Chapter 10 Declan
Declan
I don’t sleep.
Again.
It’s Monday night—two days since the benching kept me off the ice, two days since I waited in a freezing parking lot, two days since she was in my truck.
I lie on my back, staring at the ceiling, blackout curtains sealed tight so the room is a box of black. It doesn’t matter. The dark outside is nothing compared to the noise inside my head. It presses behind my eyes, a constant, pounding pressure. My skull feels one bad hit away from cracking.
I replay it in loops.
Her in the passenger seat, fingers curled in her sweatshirt sleeve when I hit that pothole.
The seatbelt cutting across her chest. The way the streetlight caught on her mouth when she looked at me.
The way she didn’t pull away when I leaned in.
Not right away—just that tiny, frozen moment of suspended gravity.
If I’d closed that last inch, I would’ve kissed her.
I know it.
My hands ache, a low, throbbing pulse from knuckles to wrist. I flex them against the sheets. The tape bites back. The skin underneath is still bruised from punching the post. I can still feel Rylan’s jersey clenched in my fist, the way the metal groaned and buckled around his head.
The sound of the impact echoes in the quiet room.
I hear my father’s voice layered over it, cold and flat. You embarrassed me.
Beatrice’s, syrup-thick. All that strength… you shouldn’t have to leash it so tightly.
Coach’s, in the locker room. You’re a liability. Stay away from her.
Talia’s, soft and too honest: I’m not alone. You’re here.
My ribs feel too tight. The bed feels like a coffin.
I rip the blankets off and sit up, elbows on my knees, head in my hands.
The room hums with phantom noise—the crowd, the clang of a locker, the slam of a door upstairs at Genny’s that I only heard about secondhand but can see too easily. Her flinch.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. For a second my chest jerks, stupid hope rocket-launching before my brain catches up.
Not her.
Adrian.
Adrian: Coach wants you in at 6. Office before ice. Don’t be late.
The adrenaline is instant. It hits like a puck to the sternum. Six a.m. usually means conditioning or film. Office means something else. Judgment. Decisions.
I stare at the message until the screen goes dark.
He’s either cutting me for real.
Or he’s letting me back in.
Either way, it’s not going to be quiet.
The arena at dawn is a different kind of dark than my apartment. Cleaner. Honest.
By the time I push through the side door, the sky outside is just starting to bruise from black to grey. The hallway lights buzz low. The Zamboni’s parked, the sheet a fresh, glassy mirror. Cold air knifes my lungs in the best way.
I should feel better. I’m in my church.
I don’t.
My stomach’s one solid knot as I walk past the locker room. I can hear a couple of guys already inside, voices low, joking about something stupid. My stall is there. My gear is there. But I pass the door and keep walking.
Straight to Coach’s office.
The door is half-open. Light spills in a narrow triangle across the hallway floor. I stop with my boot on the edge of it and knock once on the frame.
“Come in.”
His voice is clipped, controlled.
I step inside.
It’s the same office as always—whiteboard, schedule, line charts, stacks of game reports. Coffee half-drunk on the desk. But the air feels heavier. He’s behind the desk in a Titans pullover, arms folded, jaw tight. He looks tired, more lines around his eyes than last week.
“Took your time,” he says. “Sit.”
I drop into the chair opposite, hands on my knees. My taped knuckles stand out against the dark fabric of my sweats—bright, incriminating.
He studies me for a long beat. I hold his gaze and try not to fidget.
“Do you know why you’re benched?” he asks.
“Yes, Coach.” My voice feels like gravel. “I put my hand on a teammate’s throat and dented a locker.”
He nods once. “That’s the surface. That’s the part everyone saw. You know what I spent the last few days doing?”
No.
“Yes, Coach,” I say anyway.
“Trying to figure out if you’re a loaded gun pointed at this team,” he says. “Or a bomb someone else lit and walked away from.”
A muscle jumps in my jaw.
He leans back, eyes sharp. “So imagine my mood when Gio came into my office yesterday and shut the door.”
Something in my chest tightens. “Gio—”
“Gio told me what Rylan said,” he cuts in. “Word for word. I confirmed it with Maya. Dante backed it. Cole backed it.” His gaze hardens. “You want to tell me why I had to hear that from them instead of from you?”
The room seems to narrow. Heat crawls up the back of my neck.
“I handled it,” I say. It sounds pathetic even to me.
“You did not handle it,” he snaps. “You choked a kid in my locker room and left me in the dark about why.”
