10. Off the Record
Off the Record
The first secret arrived with the smell of burnt sugar.
Talia looked up from a stack of policy briefs to find a dented brownie tin on the corner of her desk, snow melting off its lid in tiny silver beads, and Noah Mercer standing just inside her office door with his shoulders still full of rink-cold.
Her pulse betrayed her immediately.
His mouth twitched, not the bright public smile from posters and stream thumbnails, but the smaller one she had learned belonged to no audience. “Before you say this is a bribe,” he said, keeping his voice low, “I already know you’re going to say it’s a bribe.”
She shut the article in front of her without looking at it. “Because it is.”
“Counterpoint.” He nudged the tin a fraction closer with his right hand. His left stayed tucked in the pocket of his jacket. “It’s stress baking with plausible deniability.”
The office around them was narrow and overheated, one wall lined with shelves sagging under binders and books on governance, ethics, and institutional accountability.
Outside the half-closed blinds, late afternoon had already gone blue with winter.
The radiator hissed. Somewhere down the hall a copier started up with a mechanical groan.
Talia folded her arms and tried not to remember exactly how his mouth had felt in the snow two days ago.
“You cannot keep appearing in my office like a campus ghost with contraband.”
“Homemade,” he corrected.
“That is not the reassuring part of that sentence.”
His eyes warmed. Just enough to soften the exhaustion still living behind them.
He looked better than he had outside the library—clean-shaven, knit cap gone, damp hair pushed back from his forehead as if he’d come in from the cold and run a hand through it.
But she could still read the strain in the set of his shoulders.
Public Noah might have recovered the grin for cameras. Private Noah had not slept enough.
And still, absurdly, some part of her had begun to recognize the exact quality of relief in his face when he saw her.
That was the danger. Not desire. Not even secrecy.
Relief.
“You have class in fifteen minutes,” she said.
“So throw me out in fourteen.”
Her gaze dropped, involuntary, to the pocket where his left hand was hidden. “How’s your thumb?”
He glanced down as if he’d forgotten he owned a body. “Fine.”
“Terrible answer.”
“It’s a hockey answer.”
“You do know those are not synonyms.”
He laughed under his breath, and the sound did something deeply inconvenient to her concentration.
Noah leaned back against the closed door, careful, listening for hallway traffic even while he looked at her.
The quiet between them had changed since the kiss.
It was no longer empty space filled with argument and resisted attraction.
It was charged, yes, but threaded with something steadier—an awareness that they had crossed into truth and somehow not ruined it.
Or not yet.
Talia rose from her chair and crossed to the blinds. She tilted one slat with two fingers and checked the corridor. Empty.
When she turned back, he was watching her with that unnerving, undivided attention he gave when he stopped performing and simply let himself be.
“No one saw you come in?” she asked.
“One undergrad on the stairwell who thought I was looking for Professor Greene.”
“You lied to a student.”
“I redirected with confidence.”
She gave him a look.
He held up his right hand in surrender. “Yes, Doctor Shah.”
That title should not have sounded the way it did in his mouth now—softened by private history, almost intimate. She felt heat rise anyway and hated that he saw it.
Noah’s expression gentled. “Long day?”
“Always.”
He nodded toward the papers. “Audit?”
“Dissertation chapter revisions, actually. Some of us contain multitudes.”
“I never doubted that.”
The answer came easy, but not careless. Noah did not flirt like a man collecting reactions. He offered things as if they mattered to him whether she accepted them or not.
That was worse than charm. Charm she could classify. Charm she could resist.
“Sit,” she said, and heard her own voice sharpen to compensate.
He obeyed immediately, lowering himself into the chair opposite her desk with the contained grace of an athlete trying not to remind the room how large he was.
His knees nearly brushed the filing cabinet.
His jacket opened enough for her to see the gray Wolves quarter-zip underneath, the university mark over his heart.
Face of the program.
And still, this version of him came bearing overbaked brownies like an apology and a peace offering and a confession he did not yet know how to phrase.
Talia sat again and opened the tin.
The brownies were uneven, too dark at the edges, one corner missing where he had clearly tested them himself. The scent hit warm and sweet and a little bitter, all caramelized sugar and cocoa.
She looked up. “These are overdone.”
“I was busy catastrophizing.”
