Chapter 7
Matt
God damn it.
She worked for them. The White Hearts. Three consecutive finals we'd lost to that team, three years of giving everything I had and watching them celebrate on our ice, and the woman I'd kissed in a gas station hallway was on their payroll.
Not a coaching staff member. Not some front-office suit I'd never cross paths with. Media Strategist's Assistant. The person whose literal job it was to make them look good.
I'd pressed her against a wall and kissed her like the rest of the world could burn. And now I was standing in her apartment, drinking her coffee, with her dog at my feet, trying to fit that fact together with the name on her badge.
I set the mug down on the counter. Harder than I meant to.
"I should go."
It came out rough. Not at her. At the whole crooked geometry of the day, at the particular cruelty of finding the one person who'd made this week feel survivable and then learning she clocked in every morning for the team that had ended my season.
I headed for the door.
Thunder hit.
Not the rolling kind. The kind that cracks like a board breaking, close enough to rattle the windows in their frames, and the dog yelped and pressed against my calf.
"Matt. Wait."
My hand was on the knob.
"It's pouring," she said. "You can't drive in this."
"I'll manage."
"You won't manage. Listen to it."
I didn't have to listen. I could feel it through the wall, the hammering, the building taking it broadside.
The kind of storm that turns roads into drainage channels and makes every lane change a coin flip.
I knew what driving in it looked like. I'd done it three hours ago and my hands had been shaking then too.
"I'll risk it."
"Don't be an idiot."
"I'm not—"
"You're being an idiot. Sit down."
I turned around.
She was on the couch, crutches propped against the armrest, watching me with those eyes that took in too much and gave back too little. Quiet. Patient. Like she'd decided to wait me out and had all night to do it.
"What's wrong?" she said.
I should have kept it locked. Should have said "nothing" and left it on the mat and sat at the far end of her living room in silence until the storm passed and I could get in my car and never come back. That was the play.
I didn't run the play.
"The White Hearts," I said, and the name sat between us with three years of weight on it. "That's the problem."
"Why?"
"Because I play for Boston. The Bruins."
Her eyebrows went up. I watched it land. The pieces clicking, the picture assembling behind her eyes. The gas station. The fans in jerseys. The man who'd been hiding his face from a room full of people who hated him.
"You play hockey," she said.
"Yeah."
"For Boston."
"Yeah."
"And the White Hearts—"
"Beat us in the finals. Three years running.
They've got our breakouts memorized, our zone entries mapped.
They run our own system back at us better than we run it.
They're the reason I can't sleep. The reason I see the same shot going wide every time I close my eyes.
The reason half of Boston wants me traded. "
It came out hotter than I'd meant it to. Faster. The anger had been sitting in my chest all week and now it was moving, and I was pacing her living room before I'd told my legs to do it, back and forth across the small space, the dog scrambling out of my path.
"Three years. Same round, same result. And it's not close. It's not like we're losing on a bounce. They're scheming us. They know what we're going to do before we've called it. Every adjustment we make, they've already adjusted for."
My hands were fists. My jaw was sore from grinding.
"And I had the shot to change it. Game seven, tie game, I'm standing in the slot with a clear lane and I couldn't close my damn blade. One play. One puck. And I couldn't finish it."
I stopped. Breathed. Realized I'd just torn the whole thing open in front of a woman who worked for the people I was ranting about.
A woman who might walk back to work tomorrow and hand over the whole breakdown. The weaknesses. The cracks. The soft spots.
Carrie stared at me from where she sat. Not with pity. Not with sympathy. With something I hadn't expected at all.
She laughed.
Not a polite one. A real, full, body-involved laugh that shook her shoulders and made her grab her stomach and had her blinking moisture out of the corners of her eyes while I stood there, fists still balled, trying to figure out how this was the response.
"Are you serious right now?"
She laughed harder.
"What is funny about this?"
"You," she managed. "Oh my God, your face."
"I don't see what's—"
"I figured it out." She caught a breath. "Why you look so familiar."
My gut dropped.
Here it came. The sports coverage. The replays. My name in a headline next to the word "choke." The entire internet's opinion about the worst moment of my life, delivered to me on her couch by a woman who was now wiping tears off her cheeks.
"I've seen your name," she said. "In the files at work."
"What files."
"The White Hearts have been looking at you. For a trade, an exchange. I don't know all the details, I'm an assistant, I'm not in every room. But your name came up last week. Multiple times. They think you'd be a strong addition."
I couldn't move. Couldn't process it. The words lined up in front of me and refused to form a play I could read.
The White Hearts wanted me. The team that had beaten us three years running was looking to put me in their sweater. The team I'd just spent four minutes cursing wanted me on their roster.
"That's not possible."
"It is. I saw the documents."
"When?"
"Last week. Before the finals. They were already making contingency plans in case—" She stopped. Shifted on the couch. "In case they won."
Of course they were. So confident they'd already been shopping for parts before the series was over. Already thinking three moves ahead while we were just trying to survive the shift in front of us.
"They were that sure," I said.
"They were confident," Carrie said, carefully.
"They knew."
She didn't argue. Didn't have to.
Then the laugh drained out of her face and something else replaced it. Something a lot closer to fear.
"I shouldn't have told you that."
Her voice had changed. The confidence was gone. Her hands were gripping the couch cushion, knuckles white.
"That's confidential. That's an NDA. Multiple NDAs. I signed so many documents on my first day, and I didn't read half of them because I was just grateful to have the job, and I have now broken every single one in front of a player from a rival team while sitting on my own couch."
She looked up at me.
"They'll fire me. Matt, it's been less than a week."
She was genuinely scared. Not performing scared, not playing up the drama for effect. Scared in a way I hadn't seen from her, not when she'd been screaming at me in the rain, not when she'd been chasing me across a parking lot, not when she'd gone down on a bad ankle.
This was real.
And for a reason I didn't fully understand, that was the thing that cracked me open.
I laughed.
Not the dark, hollowed-out one I'd been carrying around all week. A real one. The kind that comes from somewhere low and arrives without permission and surprises you worse than it surprises the room.
"What?" she said.
"You just handed me classified information and now you're worried about the paperwork."
"It's not funny."
"It's a little funny."
"Matt—"
"I won't tell anyone."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
She held my eyes. Weighing it. Deciding whether the man who'd run from her twice in one day was the same man whose word she was about to bet her career on.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay."
And then, because the day had already gone past any version of itself I could have predicted, I looked at her.
Actually looked, for the first time since the hallway.
Not at the complication. Not at the rival's employee.
Not at the mistake I'd been running from since the moment I'd put my mouth on hers.
At Carrie.
Her eyes were brown. Warm. With gold flecks near the center that caught the light from the lamp beside her, and they held me, steady and open, and for a second nothing else was on the ice.
No White Hearts. No missed shot. No season.
Just this, the two of us sitting in the wreckage of a day that should never have happened, looking at each other like we both knew what it meant and neither of us was ready to say it.
She didn't look away.
I didn't either.
Thunder hit again, harder than the last, hard enough to move the building, and the dog pressed into my leg and whimpered.
The lights went out.
Total dark. Complete. Just the rain against the windows and both of us breathing in the sudden black.