10. Off the Record #2
Talia looked at him, really looked, and saw the private wound under the captain steadiness as clearly as if he had turned his palms up.
He had been the family peacekeeper so long he had built an identity out of absorbency.
Give him panic, guilt, mess, and he would take it into himself until everybody else had more room to breathe.
Everyone wants him; only one person sees him.
The thought came again, sharper now because she understood more of what it cost.
“You are not the process,” she said.
“No.” His voice roughened. “But they keep coming to me like I am.”
A shout rose outside from somewhere across the quad—students, laughter, a car door slamming. The campus kept moving, bright and ordinary, while in this overheated office his face gave away something it did not give to cameras.
Talia stood before she could think too hard about it and came around the desk.
Noah watched her approach with a stillness that made the air thrum. He did not reach for her. He never assumed the right.
Agency, always. Even now.
That mattered. More than he probably knew.
She stopped in front of him, close enough to smell cold wool thawing into room heat, the faint clean trace of soap, and underneath it the male warmth his jacket had trapped. Her heartbeat turned traitorous.
“Show me,” she said, nodding to his hand.
He exhaled through his nose. “This is extortion.”
“This is triage.”
“With worse bedside manner.”
“You’re alive, aren’t you?”
One corner of his mouth tipped. “Questionable.”
But he held out the hand.
She crouched slightly to see better and touched the edge of the tape with careful fingers. His breath changed at once, not from pain alone. The awareness between them was too alive now to pretend this was purely practical.
The wrap was neat, practiced. The skin around it was not. Inflamed at the base, tenderness hidden under discipline and repetition.
“You should not be taking faceoffs like this,” she said.
“Good thing I don’t take many.”
“Do not get technical with me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
She looked up.
He was already looking down at her, eyes dark and intent and too open.
“You’re playing through more than you’ve said,” she murmured.
He gave a small, helpless shrug with his free shoulder. “It’s November.”
“As a medical defense, that is embarrassing.”
“As a hockey defense, it’s airtight.”
She rose, still holding his hand for one extra second before she let go. The release felt larger than it should have.
Noah’s eyes dropped briefly to her mouth.
Heat moved low in her body, immediate and unreasonable.
“This is what I mean,” she said, because she needed one of them to sound coherent. “You keep deciding pain is only relevant if it inconveniences someone else.”
He went very quiet.
Then, with none of the ease he used for the world, he said, “You make it hard to hide from myself.”
The hope in her came then—not bright, not safe, but undeniable. Not because the situation had improved. It had not. The board was circling. Missing footage implied intention, not clerical sloppiness. Noah was lying by omission to half the campus and perhaps to himself most of all.
And still.
He was trying.
Talia touched the desk edge behind her to steady herself. “That is not a compliment.”
“I know.” He stood. The chair gave a quiet scrape against the carpet. Suddenly the office felt smaller by half. “It also isn’t false.”
Their faces were close enough now that she could count the darker flecks in his irises. She should have moved. She did not.
“We only have a few minutes,” she said.
His gaze held hers. “You say that like you’re reminding yourself.”
“I am.”
Something warm and aching passed through his expression. “Good.”
“Good?”
“If you stop being smarter than me, I’m in real trouble.”
“You are already in real trouble.”
“Yeah.” His voice dropped. “But I’m in your office.”
That was not fair.
Talia put one hand lightly against the center of his chest—not pushing, not pulling, just feeling the solid heat of him through the quarter-zip and undershirt beneath. His breath hitched. The response was so immediate and unperformed it nearly undid her.
“You cannot keep using honesty as foreplay,” she said.
His laugh was low and startled and gone too fast. “I really wasn’t.”
“That somehow makes it worse.”
“It probably does.”
She could feel his heartbeat under her palm, hard and steady and human in a way the highlight reels never captured.
The public image was all composure and leadership, the smiling heartbeat of the Wolves.
This was the private pulse beneath it, accelerated because she was touching him and he was letting her.
Trust was becoming physical.
Dangerous.
Necessary.
“Tell me one thing cleanly,” she said.
He nodded.
“No management. No team-approved phrasing. No protecting me from the answer.”
A pause.
Then: “I’m scared somebody’s going to make a kid wear this alone because it’s easier than admitting how many adults watched and called it normal.”
The words sat between them, stark and unsanded.
