putting on his shirt with my silent help. “Not to my place. Just... come.”
“Where?”
“The stands.”
The arena was empty when we left the medical room.
Practice had ended, the main lights had been dimmed, and the ice rested under a thin layer of fresh skate marks.
We climbed to the first row of the center stands, where the cold hit cleaner and the silence felt less clinical.
Damon sat two seats away from me—enough space not to feel like a demand, but close enough that the distance was a choice.
I rested my elbows on my knees, looking at the rink, trying to imagine how many versions of us had gotten trapped there without my knowing.
“This is where I found out you’d left,” he said.
I turned to look at him. Damon was staring at the ice, not at me. The low light made his profile hard and beautiful in an almost cruel way, but his voice didn’t have the same armor.
“I came to practice before class. Mason was late, my dad wasn’t answering, Julian had disappeared into a meeting. Someone from administration walked in with a folder and said you’d left campus. Like it was a maintenance notice. Like you were a room that had been closed off.”
The pain of that image sank in slowly. I’d left before dawn with a backpack, copied documents, and the certainty that any goodbye would do more damage.
I’d told myself Damon was better off not seeing me.
That Julian had already told his version.
That my father needed me gone before the investigation swallowed me.
Maybe all those things were true. None of them felt like enough sitting next to the man beside me.
“I thought staying would make everything worse,” I said.
“It got worse anyway.”
“I know.”
He finally looked at me, and the question forming on his face seemed older than his voice.
“If I’d asked, would you have stayed?”
My chest tightened. Not because I didn’t know the answer.
Because I knew too many versions of it. If Damon had asked before Julian cornered me, yes.
If he’d asked after believing I was a traitor, maybe I would have stayed anyway and let him destroy me slowly.
If he’d asked as the boy who almost kissed me behind the arena, I would have burned everything to stay.
But the real answer—the one that fit this moment—required more courage than I was sure I had.
I opened my mouth.
“Noah Bennett?” Valerie Cross’s voice came from the side entrance of the stands, cutting through the air before my answer could take shape.
Damon turned first, his whole body going tense.
Valerie stood in the access corridor, red coat buttoned to her neck, recorder in one hand and a thin folder in the other.
She looked from me to Damon, registering the distance between our bodies, the empty arena around us, the fact that we were together when no one else seemed to be there.
Then she raised the folder slightly, and my stomach dropped before she even continued.
“Sorry to interrupt,” she said, without seeming sorry. “But I have some questions about an old medical authorization signed by Julian Blackwood. And I think you two are going to want to hear this before I publish.”