CHAPTER 20 — THE ARTICLE #2
“Because I'm trying not to destroy an investigation before it even exists.”
“No. You hesitated because part of you is still waiting for the full story before deciding if I deserve to be defended completely.”
His face shut down. “That's not true.”
“Then why did it hurt like the truth?”
Damon opened his mouth and closed it. Behind him, two people from the communications department passed at the end of the corridor, glanced a beat too long, and kept walking like they hadn't seen anything.
The entire campus was already reshaping itself around the article.
I could feel it. Every corridor would have eyes.
Every half-open door would become a risk.
Every time Damon and I appeared together, someone would pick a narrative before asking a single question.
“I'm trying to do this right,” Damon said, his voice dropping lower, rougher. “I don't know how to do this without making it worse.”
“I know,” I replied. “And that's the saddest part. I know you're trying. It's just that I've already been destroyed by people trying to protect something bigger than me.”
He took the words like I'd pressed on a bruise. I saw his urge to reach for me. I also saw the moment he decided not to. That belated respect didn't bring relief. It hurt in a different way.
“Come to the penthouse,” he said. “Don't be alone right now.”
“You want me to go to your place after half the team read that I'm using your bed as a cover-up strategy?”
“Don't talk like that.”
“Why? Does it get ugly when I say it out loud?”
“Because that's not what it was.”
“Not for us. For them, yes. For Julian, definitely. For anyone who wants to tear apart my work, my mouth, my body, and my past until it becomes a convenient version, yes.”
Damon stepped forward. “Then let me stand by your side.”
“I did,” I said. “In the locker room.”
He stopped.
The words hung between us with all the cruelty I didn't want to have, but that the night had handed me. I turned before he could respond and headed for the physical therapy room. This time, Damon didn't follow.
The medical room was empty when I walked in.
I turned on only half the lights, dropped the bag on the exam table, and locked the door.
The article was everywhere in my head, but I didn't open my phone.
I didn't need to. I already knew enough.
Valerie had tried to warn me—or so the message she'd sent Mason claimed.
Maybe someone had pressured her. Maybe the article had slipped out of her control.
Maybe that was a lie from an ambitious journalist who wanted to stay close to the bomb she'd set off.
None of that changed the fact that, right now, my name was circulating around campus attached to Damon's body before it was attached to the truth in those documents.
I worked because working was the only way to keep from falling apart.
I updated the game report, recorded Damon's pain, the minutes on ice, the restrictions followed, the absence of tingling, the positive response to limitation.
I wrote each line meticulously because if anyone tried to question my work, I'd have records.
The cruelest part was this: I needed to prove I hadn't let desire interfere with care.
As if my care for Damon hadn't been, from the very beginning, the most consistent thing about me.
My father knocked on the door twenty minutes later. I opened it because, despite everything, he was still my supervisor in that arena. He walked in without his usual coach's bearing. He looked older than the night before, his face lined, his eyes tired. I closed the door and stood beside it.
“I'm sorry,” he said.
I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “For what? The article? Four years ago? Asking me to stay quiet? The fact that Julian can still threaten me using you as leverage? Pick a category, Dad. Makes filing easier.”
He closed his eyes. “Noah.”
“No. You don't get to come in here with that tone now. Not after looking at me in that locker room like you were asking me to keep quiet again.”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“I know. That's the problem. Everyone's always trying to protect me without asking what I'm willing to be saved from.”
The words landed. He took a step toward the treatment table and rested his hand on it, like he needed the support.
For an instant, I saw the man beneath the coach: the father who'd held a coffee cup in the kitchen four years earlier and told me I needed to leave because Julian would do worse if I stayed.
The father who might have been wrong to get me out of the crosshairs.
The father who'd also let me carry guilt that wasn't mine alone.
“Legal is opening an internal investigation into conflict of interest,” he said. “Temporary. Marjorie will supervise your reports directly. You're not suspended yet.”