Because it was about your daughter.
Because I know what men like him are capable of when they decide you’re “sweet” and “quiet.”
Because the picture in my head of his hands anywhere near her made me see red.
None of that makes it past my teeth.
“He was talking about Talia,” I say instead, voice low. “Loud. Filthy. He said he wanted to ‘find out what she’s really like.’” My throat tightens around the repeat of it. “He knew exactly what he was doing.”
Coach’s jaw flexes. His knuckles go white on the arm of his chair.
“Why didn’t you come to me?” he asks. The anger is still there, but it’s shifted. Less explosion, more controlled burn.
“Because by the time I thought about it,” I say, “I already had him against the locker.”
And if I’d walked into his office and told him his daughter was a topic of locker-room commentary, I would’ve had to say her name. Out loud. Put it in his hands and watch what he did with it.
Silence stretches between us. His eyes search my face, like he’s looking for a crack he didn’t see before.
“Did you hit him?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “Just held him there.” A beat. “I wanted to.”
He exhales slowly, like he’s letting out steam.
“Here’s the thing, Reid,” he says. “Nothing about what Rylan said surprises me. He’s been riding the line since September. Mouth always going. I’ve been waiting for it to catch up to him.” He leans forward, elbows on the desk. “What surprises me is you.”
I hold his gaze. “Yes, Coach.”
“You’re supposed to be the anchor,” he says quietly. “The one who doesn’t bite first. I told you to stay away from her because all I had in front of me was damage and your hands around someone’s throat.”
He scrubs a hand over his face, the first crack in the iron control. “Then I get the rest of the story, and suddenly it’s not so simple.”
My pulse spikes. “Coach—”
He holds up a hand. “You don’t get a free pass because your motives were better than I thought. You still crossed a line. You still put your hands on a teammate. You still lied by omission.”
The words land like hits I deserve.
“But,” he adds, voice dropping, “I’m not going to turn you into a monster for protecting my kid.”
The word monster has teeth. Hearing him push it away from me instead of into me feels wrong in my ears.
My father would weaponize it. Beatrice would romanticize it.
Coach just… refuses it. For the first time all week, someone in charge looks at the whole picture and doesn’t decide I’m only the worst thing I’ve done.
His eyes sharpen. “You hear me?”
“Yes, Coach,” I say, hoarse.
“I am not happy,” he says. “I am not impressed. But I am… clear.” He grimaces, like the word tastes wrong. “Rylan is scratched indefinitely. He’s off my ice until I decide otherwise. You are back at practice starting today. You’ll dress for Saturday if I like what I see.”
Relief and guilt slam into each other hard enough to make me dizzy.
“You benched me,” I say. “You sure that sits okay with Admin?”
“Admin wanted your head,” he says bluntly. “I told them I’d deal with it internally. They don’t know about Talia. They don’t get to. That’s between you, me, and the four people who already heard too much.”
He leans in, eyes hard. “You ever lay a hand on my daughter, I end you. You know that.”
A flash of the dorm doorway hits me—my arm braced above her head, our mouths a breath apart. The heat of her skin. The scent of peppermint. The agonizing pull to cross the line.
If he knew how close I already came, this conversation would be a whole different kind of ending.
“Yes, Coach.”
“But I also know,” he says, “that if she were stuck in a dark parking lot with the wrong guy, you’d be the one I’d trust to get her out of it.”
The breath goes out of me in a sharp, silent exhale. That’s more trust than my own father’s given me in twenty-two years. More faith than Beatrice’s ever offered me that wasn’t wrapped in ownership.
“She was at Genny’s Saturday night,” he adds, almost conversationally. “We grabbed lunch yesterday. She mentioned it. Said she left late.” His gaze needles into me. “Anything I should know?”
Guilt hits me like a physical blow.
The truck. Her hand on my sleeve. The way I waited for her like a predator in the cold. The way I told myself I was protecting her while knowing damn well I just wanted to be near her.
I look him in the eye and lie to the only man who’s treated me like a human being all year.
“I was in the lot,” I say. “Happened to be in the area. I made sure she got to the door before I left.”
It’s close enough to the truth to pass, but it omits the most damning part: she was in the cab with me.
His jaw ticks. He doesn’t look surprised. “Of course you did.”
He studies me for another long beat. “Here’s where we are, Reid. I know you’re wound tight. I know your old man’s on you. You’ve been playing with a live wire wrapped around your neck since August. I should’ve seen it sooner.”