Chapter Twenty-Three #2
Remy ends up straddling my hips with her forehead pressed to mine. I hold her tight and breathe in her scent, reveling in her warmth. When I press my head to her chest, her heartbeat flutters against my skin.
“I thought you hated me.” Turns out my brain really likes preparing for emotional apocalypse. “I thought you’d never get over it.”
Remy laughs softly and runs her fingers through my hair. “Hate you? You tried to protect me. I don’t love how you chose to go about it, but I do love where it comes from.”
The understanding in her voice loosens something inside me I didn’t realize I’d been bracing so hard to hold together.
I open my palms against her back as I unclench. “You do the same for me.” The word thrums in my ears in time to her breaths. Love. Love. Love.
“It’s hard for me to trust people,” Remy says. “But I trust you, Owen. I think we both have some work to do when it comes to being open. I’m good at putting up walls. Been doing it my whole life.”
“We’ll practice,” I tell her. “Both of us.”
I’m surprised that the thought of working on myself doesn’t feel like punishment. It feels like a door opening toward a brighter future.
Her fingers brush against the nape of my neck. The caress is so intimate, so sensual, that my body reacts on its own. Remy sucks in a breath and shifts her hips slightly, as if to pull away. “Sorry, but right now isn’t, um. I’m not there yet.”
“I know. We don’t have to do anything about it. I just like holding you?” I sit back and blow a few loose strands of copper hair out of my face. “Can I do that for a little while? Hold you? Would that be okay?”
The words come out quieter than I intended. Almost nervous.
Remy nods. She presses her lips to my forehead. “I’m tired of running, Owen.”
God, I know exactly how that feels.
I pull her against me, and she melts against me with a contented little sigh. “Then stay,” I offer.
The pressure in my chest finally starts to ease.
* * *
Noah’s text comes through around six.
Coach Abbott: Beer?
That’s it.
No explanation. No uncomfortable concern disguised as casual conversation. No “checking in on you, kid” energy.
Just beer.
Which somehow makes me trust the invitation more.
Puck Drop is crowded when I walk in half an hour later, the familiar mix of sports-bar noise and Italian food wrapping around me almost immediately. Hockey highlights roll across half the TVs while somebody in a Stone jersey screams at a basketball game in the corner.
Noah’s already there in a back booth with a beer in front of him. He lifts two fingers when he sees me with no sign of dramatic sympathy.
Thank God.
“You look like shit,” he says as I slide into the booth. “Good to know suspension hasn’t softened you.”
“Nope.”
He pushes the second beer toward me. “You sleeping?”
“Not really.”
“Eating?”
“Sometimes.”
Noah nods like that answer tells him exactly what he expected to hear.
For a few minutes, we just watch the TV over the bar while a couple of teams I don’t care about trade lazy neutral-zone turnovers. The silence isn’t awkward, which is probably why Noah’s good at what he does. He doesn’t force conversations open before people are ready to have them.
Noah leans against the leather and studies me for a second. “You know what everybody’s saying about you right now?”
I grimace. “That I’m psychotic?”
“No.” He shrugs. “Mostly that you lost your head protecting someone you’ve grown to care about.”
“That’s not exactly a glowing endorsement.”
“No,” he agrees calmly. “Because what happened was still ugly.”
The shame hits instantly.
I stare down at the label on my beer bottle. “I know.”
Noah stays quiet long enough that I finally glance back up at him.
“You know what concerns me more than the fight itself?” he asks.
“What?”
“The fact that you look like you think it proved something.”
My stomach flips. Damn him. Because it does feel like proof. Proof that the violence is still sitting there under my skin, waiting for an excuse. Proof that my father left fingerprints all over me, whether I like it or not.
Noah watches the realization move across my face. “You get it.”
I exhale hard and scrub a hand down my face. “I don’t know how to shut it off sometimes.”
“The anger?”
“The panic.” The word leaves before I can stop it. “It’s like my brain stops working the second somebody I care about is in danger.”
Noah nods slowly.
“I saw him hit the glass. I saw Remy fall,” I admit quietly. “And suddenly I wasn’t in the arena anymore.”
The noise of the bar fades into the background while I stare past Noah toward the TVs mounted over the liquor bottles.
“I was back in that house,” I say. “Listening to my mother scream while my father tore through the kitchen, throwing shit around. Until he caught her. Then he started throwing his fists around.”
The words settle heavily between us.
“I used to think if I got big enough, eventually I’d be able to stop him.” I laugh once without humor. “Twelve-year-old logic.”
Noah says nothing.
