Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Sammie
The office door opened like a breath held too long, then let go.
My father stepped into the hall first, shoulders squared in that way that means he’s still inside the conversation he just left.
Triston followed, a shadow with edges, gaze steady, jaw set.
They didn’t touch, didn’t spar; they passed each other’s gravity and the air changed. I felt it on my skin.
For a heartbeat none of us moved.
Then Dad said my name, just “Sammie” and the house gathered itself around the sound. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. He dropped my name in the center of the hall like a coin in water and watched the ripples reach me.
“Kitchen.” He gestures before he moves.
I follow because I always do.
The party has thinned to stragglers who stayed too long out of habit.
A couple of guys were shrugging into jackets, a rookie whispers something to an assistant coach and gets shooed toward the door.
The music was off; the quiet felt like it had bones.
In the kitchen the lights were too bright and the counters too clean, as if someone had already tried to scrub the night into something digestible.
Dad stood on one side of the island. He didn’t tell me where to stand; the room told me. The window over the sink was a black square reflecting our faces back at us. Behind us, the last door closed and the lock slid into place with a soft, final click.
He held my gaze a second longer than was comfortable. Not angry, alert. Like a man counting wind shifts.
“What’s going on between you and Triston?”
No preamble. No pretense. Just the line.
I had a dozen small lies I could wear like scarves… He’s worried about the team, he’s checking in, he’s being nice because of Andrew, but they were thin fabric in a cold room. I lifted a hand and set it down again because I didn’t know what to do with it.
“Nothing.” I said, and even the word flinched. I swallowed. “We talked.”
“Right.” His mouth barely moved, but the muscle in his jaw did. “And you two have been ‘talking’ for weeks?”
Heat rose under my skin. I thought of hallways and shadows and the way the rink hums when the compressor kicks. I thought of a shed and the word I said in a voice I barely recognized as mine. It lived just under my tongue now, warm and dangerous.
“We see each other a lot.” I managed. “It’s a small world.”
“It’s my world.” He paused. Then. “And you’re my kid.”
I could have said I’m nineteen. That legal adulthood is a technicality when the person across from you still sees pigtails and skinned knees. Saying it would have been a cheap swing. He wasn’t talking about law. He was talking about belonging.
“I know.” I said, because it was the only honest thing in the room that didn’t burn to shit. “I’m not trying to—” I stopped. Hurt you was the end of that sentence. It felt like an accusation to say it out loud.
He leans on his palms, knuckles whitening against the butcher block.
“Triston is ten years older than you.” He said, but it wasn’t the number that scraped; it was what he put under it.
“He was your brother’s teammate. He’s my captain.
He’s been in the room I work in every day since before you finished high school.
Do you understand what that means, Sammie? ”
That my life is stitched into theirs. That if I pull one thread, the whole sweater can unravel.
“It means you trust him.” I said, because that’s where my mind went, hopelessly.
“It means I thought I did.” He shoots back, too fast, then closes his eyes like he’d fired and wanted the bullet back.
When he opened them, his voice became softer.
“It means if he so much as breathes wrong near you, I can’t coach him.
I can’t lead this team. I can’t…I can’t be your father and his boss and pretend I’m not a person. ”
The honesty of that knocked the air out of me. “We didn’t—” I began, and couldn’t finish either direction the sentence tried to go.
“Don’t make me be the bad guy for asking you to be careful.” He wasn’t pleading, but something in it reached toward that. “Don’t make me the wall you bounce off just to prove you can.”
I bristled on reflex. “This isn’t about rebellion.”
“No?” He questions, pinning me with a look that knows every dart I might throw. “It’s about hunger you think will starve if you box it up and label it wrong.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen enough boys on buses to know what that look means.”
“You’re not talking about me.” I snap. It stung that he was, and that he thought he had to translate me through them to understand me.
“I’m talking about humans.” He said simply.
“And young.” He studied my face, and I hated that I stood straighter like that would make me older.
“Is he forcing anything? Has he put hands on you you didn’t want?
If he has, I will—” He stops himself so hard it shakes his shoulders.
“Say no and I’ll believe you. Say yes and I’ll handle it.
