Chapter 23
Unplanned
Riley
The rain needles my window like it has a grudge.
It turns the city into white noise and my pulse into a metronome I can’t ignore.
I pace a rut in the living room rug—three strides to the bookshelf, pivot, three strides back.
My palms won’t stop fussing: straightening a coaster, smoothing a throw pillow that never did anything wrong, aligning two remotes like order might save me.
Three hard knocks. A pause. One more. Jason’s knock—confident, a little impatient, like the door owes him money.
I stop moving but I don’t stop vibrating. The radiator clicks its old bones. The lamp hums. Somewhere down on the street a horn bleats and someone swears, water-slick and distant. I stare at the door handle until the brass goes out of focus.
“Riley,” he says through the wood, voice low and roughened by cold. “Let me in.”
I should say no. I should text PR-approved lines and lawyer-approved silence. Instead I undo the chain with fingers that won’t behave and tug the door open.
He fills the frame. Rain clings to his hair, darkening it to near black, beads on the line of his jaw, soaks the shoulders of a jacket that probably costs more than my couch.
Cold air comes with him—wet asphalt, winter, and the ghost of the rink still clinging to his hoodie.
His eyes are searching. They always are when he looks at me, like he’s trying to memorize the map and always missing a turn.
“I’ve been calling.” He steps inside when I back up, careful like he’s trying not to spook me. Water patters soft from his cuffs to my floor.
“I turned my phone off.” I shut the door, flip the deadbolt, wish it worked on my chest.
He drapes the jacket over a chair. The room shrinks by half with him in it, all height and heat and bad decisions I can still taste on a memory. He looks at my hands, the way I’m white-knuckling the blanket on the couch. His voice gentles. “Are you okay?”
That question is a scalpel. It cuts too close. I breathe in for four, hold for two, out for six like I tell players who can’t get their heads to stop buzzing after a hit.
“No.” The truth comes out clean. “But also yes. Depends on the minute.”
Something in his shoulders eases—like honesty is a rope he can grab. “We’ll make it a better minute.” His mouth twitches like he almost smiled and thought better of it. “Start with this: I’m sorry about today. The leak, the noise. You shouldn’t have to carry my mess.”
A laugh breaks out of me, sharp and humorless.
“Your mess? Jason, I work for the team that pays you. The optics are my mess by default.” I hear myself go clinical, the way I do when a player tries to skate on a torn muscle—calm, factual, a scalpel of my own.
“PR wants distance. Compliance wants my phone at seven a.m. The owner wants me off your rehab because the internet thinks my hands on your wrist is foreplay.”
His jaw ticks. “Then fire the internet.”
“Tell me how.” I cross my arms because otherwise I might reach for him, and I can’t be that girl again.
Not with cameras in the bushes and a clause in my contract that reads like a tripwire.
“This is my career. My name. I built it brick by brick while you were being photographed with bottle service and bad decisions.”
His inhale is a scrape. “I know what I was.” He takes a small step closer—enough I can see the darker spokes around his irises. “I’m not asking you to pay for it.”
“Then why are you here?” The words snap before I can soften them. “If you came to soothe, I don’t need soothing. I need—” The sentence breaks because finishing it feels like stepping off a roof.
His voice lowers. “Tell me what you need and I’ll do it.”
I look at him, at the rain needling the window behind him, at the grooves we’ve cut into each other and pretended were character. My heartbeat is loud enough to count. The words crowd my throat, panicked birds.
“I need—” I start, and the truth claws at the back of my tongue, demanding air.
“I need my job,” I manage finally. “I need my name not dragged through a comment section because I happen to be good with tape and better with boundaries. I need the league not pawing through my phone like I’m a criminal for standing too close to you.”
“Then I’ll fix it,” he says, immediate, instinctive, like a goalie throwing himself at a shot. “I’ll talk to Blackwood. I’ll talk to sponsors. I’ll sit if I have to—”
“You can’t fix this with a sound bite,” I snap. “You can’t skate harder and make the internet forget. This isn’t a third-period deficit. This is my entire career teetering because you—you blow into rooms like a weather system and everyone else has to nail down the furniture.”
His mouth pulls, hurt visible before he shutters it. “You think I don’t know I do that?” A beat. Softer: “You think I don’t hate that I do that to you?”
The fight in me sputters, then flares hotter because the alternative is crying. “Then stop being the storm.”
