Chapter 39
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Halston
Now . . .
Aren brings me in through the players’ entrance.
I have a press pass.
I'm not sure how he got it, and I don't ask, because I am learning that questions have levels. Some questions help you understand a situation. Some questions make a dangerous person explain his methods while you are walking through a building full of cameras.
I choose silence.
The corridor beneath the arena is lit too bright, all concrete, rubber flooring, and walls that carry sound farther than they should.
Somewhere ahead of us, a door opens and closes.
A burst of laughter cuts through the hall, then disappears.
There is the smell of ice beneath everything.
Cold water. Metal. Sweat. Tape. The chemical bite of cleaning products.
Aren walks half a step ahead of me, never too far. He has already made me put on a Night Hawks cap. Glasses too. I usually wear contacts, but today he asked me not to. The request sounded simple until I understood what he meant: Let me make your face less searchable.
He stops at a door in a corridor I would not have been able to find on my own.
“You don’t have much time, sir,” he says. “I’ll be back to pick you up. Keep the cap on and avoid the cameras.”
“Thank you, Aren.” I tap the bill of my cap and adjust the glasses.
“I will be close,” he says.
He opens the door for me, checks the room before I step inside, then moves aside.
The room is small. Too warm. It smells like a man who has been sweating in protective gear, taking it off, putting some of it back on, and doing that for ten years.
There is a couch along one wall. A TV mounted in the corner, volume low, two analysts talking about a game I have not been able to care about in any useful way.
A bench with a folded towel on it. A pair of skates on the floor in front of the bench, blades guarded, leaning against each other.
Then I see him.
Creed.
He is already wearing most of his gear, skates included, which means he is taller than I expect, even though my body seems to know exactly how tall he is.
We are the same height without them. With the skates, he looks bigger.
Not just taller. Built into the room. Shoulders wide beneath the pads, hair damp at the temples, tape job on one hand, half done.
He looks up.
For a second, neither of us moves.
He smiles lightly. “Hal.”
“Creed.” I bob my head.
He looks like he wants to step toward me.
He doesn’t.
That hurts more than it should, because I know why. He is afraid of hitting a boundary I can't remember making. Afraid of touching a man who might flinch. Afraid of needing something from me, I may not be able to give him back.
So I cross the room.
His expression changes before I reach him.
Relief.
Pain.
Then he opens his arms.
I walk into them.
I close my eyes and press my face into the side of his neck.
For one breath, the world narrows to the heat of him, the hard edge of his gear, the impossible fact that I know this feeling without knowing the memory that made it mine.
I breathe him in. Sweat. Tape. Soap from the trainers’ room.
Beneath all of it, Creed—warm skin, hard breath, the scent my body seems to remember before my mind knows what to do with it.
There is, in the back of my mind, the faintest pull of something I can't reach. A shape almost arriving. A door almost opening. A picture trying to come clear through fogged glass.
His neck under my mouth.
His arm around me in another room.
My hand in his hair.
My name spoken against my skin.
Then it slips.
Gone before I can catch it.
I stay against him for another beat anyway, because the closest I get most days, and I have learned to take what the almost gives me.
His arms close more firmly around me.
“You came,” he says into my hair.
“I did.”
His breath moves once, uneven.
Then he lets me go, but only enough to see my face.
“Sit down.” He motions to the bench. “You look like a man who has been awake for three days.”
“That is the diagnosis, yes.”
It is not the full truth. It has been years since I could sleep as if sleep were a place where nothing could find me. The difference between then and now is that now I am anxious about the future. Back then, I had no idea who the fuck I was or whether there was any future to be anxious about.
Creed’s mouth moves.
The laugh almost gives me a memory, too.
It doesn’t.
I sit on the edge of the couch because my legs don't trust themselves yet. Creed stays near the bench, close enough to reach, far enough to let me choose.
“How long do we have?” I ask, folding my hands together because if I don’t, they will give too much away.
“Fifteen minutes,” he says. He glances toward the door. “Coach knows you’re here. He gave me the room.”
“That was kind of him.”