But don’t stand in the doorway pretending you’re not in the room. ”
The directness of it shakes me and steadies me at once. “No.” I said, clearly. “He hasn’t…forced.” My cheeks burned at the end of the sentence. “I’m not a thing to be dragged anywhere.”
He exhaled like some fist in his chest loosened. It didn’t open. It just loosened.
“Then fucking hear me.” he growls with his voice low. “He’s not for you, Sam. Not now. Maybe not ever. He is a storm you think is weather. He will blow your life apart and call it air. That’s what men like him do when they don’t know how to want softly.”
Something inside me bucks at that—not because it wasn’t partly true, but because it wasn’t the whole story. I had felt softness under his control, a careful angle in the way he didn’t touch until I asked. The storm had a center. I stood there and remained myself.
“You don’t know him.” I said before I could swallow it.
He barked a laugh that had no humor in it. “I know him better than you do.”
“You know the captain.” I pause. “You know how he moves on the ice and in the locker room. You know the part of him that belongs to the team. You don’t—” You don’t know how he says my name like he’s taking care of it felt like I was putting my throat in a saw, so I didn’t say that. “You don’t know all of him.”
“And you do.” He spits, not a question.
“I’m learning.” I said, and hated that my voice shook. It sounded like an apology when I meant declaration.
He closes his eyes again, and I watch him do the thing he does with rage and fear.
When he looks at me, grief has edged his anger into something quieter, and it crushes me worse.
“After your brother.” He said, and the room bent around the name even though he didn’t say it. “After last Halloween, I promised myself there wouldn’t be another thing I wish I’d stopped. I can’t lose you to something I can see coming.”
You can’t keep me either, I didn’t say. Both things were true and neither belonged in this kitchen without a fight.
“I’m not asking you to stop being my father.” I said instead. “I’m asking you not to make me disappear to fit inside your fear.”
He flinched. Just a tiny jerk in the muscle above his eye. “So it’s serious.”
“I don’t have a word for it yet.” My honesty surprises us both.
His gaze slides to the window and back, like he needed the black square to steady his eyes.
“If you keep… seeing him.” He said, measuring each word.
“It can’t be in my house. It cannot be in the rink.
I won’t have you hurt and then have to put a whistle to my mouth and pretend I didn’t help build the field you got hurt on. ”
“Hurt.” I echoed. “What if I’m not?”
He gave me a look that was both tender and brutal. “Then you won’t mind making it a little harder for him.”
I stared. “You want me to…?”
“I want you to choose daylight. If you’re going to do this, don’t do shadows under my roof. Don’t make me complicit in the sneaking. Don’t make me lie to myself about what I’ve seen.”
I thought of the shed like a confession booth. I thought of the porch where the dark folded around us like a co-signer. The word daylight felt rude and right, like cold water. It made the ache in me clearer. It made it less magic and more fact.
“I can’t promise to stop.” I said, and the tremor leaving my voice felt like a piece of ice breaking off a river. “I can promise not to hide in here.”
His relief was small and real. “That’s a start.”
Silence stretched between us, not empty, not full. I picked at a place on the counter where a tiny chip in the varnish caught my nail. He drummed his fingers once, stopped himself, and folded his hands instead.
“He’s going to push.” Dad said finally. “That’s who he is. The ice made him that way and life did the rest. You think you know where your lines are until someone like that tests every inch of the fence. What are you going to do when he puts weight on the posts?”
I thought of last night’s restraint. I thought of the way don’t stop, left my mouth like a key and unlocked a door I’d stood outside for months. My cheeks go hot, my pulse thuds in my throat, but underneath the rush was a strange calm. I had an answer now that I wouldn't have had yesterday.
“Say what I want out loud.” I said. “Not after. During.”
He blinks at that. Surprise, then something like respect, crosses his face before it is gone.
“Good.” He said, voice a notch lower. “Then you say it to me too.” He pointed gently at the floor between us.
“If this gets too big, if it hurts, if it turns you into someone you don’t like, come here and say it.
Don’t disappear into somebody else’s world. ”
Emotion smacks me without warning. “Okay.” I said around it.
He comes around the island then, slow, as if approaching a wild animal that might bolt. He puts his hands on my shoulders the way you place them on a child who is sick, firm and steady and full of all the helplessness men like him hate. He kisses my hair.