Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Nico
I stood outside his door and took a breath.
Tell him. He deserves to know. You’ve known that since Washington.
I raised my hand. The door opened before I could knock, and Evan stood there with a smile that kicked up my pulse.
He pulled me to him by the front of my jacket and kissed me, his lips soft and welcoming.
I kissed him back, and for a moment all my rehearsed sentences went somewhere I couldn’t reach.
When he pulled back, his gaze traveled to my jaw and stopped.
“What happened?” His hand came up, fingers gentle against the bruise. The touch was careful, worried, and I felt it everywhere.
“That’s part of what I need to tell you.”
He went still. Then he stepped back and let me in.
We sat on the couch, not touching, which felt strange after a week apart. He turned to face me and waited. No questions, no prompting, just those steady eyes on mine, giving me the room to say it however I needed to. That was very Evan.
“My name is Nicolás Briggs,” I said. “I’m a professional hockey player. I play left wing for the San Jose Lasers. Number seventeen.”
A heavy silence followed.
He didn’t move. There was no surprise on his face, none at all.
He looked like a guy who’d suspected something for a while and had just been waiting for me to say it out loud, except what I’d said was bigger than whatever he’d guessed.
His jaw tightened. His eyes stayed locked on mine, and my chest went tight watching him.
“The bruise,” he said finally.
“Fight with an opposing player in Florida. Svoboda. He cross-checked me from behind and we dropped gloves.” I met his eyes. “It’s part of the game. I’ve had worse.”
“You’ve had worse,” he repeated, his voice flat, not quite a question.
“Yes.”
He absorbed that. “Tell me why you didn’t tell me.”
I’d rehearsed this in the car. In hotel rooms across four cities. In the parking lot sixty seconds ago. I still didn’t have the perfect words, but I had honest ones.
“The first night, at the club, I went there because I wanted to be nobody. Not Nicolás Briggs the hockey player. Not the guy with his face on buses and three-quarters of a million people following him online. Just Nico.” I paused. “But that’s not the whole truth.”
He waited.
“Two other players I know had just come out. Marco Morelli and étienne Savard. They posted a photo together—just the two of them, smiling, not hiding anything—and I couldn’t stop looking at it.
My tattoo… One life to live. One life to love.
I’d been telling myself for years it was about hockey, about playing without regrets.
But that night I looked at that photo and understood I’d been using the hockey half as an excuse to ignore the other half entirely.
” I met his eyes. “I didn’t want a press conference.
I didn’t want to make a statement or become a story.
I just wanted to walk into a room and be a person who wasn’t hiding. For one night.
“And then you were there.”
I held his gaze.
“When you didn’t recognize me… I can’t describe what that felt like. It had been so long since anyone had looked at me like I was just some guy.
“When people find out,” I continued. “Everything shifts. The way they listen, what they want from the conversation, what they want from me. I’ve watched it happen—someone I’m talking to will get that look, like they’re suddenly recalibrating, like the person they were talking to a second ago has been replaced by something more useful.
” I paused. “You never looked at me like that. I wasn’t ready to give that up. ”
He was listening, hands in his lap, giving me nothing yet.
“There’s something else.” I’d thought about whether to include this and decided I had to.
“A couple of years ago, I met someone on the road. A hookup. I thought it was anonymous, thought I was being careful. He took his phone out and I didn’t think anything of it.
Three days later, I got a text.” I kept my voice level.
“He had photos. He wanted money to keep them private.”
Evan’s expression shifted, moving through surprise into something quieter and more considered. He was putting it together. I could see him doing it.
“I handled it,” I said. “Paid it, which I know was probably the wrong call. But I handled it alone, and afterward I understood something I hadn’t before.
Recognition isn’t just uncomfortable. It has a cost. A specific, concrete cost. And I’d been careless, and it had almost cost me everything.
After that,” I said. “I stopped being careless.”
The room was quiet. Outside, a car passed. The refrigerator hummed.
“So when you came along and you didn’t know who I was, and I already knew I didn’t want to lose you, telling you felt like it would end something before it had a chance to become anything.
” I took a deep breath. “I told myself I was waiting for the right moment, the right context. Because I knew if you googled me first and saw the Wikipedia page, the follower count, the media coverage, you’d have made a decision about Nicolás Briggs before you’d ever gotten to know Nico.
And I was afraid that decision would be no. ”
“But?”
“But those were rationalizations. The truth is that I liked being just Nico to you. I liked what we had before you knew. And I was terrified that telling you would change it before we had enough of it to survive the change.”
He was quiet for a moment. What moved across his face wasn’t anger. It was something softer and more careful, the look of someone who recognized what I was describing from experience.
“Can I tell you something?” he asked.
“Of course.”
He took a deep breath. “Three years ago, I was in a relationship with someone famous. Ryan Pierce—he’s an actor.”
I kept my expression still. Ryan Pierce. I knew exactly who Ryan Pierce was. Everyone did.
“We were together for seven years,” Evan said.
His voice was careful. Measured in a way that told me he was keeping a tight hold on something.
