Chapter 18
EVIE
Keegan’s hands stay locked on his thighs while mine hold his face.
The studio floor presses through my pants.
His knees bracket mine without closing the space, and the muscles in his arms stand hard beneath the sweatshirt as if keeping still requires the same force he uses to hold position against the boards.
He could pull me against him before my next breath. He does not move.
“You’re shaking,” I say.
“I’m on my knees in front of my wife while she decides whether I still have one.” His voice catches low in his chest. “Shaking is the civilized option.”
The answer almost opens my mouth into a smile. Almost. I slide my thumbs along the rough line of his jaw instead, feeling how tightly he has set it.
“I watched you offer to leave hockey.”
“When the contract ends.” Keegan’s gaze never leaves mine. “I won’t walk out on the team in the middle of a run.”
“That is not the part I’m arguing.”
“I know.” His fingers flex once against the fabric, then flatten again. “You told me destruction isn’t proof.”
“And you went on television and tore your jersey apart.” My thumb finds a raw scrape along his knuckle, evidence of how badly the stitching fought him.
“The letter, not the career.”
“With your bare hands.” I lift that hand between us and turn it toward the task light.
“The scissors were in another room.”
My laugh escapes wet and unsteady. Keegan’s whole body surges toward the sound before he catches himself. The aborted movement costs him; his shoulders jerk, breath leaving through his nose, hands pressing harder into his thighs.
“That,” I tell him, “is what I mean. You know how to make pain spectacular. You know how to bleed where everyone can see it. You do not know how to come home on an ordinary Tuesday and leave enough of yourself for me.”
His expression loses the brief warmth. “Teach me.”
“No.” I drop my hands from his face. The loss of contact hits him visibly, but he remains still. “I spent five years teaching you where the towels belong, which nights I worked late, when I needed you to answer a question instead of buying the problem. I am not designing your redemption for you.”
“Then give me the rules of the marriage you can live in.” His hands curl again, fighting for somewhere to put the need. “I do the work of becoming the man who can keep them.”
I sit back on my heels, building enough distance to think. “Hockey is not the enemy, Keegan.”
His brows draw together. “It took me away from you.”
“You used it to leave. That is different.” I point toward the muted television.
“I am not asking you to become smaller so I can feel secure. I love that you walk into a room and the room notices. I love watching you take over a game. I even love the deranged part of you that thought tearing off a stitched letter with your fingers was a reasonable media strategy.”
“It worked.”
“Do not interrupt the first flattering thing I’ve said in weeks.”
His mouth closes. The almost-smile that follows is bright and miserable, an impossible combination that belongs only to him.
“I love your force,” I say. “I will not live underneath it.”
Keegan’s head bows. “You won’t.”
“Look at me when you promise.”
His eyes lift immediately. “You will not live underneath me again.”
“Sobriety stays yours.” I reach for his right hand, pry it loose from his thigh, and turn it palm-up between us.
Half-moons mark the skin where his nails pressed.
“I will not count bottles, appointments, meetings, or days. I will not smell your breath. If you drink and hide it, I leave. There is no siege after that. No campaign.”
His fingers try to close around mine. He stops them before they trap my hand. “If I drink, I tell the physician, Jake, my support, and you. If I hide it, you leave.”
“You don’t make me the person who keeps you sober.”
“Never.” The word comes fast, then he forces himself to slow down. “You are the reason I saw what drinking was costing. You are not responsible for whether I pick it up again.”
I trace the healing cut across his palm. “No private drinks. No late-night confidante. No woman who knows our fights before I know your fear.”
“No hidden emotional relationship. No messages I would turn over before letting you read.” His chest rises hard beneath the sweatshirt.
“If I need help carrying something I can’t put on you, I use Jake, a professional, or the support people who agreed to carry it.
I do not build another relationship outside ours and call it friendship. ”
The precision hurts because it fits exactly around the shape of what he did. “And if someone begins treating access like a claim?”
“I close the door before you have to point at it.”
His palm is warm beneath mine. I release it and watch his hand return to his thigh instead of following me.
“My studio stays mine.” I gesture toward the benches, the locked cases, the room carrying my name rather than his money.
“Yes.”
“You do not buy the building.” I take his hand back. My grip tightens.
“Even if the plumbing fails?”
“Especially then.” I let his hand go before the banter can soften the boundary.
“Cruel.” The word rumbles out of him, but his eyes have begun to burn. “Can I recommend a plumber?”
“You may submit one name in writing.” I raise one finger between us, giving his ridiculous request the gravity he thinks it deserves.
“Through counsel?”
“Through Sienna. She enjoys rejecting you.” The thought of my sister reviewing his plumber like a hostile board application pulls at my mouth.
“Everyone enjoys rejecting me lately.” His gaze travels over my mouth. “Some people more than others.”
Heat pulls low through my body. I let him see it and do nothing to ease him. “My work is not the thing I do while I wait for your life to finish.”