“Yet.”
He didn't respond.
“Great,” I said, unlocking the door. “Then I'd better get to the penthouse and grab my things before someone decides my suitcase is evidence too.”
“Noah, don't make decisions while you're still reeling from the article.”
“Funny. When I was eighteen, everyone made them for me while I was still reeling from the scandal.”
I walked past him before the conversation could turn into another attempt at damage control.
In the hallway, some students were still milling around near the arena, and two of them looked at me with recognition that came too fast. I kept my face neutral until I reached the parking lot.
Only inside the rideshare, on the way to Whitmore Tower, did I let my hands shake.
Damon was in the penthouse when I arrived. Fresh from the shower, now in sweatpants and a dark t-shirt, his hair still wet, his shoulder bandaged again. He was standing in the living room near the locked box in the safe, as if he'd spent the whole time waiting. Maybe he had. That didn't calm me.
“I'm going to the guest room,” I said as soon as I stepped out of the elevator. “I'll grab some things and sleep somewhere else tonight.”
“No.”
The word came out too fast. Old command. Bad reflex. I turned to him slowly.
“Choose your next words very carefully.”
Damon took a breath, and I saw the effort it took to pull back from his own command. “Please. Don't leave like this.”
“Like what? Exposed? Humiliated? Exhausted? Because those are the options.”
“I was wrong in the locker room.”
The admission stopped me at the edge of the hallway.
Damon stood in the middle of the living room, far enough to give me space, close enough for me to see the tension in his face.
The penthouse lighting made everything too beautiful for the conversation we needed to have.
Tall windows, rain-slicked city, impeccable furniture, and the two of us at the center of it, broken by an article that hadn't even told the worst of it.
“You hesitated,” I said.
“I hesitated.”
The honesty, again. Late, insufficient, and still dangerous.
“You know what I thought in that moment?” I asked. “I thought maybe Caleb was right to ask. Maybe everyone should be suspicious of me, because even you—who knows about the folder, who saw the memo, who read the threat—still needed time to decide how far you could go to defend me.”
“I was trying not to expose your father.”
“My father's already in the middle of this.”
“I know. But it wasn't my place to expose him.”
The answer silenced me for a second, and I hated that. Because it was true. Because he'd managed to do something right and something wrong at the same time. Because nothing in this story was clean enough to allow for simple hatred.
“You don't understand,” I said, quieter. “I didn't need you to tell them everything. I needed you to not look like you were still deciding when someone asked who I was.”
Damon crossed half the room and stopped before he got too close. “I know.”
“No, you don't.”
“Then make me.”
The words cracked something open in me that I would have preferred to keep shut.
Maybe it was anger. Maybe desire. Maybe the violent mix of both, fueled by fear, humiliation, longing, and the sight of him standing there, trying not to command, trying not to take, trying to stay.
What remained between us never knew how to take a clean path.
We either fought or we kissed. Sometimes they were the same thing.
“You don't have the right to ask me that now,” I said.
“I'm not asking for a right. I'm asking for a chance.”
“You want a chance because you feel guilty.”
“That too.”
“Damon.”
“I'm also afraid you'll walk out that door and I'll deserve it.”
The words cut so deep I had to look away.
It was unfair. Not because it was a lie, but because it was too honest at the wrong moment.
I wanted to leave. I really did. I wanted to go into the guest room, stuff clothes into a bag, find any bed where the Blackwood name wasn't plastered on the walls, and sleep until the article became old news.
But I also wanted to stay. I wanted him to understand without me having to explain it in blood.
I wanted his body to stop feeling like the only place that could hold me together when the world decided to turn me into a headline.
“I'm angry at you,” I said.
“I know.”
“I should go.”
“I know.”
“So why are you standing there like you expect me to choose the opposite?”
He looked at me with a sadness so raw it almost seemed indecent. “Because I'm selfish enough to want you to stay and guilty enough to know I can't tell you to.”
I went to him.