Chapter 12
Frozen Over
Jason
We don’t run. We stand like we’re going to. Then we don’t. We stand together, breathe once, and stand up slow like civilians who have nothing to hide. The flashes blink hungry across the street; we give them nothing but backs and winter.
I open the door and let Riley step through first. Cold folds over us, clean as a blade.
Her breath ghosts into the night in quick, measured puffs—four, six, four, six—the cadence she uses when she’s turning nerves into science.
I fall in half a step to her left and steer us down the side street that peels off the hotel like an escape hatch.
Asphalt glints with thin ice where the city didn’t bother to salt.
The river smell threads the air—metal, wet, distant snow.
“Left in ten,” I say, low. We don’t look at each other; we match shadows. The hotel hum fades behind us to a warm rectangle and then to nothing. The city is the kind of quiet that happens between weather.
We turn. No cameras on the corner—just a newsbox with last week’s headline and a flyer for a missing cat with cross-eyed charm.
A bus sighs two blocks over. Somewhere, a bottle rolls and comes to rest with a hollow clink.
I tuck my hands in my pockets because if I don’t, they’ll find hers like they’ve been doing it for years.
“You okay?” I ask, and hear the stupidity of the question in the cloud of my own breath.
“I’m walking,” she says. It’s not a yes, but it’s not a no. Her ponytail swings once and corrects, like she refuses even her hair the drama.
We pass a shuttered deli. The open sign tries to glow and fails.
In the glass I catch our reflections—two figures wrapped in too many layers and not enough armor.
The last twenty-four hours are stacked on my back like an extra set of pads.
Rage. Fever. That kiss. The way she said not here like it was a wound and a rule all at once.
“Block more,” I say, and we keep moving, the crunch of salt grains under our soles a metronome.
I angle us away from the front entrance to avoid whatever podcast detective is still camping by the planters.
Riley doesn’t ask where we’re going. She doesn’t need to.
I’m not sure I know either. Away is the point.
At the end of the block a streetlight throws a quiet pool over a bench that isn’t a story yet. We stop there because both our bodies agree before our mouths do. My lungs burn in the pleasant way; hers still count. Four. Six.
“I shouldn’t have kissed you back there,” I say. The words fog out and hang between us like a confession looking for a place to land.
Her mouth tightens and then softens. “You shouldn’t have,” she says. It doesn’t sound like victory. It sounds like triage.
“I told you, I’m trying to learn boring,” I add, because promises feel like lies unless I put skin on them. “Starting now. No headlines. One block at a time.”
She huffs a breath that might be a laugh if we were different people in a different life. “One block at a time I can do,” she says, and we start walking again, slower, like we might actually survive this street.
We cross at a dead corner, the walk signal flashing its little white man like he’s got somewhere to be. My somewhere is here. The quiet gets bigger around us until my head has room to think without yelling.
“Do you know what I hate most about the money?” I say, and it sounds like I’m starting a bit. I’m not. “It solves every problem but the ones I have.”
Riley’s breath ghosts sideways. “Which ones are those?”
“The kind where a win feels like a promise I can’t keep.
The kind where I walk off the ice and everybody’s hands are out—sponsors, media, kids who want me to be their future, men who want me to be their proof—and none of them want the version of me who shuts up and makes soup when he’s sick.
” I rub my thumb against my palm inside the glove until the urge to fidget finds a home.
“The kind where I go back to a place with too many rooms and can hear the fridge hum from the bedroom because there’s nothing else making noise. ”
We pass a mural of an orca leaping out of a painted ocean. Its eye follows us with that whale sadness artists know how to trap. Riley’s pace doesn’t change, but she tips her head enough to let me keep going.
“When I was a kid,” I say, “loneliness looked like a microwave dinner and a note on the counter. In the league it looks like a penthouse and a calendar full of people who know my stats better than my voice. The money buys silence. The pressure buys more of it. And then I’m standing in a hallway with you and I can’t shut up because it’s the first time all day I’m not a mascot. ”
She’s quiet for a half block. The snow that isn’t snow starts to fall—salt dust shaken from a rooftop. It dots her hair and melts. “You could tell other people that,” she says, gentle, not pushing. “You don’t have to bleed on me to prove you’re human.”