“Your work gets protected time.” Keegan shifts one knee, then stops when the movement brings him closer. “Our marriage gets protected time. Practice is an obligation. Every optional drink, dinner, sponsor room, and ego-stroking hour is not.”
“You missed my commission because you were listening to her.” The Belleroque setting lies covered on the bench behind him, beautiful proof made without his attention.
“I will spend the rest of my life knowing that.”
“That is punishment, not a plan.” I touch two fingers to his sternum, stopping the self-condemnation before it can become another place he hides.
His eyes close for one beat. When they reopen, the self-recrimination has sharpened into attention. “I ask about the work in front of you. I learn what is due. I show up when you invite me and stay away when you don’t. I don’t make one remembered stone into proof that I’m cured.”
“Better.”
The praise strikes him harder than the accusations. His hand lifts an inch from his thigh before he forces it down. “Keep going.”
“Counseling.” The word changes his posture more than the threat of divorce did; his back straightens as if preparing for impact.
“Whenever you want.”
“Not whenever I want. We need it. I choose the person with you. You attend even if the team schedules something shiny.” I keep my fingers against his chest until the demand enters the same body that once walked out for practice.
“Yes.”
“And you do not spend six sessions charming the counselor into declaring you misunderstood.” I narrow my eyes when his mouth begins to curve.
“What if I’m genuinely charming?”
“Then we find someone immune to solar radiation.”
His smile finally breaks free. It lights his wrecked face and lands straight under my ribs, the same smile that once made forgiveness feel inevitable before accountability had entered the room. Now he gives me the smile and keeps his hands where I can see them.
“The captaincy,” I say.
The light does not disappear, but it steadies. “I resigned.”
“I know. I am not ordering you never to wear the C again because I do not control the team. I am telling you I will not live through a campaign to get it back.”
Keegan looks toward the television. The image has changed to the mangled patch beneath the microphones. “I don’t want it back.”
“Today.”
“Ever.” He turns to me. “The next man can earn it without wondering whether I’m waiting for him to fail.”
“And when some commentator says the team needs their real captain?”
“I tell them the real captain is wearing it.”
The answer settles inside me without asking to be admired. Jake’s face flashes through my mind: standing beside Keegan’s water, telling the truth when loyalty would have made silence easier.
“It should be Jake,” I say.
Keegan’s expression softens with immediate certainty. “Yeah. It should.”
The studio clock moves behind us. Outside the frosted glass, traffic passes and no one enters. The public world has had his confession. This room holds the part no camera could make valuable: the two of us on a hard floor, arranging a life out of limits.
“The petition,” he says finally. The words scrape. “You told me I might still go through with it.”
“I might have gone through with it.”
His shoulders lock. He does not correct the tense or reach for hope before I finish.
“I’m going to call the lawyer tomorrow,” I say. “I will tell her to withdraw it.”
Keegan stops breathing.
“But I am not returning to the marriage we had.” My voice drops, calm enough that he hears every word. “That marriage ended when I left my ring on the island. If I come home, it is because we are building another one.”
“If?” His voice is barely present.
I put my hands around his wrists. His pulse pounds beneath both thumbs. “I am taking you back.”
Nothing in him moves. Not a blink. Not a breath. The force he has been holding all evening turns absolute, a body braced against joy because joy might be another blow wearing a beautiful face.
“Say it again.”
“Keegan—”
“I’m not pushing.” His voice breaks. “I am begging you to let me hear it once while I know I’m awake.”
My own tears blur the sharp lines of him. “I am taking you back.”
His fingers tear free of his thighs and stop in the air beside my waist. They shake there, open and empty, while he waits for the last boundary.
I close the distance until my knees touch his. “You can touch me.”
Keegan moves.
His arms lock around my waist and haul me against him with a sound that is half laugh, half wreckage.
My knees leave the floor. He rises with me held against his chest, turns, and plants me on the edge of the workbench without disturbing a single tool.
His mouth finds mine hard enough to steal breath, then softens only to say my name against my lips.
“My wife.” He kisses me again, joy breaking through every syllable. “My impossible, vicious, brilliant wife.”
“Your wife has terms.”
“I love her terms.” His hands span my waist, no longer pretending he is calm. “I’ll frame them. I’ll tattoo them on Jake.”
I laugh into his mouth. “That seems like a boundary violation.”
“He’ll consent. He loves me.”
“Platonically.” I lift one eyebrow.
“With boundaries.”
The old joke survives another collision. Keegan bends over me, shoulders shaking now for a different reason. He kisses the corner of my mouth, my cheek, the wet track beneath my eye. Every touch asks and celebrates at once.
“I am not smaller,” he says against my temple.
“No.” I slide both hands into his hair and pull until his gaze returns to mine. “You are finally pointed in the right direction.”
His laugh fills the closed studio. “Tell me where.”
I kiss him once, fierce enough to make his hands tighten at my waist. Then I put my mouth against his and give him the direction he has earned.
“Take me home.”