Talia’s throat tightened.
There was no jersey in that sentence. No captain voice. No grin. Just Noah.
And because hope was apparently a reckless thing, she believed him.
Her thumb moved once against his chest before she could stop it. “Thank you.”
He looked startled by the gratitude. “For what?”
“For not packaging that.”
His eyes softened. “You really hate packaging.”
“I’m a doctoral candidate in ethics. It’s practically devotional.”
“No,” he said quietly. “It’s personal.”
She stilled.
He saw too much. That was becoming a problem of its own.
Before she could answer, footsteps sounded in the hall again—closer this time, voices layered under them. Instantly Noah stepped back. The shift was almost surgical. Distance, posture, neutral face. Athlete in a faculty office, nothing more.
The speed of the transformation should have bothered her.
Instead it made her chest ache.
The voices passed. One laugh. A jangling key ring. Then silence.
Noah exhaled and looked faintly disgusted with himself. “I hate this part.”
“The sneaking?”
“The part where I walk around acting like we didn’t kiss in a snowstorm because two men in university coats happened to ruin the timing.”
She crossed her arms, trying for severity and probably missing by a mile. “That was not the only thing ruining the timing.”
“Fair.”
“And for the record, your timing remains terrible.”
He tipped his head. “And yet.”
And yet.
She hated how much warmth lived inside those two words.
That was how it started, she realized later—not with one grand surrender, but with this accumulation of stolen honesty. A brownie tin abandoned on her desk. Five minutes before class. A hand offered without argument. A sentence told cleanly because she had demanded it.
After that, they kept finding each other in the seams of the day.
At dusk between Halcyon Academic and the library, where lamplight glazed the snowbanks gold and students hurried by in clouds of breath.
In the side corridor outside the lecture hall after her evening discussion section let out, Noah waiting with his knit cap low and his huge body folded into patience against cinderblock.
Once on the long sheltered walkway between buildings while sleet tapped the plexiglass roof overhead and he held out a paper cup of vending-machine cocoa with an expression so dubious she laughed before she could stop herself.
“It’s terrible,” he warned.
“Then why did you buy it?”
“You looked cold.”
“That is not a justification.”
“It is to me.”
Always that code. Take care of your people first.
The more she saw of him, the more she understood both its beauty and its damage.
He did play better. She could see it even before campus started saying so.
Less frantic in the neutral zone. Cleaner decisions.
More patience with the younger defensemen when they blew a rotation.
A goal against Bemidji off a rebound he had no business reaching, then a postgame quote to local media about “collective response” delivered with that bright, dependable grin while sweat dried at his hairline and his left hand stayed carefully angled out of frame.
Public Noah belonged to everyone.
Private Noah texted her after midnight from outside the training room.
You awake?
She stared at the message in the dark, then answered before she could talk herself out of it.
Unfortunately.
Three dots appeared almost at once.
Need a walk?
She should have said no.
Instead she put on boots and met him under the bell tower, where snow crusted the edges of the brick path and the whole campus had gone hushed except for distant traffic and the hum of the maintenance trucks.
He stood there in a black beanie and heavy jacket, hands in his pockets, shoulders carrying the kind of fatigue that came after a game and too much pretending.
“You scored,” she said by way of greeting.
He fell into step beside her. “You watched.”
“It was on at the bar where my cohort was grading.”
“Mm.” He glanced down at her, something pleased and private in the look. “And here I thought governance scholars only drank and ruin lives.”
“We also cite sources.”
“Hot.”
She snorted. He smiled, and for a few minutes they let themselves be easy.
Then, halfway past the dark science building, he flexed his left hand once with a sharp, involuntary breath.
Talia stopped walking. “How bad?”
He kept his gaze on the path. “Manageable.”
“Again. Not a number.”
“It spikes after games.”
“Are you getting treatment?”
“Yes.”
“Are you listening to the treatment?”
He gave her a sidelong look. “That question feels loaded.”
“Because it is.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Tape, ice, anti-inflammatories. They want imaging again if it doesn’t settle down.”
“And?”
“And we play St. Brendan again in nine days.”
She went still under the winter stars.
There it was: athletic pressure stripped down to bone. Rivalry, conference standings, a wounded body, and Noah already arranging himself as sacrifice because his team was shorthanded and scared and somebody had to look steady at the front.