Chapter 34
thirty-four
MORGAN
I hate this feeling.
As I walk toward the locker room, I hate that I can’t maintain the clean, surgical anger that’s kept me functional for so long. I hate that somewhere between watching James on that stage and Mills’s interrogation during my masochistic dawn-run, my fury has curdled into something infinitely messier.
Because here’s what I've been trying to ignore: for weeks before the gala and before I'd run out on him at the library, I’d cataloged James’s evolution.
The way he’d started timing drills with an actual stopwatch instead of turning practice into his personal comedy special.
His quiet corrections with Kellerman, with no audience, no punchline, just genuine mentorship.
The focus in his eyes when he’d helped me with gear. The effort he'd put into studying.
He was becoming the man I'd hoped he'd be so many years ago.
And then we fucked, and I ran like my ass was on fire.
The memory of that night in the library ambushes me with all the subtlety of a freight train. Those massive goalie hands that could span my entire waist like he was palming a basketball. The way he’d groaned “Morgan” against my neck while his cock filled me so completely I forgot my name.
I can still feel him moving inside me, each thrust deliberate and deep enough to reorganize my internal organs. The stretch of him, thick and perfect. My thighs clench involuntarily at the memory, and I have to pause mid-stride to get my shit together.
Get a grip, Riley. You’re in public, not writing erotic-friend-fiction.
My response to all that terrifying vulnerability had been radio silence so complete that SETI could’ve used me to listen for aliens. Texts that were deleted so thoroughly that the NSA couldn't find a trace of them. Strategic avoidance with the precision of someone navigating a minefield.
A fortress of ice that would make Elsa look emotionally available.
And through it all, I knew in my marrow that it would end badly.
Because James literally cannot tolerate silence.
It’s his kryptonite, his worst nightmare, his personal seventh circle of hell. And when faced with my Antarctic-level freeze-out—a void he couldn’t joke across, and couldn’t fill with his usual chaos—of course he panicked and defaulted to his emergency-broadcast-system.
The grand gesture.
The public spectacle.
The desperate smoke signal saying “PLEASE FUCKING LOOK AT ME.”
The gala wasn’t malicious. It was him drowning and grabbing for the only flotation device in his arsenal, trying to be a hero and getting my program the resources it needs and getting me to pay attention to him for the first time in weeks.
He was trying to get me back and save the day and fill the silence.
Congratulations, genius, my mind mocks me. You triggered his deepest wound and then acted shocked when it bled all over the ballroom’s marble.
The locker room door looms ahead, and I brace for another day in our concrete dungeon, although at least the guys have moved out now. But as I shoulder through the door, I freeze so hard my muscles lock, because it's not just that something is wrong.
Everything is wrong.
The smell hits first, fresh paint all over the walls, the scent so sharp and clean that my sinuses tingle. Then I notice the light, steady and even, with no death-rattle flicker. My brain scrambles for explanations like a student who forgot there was a test.
Did Galloway have a stroke and develop human empathy?
Did maintenance finally discover what “maintenance” means?
I step deeper inside, and the changes multiply faster than my ability to process. But it's not just paint and minor electrical work. The benches that used to wobble have been replaced with sturdier ones, which feel solid enough to survive a nuclear blast.
My fingers trail along the smooth wood, and that’s when I spot the stick racks. They're built into the walls with individual slots and—I have to blink to confirm I’m not hallucinating—brass nameplates waiting for engraving, the kind the men's team has had since the Treaty of Versailles.
But the floor stops me cold.
Someone has scraped years of fossilized tape residue off the concrete, a job that maintenance wouldn't take on in a million years. Completing that job would have taken hours of hard scraping on hands and knees, a job that's less like labor and more like penance.
I stand in the middle of the locker room for a full minute, looking around, not quite believing what my eyes are showing me.
After so many months of trying to get a program off the ground, drilling new players into a team while simultaneously fighting Galloway for miserly resources, it feels like a dream.