“Honesty. Nice change.”
His gaze held hers. “I’m trying.”
The room seemed to narrow by an inch.
Talia broke off a corner and tasted it. Dry. Rich. Better than it looked.
“Annoyingly decent,” she admitted.
“High praise from you.”
“Do not get used to it.”
He leaned his head back against the chair and closed his eyes for a second, smiling in that private, disbelieving way that made him look younger than twenty-four and much more dangerous to her peace of mind.
The smile faded first.
“Board interviews started this morning,” he said.
There it was. The real reason he had come.
Talia set the brownie down. “With players?”
He nodded. “Some. Staff. Equipment. Academic support.”
“Counsel present?”
“For the staff. Players got told they could request representation.” He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling, jaw ticking once. “Half of them don’t know what that means.”
“Did you?”
“No.” A beat. “I do now.”
She studied him. “Were you interviewed?”
“Not yet.”
Not yet. Not no.
Outside, footsteps sounded in the hall, then passed. Noah’s posture changed subtly until the sound disappeared. Only then did he let a breath out.
The constant calculation of visibility had become its own language between them. Who might see. Who might guess. Which doors could stay open and which could not.
It should have chilled hope dead on contact.
Instead it seemed to feed it in secret, giving every small moment stolen weight.
Talia hated how human she had become around him.
“What aren’t you telling me?” she asked.
His mouth flattened. “Still direct.”
“I am not developing a new personality this late in the semester.”
That got another fleeting curve at the edge of his lips. Then he rubbed the heel of his right hand over his chest once, as if something beneath his sternum ached.
“There’s more missing than tutoring logs,” he said quietly.
Talia went still. “What do you mean?”
“Footage. Hallway cams outside one of the study rooms. Two nights. Gone.”
Her mind moved at once, assembling implications. Access, deletion authority, timeline, chain of custody. “How do you know that?”
His eyes came back to her face. Careful now. Guard rising.
And there it was again—the old instinct, the one that made him leak truth by teaspoons and call it protection.
She set both palms flat on the desk. “Noah.”
He heard the warning.
“I’m not asking you to burn someone with gossip,” she said. “I’m asking what exactly you know and how.”
He looked down at his left hand still in his pocket, then finally pulled it free and laid it on his thigh.
Fresh tape wrapped the thumb in the same spiral she had seen him redo on the bus in her mind, white against reddened skin. The joint looked angry under it.
He caught her looking and curled the hand slightly. “Don’t.”
“Then stop giving me new things to worry about.”
A muscle moved in his jaw. “I heard from somebody who had reason to notice.”
“Somebody on staff?”
“No names.”
“Convenient.”
“It’s not about convenience.”
“It’s about control.”
His gaze sharpened, but he didn’t push back this time. Progress, perhaps, or exhaustion.
“I’m trying to keep people from getting flattened before there’s enough to matter,” he said.
“And while you try, the circle of things you aren’t telling me keeps growing.”
“I know.”
The quiet answer took some of the heat out of her anger by refusing to dodge it.
She leaned back in her chair and looked at him properly. Not the team-approved version. The one beneath.
Noah carried everybody like a reflex. It was stitched through him so deeply he mistook it for morality.
But lately she had started to see the cost with humiliating clarity: the lies were not born of arrogance, but panic.
If he could just hold it all one more day, one more interview, one more game, maybe no one else would have to bleed first.
It was a terrible instinct for the truth.
It was also heartbreakingly sincere.
“You cannot investigate this yourself,” she said.
His expression said he already knew she would say it and had done it anyway.
“Too late.”
“Noah.”
“I’m not kicking in doors.” He glanced toward the blinds. “I’m asking questions.”
“You are a player in a program under board review. You are not a neutral fact-finder. You are a walking conflict of interest with a slap shot.”
That almost made him smile.
Almost.
“I know what I am,” he said.
“Do you?” she asked softly. “Because from where I’m sitting, you keep behaving like if you can just gather enough truth by hand, you’ll somehow get to decide how much damage it does.”
The words landed. He did not flinch from them this time.
“No,” he said after a moment. “I keep behaving like if I don’t know what happened, I can’t look some nineteen-year-old in the eye and tell him to trust the process.”
The room went still around that sentence.