“In the end, being with him meant giving up my privacy. My autonomy. Everything became about him, about his image, about how the world saw us. His team controlled how I dressed, what I said, where we went. I wasn’t a person to them. I was a detail.”
I didn’t say anything. I let him talk.
“Then he cheated on me. I found out on social media from photographs of him with his co-star, published before he’d said a word to me.
My private life became public entertainment overnight.
Paparazzi outside the house. Strangers sending threats.
I lost my job because I’d become a liability.
” He shook his head. “I had to leave LA, move to a new city, rebuild everything from the ground up, because being with him had burned it all down.”
The pieces of Evan’s apartment rearranged themselves in my understanding. The bare walls. No photographs. The life built to contain none of what had come before.
“I came to San Jose to have a life that was mine,” he said. “Where I controlled my own story. My own space. My own peace.” He sat back against the couch. “And now you’re telling me you’re a professional athlete with three-quarters of a million followers and your face on buses.”
“I’m not Ryan,” I said.
“I know you’re not.” He said it without hesitation, and that mattered.
“But you’re famous. You’re public. And being with you means stepping back into something I worked very hard to get away from.
” He looked at me steadily. “When you told me about your life—the vague version, the one you’d been giving me—I kept filing the pieces away.
Events. Saturday nights. I was building a picture I couldn’t quite see yet.
” A pause. “I think part of me knew it was something I’d have to decide about.
And I didn’t want to decide yet, because I wasn’t ready to lose this either. ”
My chest loosened with the relief of being understood.
“I need you to understand something,” I said.
“What you just told me. What it cost you, what you built here to get away from it… I didn’t know all of that, but I knew enough.
You told me you’d moved here after a bad breakup.
I’d seen your apartment, the bare walls, no photos, nothing from before.
I didn’t need the details to know you’d stripped your life down on purpose.
” I made myself say the rest. “And I kept waiting anyway. Which means I was asking you to trust me while I was still protecting myself. That wasn’t fair. ”
He was quiet.
“I’m not going to ask you to step back into that world,” I said.
“What I have with you is private. I don’t make public statements about my personal life.
I’m not coming out publicly. Not because I’m ashamed, but because it’s nobody’s business.
I’ve been doing this for fourteen years. I know how to keep things separate.”
“Can you?” His voice wasn’t skeptical; it was genuinely asking.
“I can control what I put out there. I won’t put you out there without your consent.
” I shook my head. “I can’t promise no one will ever figure it out.
I can’t promise the media won’t take an interest if they do.
I can’t promise you that. I wish I could.
What I can promise is that I’ll treat your privacy like it matters.
Because it does, and because you’ve already paid enough for someone else’s thoughtlessness. ”
He looked at me for a long moment, and I let him. Whatever he needed to see, I wasn’t going to hide it.
“I need complete honesty,” he said finally. “Not the version you’ve been giving me. Everything. Schedule, travel, injuries, what your life actually looks like. I can’t make real decisions based on partial information.”
“You’ll have it. All of it. Starting now. Ask me anything.”
He asked, and I answered—the season schedule, the road trips, the media obligations, the sponsor appearances.
The contact sport reality of what the bruise meant and how often it happened.
The unglamorous texture of what my life looked like between the moments that made highlight reels.
He listened without interrupting, and when he had questions, they were precise and practical, the questions of someone building an accurate picture rather than deciding whether to be afraid.
When we’d been quiet for a while, I reached across the gap between us and rested my hand on the cushion, palm up. Not reaching for him. Just leaving it there.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he placed his hand in mine.
“I’m willing to try,” he said. “If you’re willing to be honest.”
“I am.” I closed my fingers around his. “I have been, since Washington. I just got home too slowly.”
He almost smiled at that. Not quite, but almost.
We sat there for a while without talking, his hand in mine, the afternoon light moving across the room. Eventually he shifted and looked up at me.
“Nicolás,” he said, trying it out.
“Still Nico. You know my last name now,” I said. “I still don’t know yours.”
He looked at me for a moment. Something flickered across his face, quick enough that I almost missed it.
“Beckett,” he said. “Evan Beckett.”
“Evan Beckett.” I pressed a kiss to his hand. “Marketing consultant. Face on zero buses.”
“My favorite distinction,” he said dryly.
We ordered dinner—Chinese, from the place down the street, because neither of us wanted to go out and neither of us wanted to cook.
We ate on the couch with the containers between us and the TV on low, and talked about smaller things: his week, what he’d been working on, a book he’d started.
Normal conversation, the kind we’d been having for weeks, except that this time nothing underneath it was hidden. It felt different. Lighter.
He fell asleep against my shoulder somewhere around ten. I stayed until his breathing evened out, then eased out from under him, pulled the blanket over him, and let myself out.
I walked to the elevator and stood there, waiting. When the doors opened, I stepped inside and turned to face the hallway—the long corridor, his door, closed and quiet.
I’m willing to try, if you’re willing to be honest.
Not yes. Not I’m in. But he hadn’t said no, and his hand in mine had been steady and sure.
I pressed the lobby button. It was enough. I’d make it enough.