Which somehow makes it easier to keep going.
“I think part of me still believes I failed her.” My fingers tighten around the beer bottle. “If I’d been stronger or older, maybe she wouldn’t have had to stay with him so long. That if I hadn’t been born, she never would have had to stay to begin with.”
Noah’s expression shifts slightly then. Not pity. It’s sadder than that.
“Owen,” he says carefully, “your mother stayed because your father abused her. Not because she loved you too much.”
The air thins around me, so I look away immediately. Some disgusting little corner of me has always wondered if she could’ve escaped sooner if I hadn’t existed at all.
Noah studies me for a long moment before taking a slow sip of beer.
“You know everybody thinks I’m naturally calm, right?”
I blink. “You are calm.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I work at it.”
The bluntness of the answer makes me sit up slightly.
“I had a sister. We were close. When Natalie and her husband died in a car crash, I thought I was going to lose my damn mind.” There’s an old exhaustion underneath the evenness of his tone.
“One second, I was living my normal life. The next time I was helping raise a grieving kid while trying to figure out how to survive my own grief at the same time.”
Vivian Metcalfe. Coach’s wife.
Right.
I’d almost forgotten that Noah stepped in and helped raise her after the accident.
“I remember being so angry all the time,” Noah admits. “At the driver. At the universe. At myself because I couldn’t fix any of it.”
I frown. “The driver was Molly’s uncle, right?”
“Arthur, yeah.”
Damn.
I knew that part of the story, but hearing it out loud still feels brutal.
Noah nods slowly. “Try navigating that emotionally.”
“How the hell did you?”
“I didn’t. Not at first.” He gives me a tired half smile. “I focused on hockey too much. Slept too little. Snapped at people I loved. Thought keeping everything buried made me strong.”
That lands a little too hard.
“One day, Viv asked me if I was mad at her.” Noah looks down at his beer bottle. “That about ripped my heart out.”
My chest twists painfully.
“So I got help,” he says simply. “Grief counseling first. Then regular therapy after I realized half my issues weren’t actually about grief at all.”
The honesty of it catches me off guard.
Noah laughs quietly at my expression. “What? You think emotionally stable people just wake up like this?”
“A little.”
“Absolutely not.” He points at me with his bottle. “Everything good in my life came after I stopped confusing emotional suppression with strength.”
The noise of the bar swells around us again for a moment. Somebody cheers loudly near the dartboards. Glasses clink. A waitress laughs. And sitting here across from Noah, an old wound inside me slowly starts to unclench.
“You know the difference between you and your father?” Noah asks eventually.
I stare down at the table. “Enlighten me.”
“Your father probably never lost a second of sleep worrying about who he was hurting.”
Every muscle locks up.
“What happened with Toutain crossed a line,” Noah continues calmly. “You know that. The League knows that. But ugly behavior during a triggered moment doesn’t automatically make you an abusive man.”
I swallow hard.
“It scared me how fast I lost control.”
“Good.”
I look up sharply.
Noah shrugs. “You know why that fear matters? Because it means you don’t want to become him.”
I stare down at my hands for a second, jaw tight enough to ache.
Because he’s not wrong.
“For what it’s worth,” Noah says more quietly, “I’ve coached a lot of goalies. A lot of men. I’m not worried about you becoming your father.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No.” He swallows once. “I do.”
Silence stretches between us. It’s not empty, just heavy in a different way now.
“You’re intense,” Noah says. “Protective. Hypervigilant as hell. You carry too much responsibility for everybody around you.” He lifts one shoulder. “But none of those things make you abusive.”
I stare at him.
“You know what I think?” he asks.
“What?”
“I think you’ve been trying to raise yourself since you were twelve years old.”
That one almost destroys me. I look away immediately, jaw tightening hard enough to ache. Noah pretends not to notice, which honestly makes me love him a little for it.
After another minute, he reaches into his jacket pocket and slides a folded piece of paper across the table toward me.
“What’s this?”
“Therapist recommendation.”
I blink down at it.
“She worked with me after Natalie and Steve died,” Noah says. “And again, later, after the Arthur situation blew up.” His mouth curves faintly. “She’s terrifyingly perceptive. You’ll hate her for probably the first three sessions.”
A startled laugh escapes me.
“There’s the first genuine sound you’ve made all night,” Noah says dryly.
I shake my head and tuck the paper into my pocket carefully. Then I sit there for a second, staring out across the bar while the game plays overhead, and my lungs finally loosen enough to let me breathe all the way in.
Not fixed or magically healed.
But maybe not doomed either.