Creed looks down at the tape around his hand and pulls at the end with his teeth before smoothing it down. “He knows how much everything fucked me up.” He pauses, jaw shifting once. “He’s one of the few who knows any of it.”
“Was it bad for you?”
The question leaves me before I can make it safer.
He scoffs, but there is no humor in it. “I lost the two people I love most in the world.”
His lips press together, and the sadness on them makes guilt move through me so fast I almost speak just to stop feeling it. Something in me insists I could have stopped it.
Creed sees it.
“It’s nothing you did.”
“My family—”
“They’re dangerous, and we underestimated them,” he says, cutting in. “If I knew then what we know now—”
He stops.
The unfinished sentence sits between us.
I don’t make him finish it.
“After everything I’ve learned, I don’t understand why they haven’t killed me,” I say honestly.
Creed looks at me.
I hear what I have said after I say it. The bluntness. The lack of drama. The awful logic of it.
After everything I have learned from the lawyer, it’s not unreasonable.
There is surveillance on me. The moment they petition to revoke my conservatorship because I have a wife, things could get ugly.
I am leaving the apartment tomorrow for a safe location.
They don’t know yet if Creed or Livia will join me.
Those details will be discussed later, which is another way of saying everyone is trying to keep the people I love alive while pretending logistics can calm terror.
To obtain all that, Fitz needs the federal package and that security company’s report to file the supplemental affidavits. The federal package came in yesterday. The company sent the rest earlier today.
Sunday morning, I will be in more danger than I was after the accident.
If only I could remember.
“The last thing I need is for either one of you to be in danger,” I say, looking at him because looking away would make it smaller, and this is not small.
Creed’s face changes.
His eyes go colder than his voice.
“I’ve been waiting for them to kill me,” he says. “But I’ve been careful to stay away so they don’t do anything to my family.”
I open my mouth.
Close it.
Then I finally ask, “What do you mean?”
He looks at the half-finished tape job on his hand. For a second, I think he won’t answer.
Then he does.
“I did my best to reach out to you,” he says.
“At first, they pushed me not to have contact. Legal noise. People showing up. Messages through channels that should have stayed private. Then there were notes left for the doorman at my building. No envelope. No return address. No fingerprint anyone could match. Calls too. Nothing traceable. Same general structure every time.”
He swallows.
“Stop searching for Liv, or you’ll be next. Stop harassing the Saint Claires. Halston is off limits. Continue, and your family pays.”
“Creed.” My voice comes out wrong.
He looks up.
“The most recent one was three months ago,” he says. “It named Vesper, my sister, and my niece, Vienna.”
His mouth tightens around the little girl’s name.
“That baby girl is . . .” He stops, and for the first time since I walked in, the controlled man in front of me almost disappears. “I’d die for her. Same as I would for you and Liv. I tried to let things go even when it killed me.”
I narrow my gaze. “But you didn’t.”
He shakes his head. “Not entirely.”
“Why?”
His eyes meet mine.
“I had hope.”
Hope.
For ten years, this man has kept a hand around a possibility so small it probably cut him every time he touched it.
“There were others about Luther,” Creed says. “Two specifically about his contract. One about an injury they said would happen at a Boston game. It didn’t happen, but it came close. There was one about my father at the camp after Christmas one year. Accidents happen on rural roads.”
He gives a short laugh. It is ugly.
“I just handed every note to Fitz.”
The room is too warm. I notice it all at once.
The air pressing against my skin. The low TV voices.
The smell of tape, sweat, and clean gear.
Creed standing in front of me in skates and pads, dressed for impact, telling me he has spent ten years calculating whether loving me would get his family hurt.
I hate my name.
Not Halston.
Saint Claire.
I hate what it has done to him.
There is a knock at the door.
A voice on the other side says, “Lafontaine. Five.”
Creed turns his head. “Almost done.”
His voice sounds normal.
That unsettles me.
I wonder how many times he has made his voice normal while his life was burning behind it.
“When—” I start.
“The security team will decide that,” he says, turning back to me. “Liv is coming to help you. I hope you understand what I asked her to do. I asked her to pause her life for a few . . . who the fuck knows how long.”