I shake my head. “I don’t trust most people with the parts of me I’ve got left. I trust you.” Saying it isn’t a grand gesture; it feels like finally putting a box down. “I trust you more than I trust me in rooms with cameras.”
A bus hisses past, heaters blowing hot breath into the cold.
The wind lifts the edges of her scarf and I fight the impulse to tuck it back because learning boring means learning restraint.
“Pressure’s not the villain,” I add. “It’s the gravity.
It keeps me on the ice. It also pulls everything else out of orbit unless I’m careful. I haven’t been careful.”
“That’s honest,” she says. The words don’t fix anything. They give me something to stand on.
I huff out a laugh that fogs quick and disappears. “The part no one tells you,” I say, “is that loneliness eats wins. You hit the tunnel high, and by the time you get home the goal’s just… gone. The only thing left is the echo. I don’t want to live with echoes.”
We reach the next corner and stop because the light tells us to.
Her shoulder is inches from my arm. The city throws our shadows long and thin across a shuttered bodega.
“So yeah,” I say, softer. “I’m good at contracts and cameras.
I’m bad at normal. I’d like to not be. I’d like to go home after a game and have it be a place.
Even if it’s just a couch that sucks and a blanket you keep stealing. ”
Riley’s mouth curves the smallest amount, like the image gets past her defenses before logic does. She looks at the walk signal, not me. “You can learn normal,” she says. “It’s boring on purpose.”
“I’m here for boring,” I say. “I’m begging for it.” The light flips; we cross. “And I know begging isn’t attractive.”
“Depends on the ask,” she says, and the corner of her voice smiles even if her face doesn’t. The street opens ahead of us, hushed and possible. The things I didn’t say on camera sit between us like they finally have air.
We walk past a laundromat with its lights on for no one. A row of empty machines stares back like open mouths. Riley slows in front of the glass, and I feel something in her cadence change—less counting, more choosing.
“I didn’t leave because I didn’t love you,” she says, still watching our ghost-selves in the window. “I left because loving you felt like disappearing on purpose.”
The sentence lands under my ribs and sits there, heavy. I deserve the weight. “Disappearing how?” I ask, even though I can guess every exhibit in that museum.
She tips her chin, the motion small and decisive.
“Silence,” she answers. “At first it was romantic, you know? The secret. The ‘ours.’ The way your hand would find mine in a hallway and the world would, for thirty seconds, shut up.” She lifts a shoulder.
“But then the world stayed loud and you stayed quiet. You missed dinners and I told myself it was the schedule. You skipped calls and I told myself it was time zones. You didn’t correct rumors and I told myself it was strategy.
And every story I told to make the shape of you fit my life carved out a piece of me. ”
My mouth is dry. I swallow and get glass for my trouble. “I thought—”
“I know what you thought,” she says, not unkind. “You thought quiet was safe. That if we weren’t on the record, no one could use me as a weapon against you. But it made me the weapon anyway. It made me the thing you hid instead of the person you chose.”
We stand there with the spin cycles stopped and the detergent smell sneaking under the door.
I look at her reflection because it’s easier than looking at her.
“I kept thinking if I just won enough, the noise would back off,” I say.
“That if I stacked the right trophies the cameras would look somewhere else and I could have you and the game without paying twice.”
“And?” she asks, turning so I have to meet her eyes.
“And I learned trophies are cameras,” I say. The truth isn’t new to me; saying it to her is. “They make everything louder.”
She nods, the smallest approval for the smallest growth.
“I needed you to say I pick you,” she says, voice steady, not soft.
“Not just when it was easy or when you were lonely, but when saying it cost you something. I needed you to call me back. I needed you to tell your agent no when she said I was bad optics. I needed you to stop letting other people write me into your footnotes.”
Julia would say she never called her bad optics; she’d say she was protecting the brand.
I don’t defend a history that left Riley alone with the fallout.
“I hear you,” I say, and mean the gerund—hearing as an action, not a trophy.
“I hate that I made you write caseloads of stories to make us make sense.”
She exhales, a ribbon of white that unspools and vanishes. “I hate that I learned how good I am at it,” she admits. “I hate that I’m still doing it.”