Then I spot a protein bar wrapper, tucked behind a bench like an exhibit in a museum to one person. The label (“MONSTER FUEL”) screams from the package in testosterone-poisoned red letters, and I'm horrified that I'm able to immediately recognize who it belonged to.
“They’re not that bad, Morgue," James had said as he chewed on one. "They’re just… aggressively mediocre… like reality TV or campus wifi.”
The memory sucker-punches me—him breaking one in half during our study sessions, offering it like he was sharing communion wine instead of compressed cardboard, and, when I'd refused, how he’d immediately broken into a joke about my “bougie digestive system.”
The realization doesn’t dawn.
It fucking detonates.
James did this.
After I’d ghosted him with the thoroughness of someone entering witness protection and he'd responded with a public Hail Mary that ended up with a 100-yard interception return. After his public crucifixion in that room and his one-week suspension since.
James did this.
The door explodes open. Mills storms in with Sarah and Jen, already at volume eleven. “Morgue, you’re not going to believe the bullshit I just heard about—”
She stops mid-syllable, her mouth forming an O.
“What the actual fuck?” Mills's question is a whisper, even as she spins like she’s entered Narnia.
Sarah’s eyes have gone full Disney princess. “Did we… did someone die and leave us their 401(k)?”
“There's been a few changes,” I manage, the words feeling scraped from my throat. “It's all…”
“Fixed,” Jen finishes, her professional cynicism cracking as she touches the wall with something approaching religious awe. “Someone actually gave a shit.”
Mills is still gaping, her usual motormouth stalled. “Galloway would rather eat glass than spend money on us.”
"Yeah…" my voice trails off, because I'm desperate for them not to connect the dots, because I'm still processing the shock myself.
But Mills is onto it. Her eyes go wide, narrow, then wider. “Fitzgerald did this, didn't he?”
“After getting suspended?” Jen’s cynicism evaporates completely. “His response to public humiliation was to… channel his feelings into home improvement?”
The room goes cathedral-quiet.
“This took all night,” Sarah whispers like she’s describing organ donation. “After everything. He came here and…”
“And worked,” Mills finishes. She turns to me with an expression that rearranges my internal organs. “No audience. No credit. Just…”
She gestures at our transformed space.
“Respect,” Mills says, the word carrying atomic weight. “This is what actual fucking respect looks like.”
The word reverberates through my chest cavity, rattling things I thought were welded shut. Because she's right. What James did here wasn't some desperate play for forgiveness. It was just quiet, anonymous labor from someone whose world was actively imploding.
Respect.
I can see it. James on his knees on unforgiving concrete, scraping at tape older than most of our players. His fingers cramping, maybe bleeding, working with the precision he usually reserves for keeping pucks out of nets. All with no witnesses and no guarantee I’d ever know.
Just the work.
Because he thought we deserved better.
Because he thought I deserved better.
Even after I’d treated him like something stuck to my shoe.
My body stages a rebellion against my brain. My pulse kicks into overdrive, my stomach performs gymnastics that would score a perfect ten, my hands shake as I clutch the wrapper, and there’s this hollow ache behind my sternum that feels suspiciously like longing.
Every cell in my body recognizes what my mind is desperately trying to deny—this man, this beautiful disaster of a human being who can’t shut up to save his life, chose silence… chose invisible work… chose to honor what we’d started building before we both burned it down.
The fortress I'd only recently rebuilt in a panic after that night in the library, reinforced by the gala, doesn’t crack.
It vaporizes. Just… gone. Because this room, reeking of paint, is proof of everything I was catastrophically wrong about, and my traitorous heart isn't going to let me deny it anymore.
“Captain?” Mills’s voice cuts through my spiral. “You good? You look like you’re about to either cry or commit murder.”
I realize I’m standing in the middle of our transformed sanctuary, clutching a protein bar wrapper like the Shroud of Turin, while my entire worldview self-destructs. But the question she should have asked is, what the hell am I going to do about it?
Not even I know the answer to that. So, for now, I lie.
“Yeah,” I say, the word a raw rasp. “I’m good.”