He takes a breath.
“But we don’t ask her to stay.”
The sentence cuts through me.
“We don’t?”
Creed’s eyes hold mine. “She deserves to be happy, Hal. She probably found that already, and we’re not getting in the middle of that. I know your heart and your soul want her, but—”
“Do I need to let you go too?” I ask.
His face stills.
“Are you happy with somebody else?”
He shakes his head before I finish.
“No.” The word comes fast. Then, softer: “Ne—”
He stops himself.
I almost finish it for him.
Never.
He won’t say it, but continues, “I belong to the two of you.”
Relief moves through me so quickly it hurts.
Then sadness comes behind it.
He didn’t move on.
Or he couldn’t.
I don’t know which one should comfort me. Neither does.
“I get it,” I say. “We let her go because it’s best.”
Creed’s jaw moves once, like he is grinding down a protest.
He doesn’t say it.
There is another knock. Softer this time. A warning instead of an interruption.
He looks toward the door.
Time’s up.
That, more than anything, makes me feel the loss. Not ten years. Not threats. Not lawyers. Fifteen minutes in a room that smells like tape and sweat, with a man I loved and don't remember loving fully enough, and even this has to end on someone else’s schedule.
Creed turns back to me.
“Can I kiss you?”
The question is careful.
Too careful.
It nearly destroys me.
He asks as if I am a locked door he once had a key to and will not try without permission.
I stand.
My knees almost betray me.
“Please,” I say.
Then he steps into me.
Slowly.
He is still in skates, so he has to bend. I have to lift my face. The difference should feel awkward. It doesn't. It feels like a body finding the old angle before the mind can follow.
His hand comes to my jaw.
Stops there.
A question against my skin.
I turn into it.
His mouth touches mine.
For one second, it is only contact.
Warm.
Careful.
A breath shared between two men who have lost too much to rush the first thing they are allowed to take back.
Then he kisses me.
Slow.
So fucking slow it feels like he is giving my body time to remember before asking my mind to catch up.
His lips move against mine with aching restraint. He doesn't press me back. He doesn't take. He waits inside the kiss, and somehow that is what opens me. My hand rises to his chest, to the edge of his gear, useless against all that protection, and still I feel the man beneath it.
Something in me lights.
Not memory.
Deeper than memory.
Recognition with no picture attached.
My mouth knows him.
My body knows where to breathe.
The kiss goes through me like a door opening in a house I thought had been demolished.
For half a second, I'm not in the small room beneath the arena.
I am somewhere else.
A roof.
A bar.
A bed.
A hand around my wrist.
A woman laughing.
Creed saying my name in the dark.
Then it is gone.
I make a sound against his mouth.
Creed freezes.
I catch the front of his jersey before he can pull back.
“No,” I whisper. “Don’t stop.”
He exhales.
I feel it.
Then he kisses me again.
This one is not careful in the same way.
It is still controlled because Creed is Creed, because he will always leave me a door cracked open, but there is heat in it now.
Ten years of it. Grief. Want. Anger. Devotion.
His hand slides to the back of my neck, fingers pressing into my hair, and I understand with a certainty I don't know how to explain that this is not a new thing beginning.
This is an old thing waking up.
My soul, if I still believe in that word, doesn't remember gently.
It surges.
It reaches.
It says, There you are.
Creed pulls back first, breathing hard, forehead almost touching mine.
His eyes are wet.
So are mine.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“For what?”
“For asking for more than you can give.”
I shake my head.
The motion brushes my forehead against his.
“You didn’t.”
His thumb moves once along my jaw.
“I should go.”
“I know.”
Neither of us moves.
The door opens a fraction, then stops.
A voice says, “Lafontaine.”
Creed closes his eyes.
Then he presses one more kiss to my mouth.
Brief.
Devastating.
He steps back.
The room feels too large immediately.
“I’ll see you after,” he says.
“After what?”
His mouth does something that almost becomes a smile, but doesn’t survive.
“After whatever they try next.”