“I’m trying.” He spreads his hands like he wants to show me they’re empty. Rain has dried on his knuckles in pale lines. “Tell me where to stand. Tell me what to say. I’ll follow your lead.”
“That’s the problem,” I say, and my voice shakes with the truth of it. “I don’t want to choreograph us. I don’t want to manage you like a player who thinks he’s invincible. I want—”
“What?” he asks, gentle, and the gentleness makes the words break free.
“I want to not be brave all the time,” I say, and it feels like tearing something open. “I want to not calculate press angles every time you look at me. I want a world where the thing I feel for you isn’t a liability I have to document in triplicate.”
The silence after is thick. Rain hammers the glass. His throat works around a swallow. “Riley,” he says, voice low, “what do you feel for me?”
It’s unfair. He shouldn’t ask. But he’s never been fair to me or to himself where I’m concerned. He takes hits head-on and asks his ribs to figure it out later. I’m the opposite—always triage first, feeling later. Tonight, the order reverses.
The words collide in my mouth. Anger with fear. Memory with want. Career with heart. It’s a pileup on black ice and I can’t steer around it anymore.
“I—” My tongue is thick. The truth is a weight I’m suddenly done carrying alone. “Jason, I—”
He steps closer, enough that I feel the heat of him. Not touching. Waiting. “Say it,” he whispers. “I’ll hold it.”
Something caves in. Not a collapse—an opening.
“I’m pregnant.”
The room inhales. The radiator. The lamp. My lungs. Even the rain sounds like it cuts off mid-drop.
Jason goes still the way a body goes still after a hit—stunned, upright, searching for footing. His eyes flick to my stomach like he can see through cotton and fear to the tiny yes inside me. Back to my face. Back to my stomach.
“Oh,” he says, a single syllable blown out on a breath that shakes. Then nothing. Just that blue gaze, stunned and shining, as the world tilts under our feet and refuses to tilt back.
He moves before I can process it—one heartbeat he’s a wall in front of me, the next he’s gravity itself, sinking to his knees like the floor asked politely.
The motion knocks the air out of me harder than any argument.
Jason Maddox, all edges and stubbornness, kneeling in my living room with rain still clinging to his lashes.
His hands hover until I nod, a small permission that feels enormous. Warm palms find my hips, not possessive, not pleading—steady. He looks up like he’s seeing the first morning he’s ever trusted. The shine in his eyes is not theatrics. He has no audience here but me.
“Okay,” he breathes, the word catching on a half laugh that sounds like a prayer. “Okay.” He swallows, steadies. “We can do this.”
The sentence lands and unfurls like a blanket around something fragile.
My throat is a fist. I’ve carried ten thousand plans in my head—clinic schedules, rehab protocols, crisis flowcharts—and none of them prepared me for the way relief can hurt.
It’s too big for my ribs. It presses behind my eyes until they burn.
“Don’t say it because it sounds good,” I whisper, fingers slipping into his damp hair before I can think better of it. He tips into the touch like it’s heat after a winter skate. “Say it because you mean it when the cameras aren’t blinking and the league is counting contract clauses.”
“I’m saying it because it’s the only thing that ever made sense.
” His thumbs draw absent circles over the outer seams of my joggers, grounding me in a body I suddenly don’t trust to stand.
“I don’t care about their angles. I care about you.
About…” His gaze flicks to my midline again, wonder and terror braided tight. “About all three of us.”
I make a sound I don’t recognize. It might be a laugh. It might be a sob. I’m high on oxygen I didn’t know I was missing. “You realize ‘three of us’ is not a PR strategy.”
“Good,” he says, mouth tugging. “I’m retired from strategies I can’t live with.
” He lifts one hand, lays it flat—so carefully—over my lower belly.
Heat blooms under his palm like my skin remembers him before my brain does.
“Hi,” he says softly, to the smallest part of our future.
“I’m the idiot who took too long to grow up. I’m working on it.”
I choke on a laugh and swipe at my eyes with the heel of my hand. “You cannot introduce yourself to our possible-zucchini as an idiot.”
“Okay.” He nods solemnly, eyes shining. “Hi, I’m the man who loves your mom so much it makes him stupid.”
The word loves detonates and then rains down in quiet pieces. It doesn’t scare me the way it used to. Maybe because tonight it isn’t dressed in grand gestures and sharp edges; it’s on its knees, soaking my rug, asking for the chance to be ordinary and lasting.