19. No Spin #3
When it faded, Talia folded her arms and looked at him the way she had in classrooms and hearing rooms and hallway corners where the air had gone tight around them. But there was no procedural distance left in it now. No institutional line to hide behind.
“You said you didn’t want forgiveness purchased by a trophy,” she said. “Good. Because I’m not offering forgiveness as a transaction.”
He held very still.
“I’m offering honesty,” she said. “I wanted you. Even when it was inconvenient. Even when it was stupid. Even when I was angry with you. And I refused to build anything with you while I thought you were still trying to earn absolution through performance.”
Every muscle in his body seemed to lock and release at once.
“Talia—”
“No, let me finish.” Her chin lifted. Agency in every inch of her. “I have my own work. My own ethics. My own career to protect from becoming a footnote to a hockey scandal or a man’s redemption arc. I am not here because you won a championship.”
“I know that.”
“I’m here,” she said, “because tonight you stood in front of every easy narrative available to you and refused to crawl into any of them.”
He stared at her.
The hallway had gone quiet enough now that he could hear the heater clicking in the wall unit below the window. Hear the distant, muffled roar of his teammates starting up another chant somewhere deep in the building. Hear his own breathing, roughened by fatigue and need.
He took one step closer.
Not enough to touch. Enough to ask.
“If I say I’m done performing for this,” he said, voice low, “you’ll tell me if I’m lying.”
“Immediately.”
“And if I say I want you in my life in a way that has nothing to do with making this week prettier—”
“I’ll ask what that means in practice.”
His mouth almost curved. “That’s deeply on brand.”
“I take that as a compliment.”
“It is.”
Another step. Close now. Close enough to see the faint tiredness at the edges of her eyes, the strand of hair that had worked loose by her temple, the pulse moving at the base of her throat above the collar of her coat.
No cameras here.
No microphones.
No spin.
“What it means,” he said, “is I want to know you when there isn’t a hearing.
I want your bad moods and your impossible standards and the way you go terrifyingly quiet when someone says something ethically sloppy.
I want coffee with you when it isn’t strategy.
I want to be told when I’m protecting someone from consequences because I know I still do that. I want—”
His voice caught.
Only one person sees him.
He exhaled and finished anyway. “I want to stop being brave in public and dishonest in private.”
Talia’s eyes held his.
For one suspended second he thought she might cut him open again, not out of cruelty but because she could and because truth mattered more than comfort to her.
Instead she said, very quietly, “That is the first genuinely romantic thing you’ve said to me.”
He barked a tired laugh.
“Low bar?”
“Embarrassingly.”
Then she stepped into him.
Not all at once. Not dramatic. Chosen.
Her gloved hand came to the front of his jersey, fingers catching in the damp fabric just below the championship patch. His body reacted like impact—heat, tension, the brutal awareness of every inch of space between them collapsing.
“Tell me one more true thing,” she said.
He looked down at her hand, then back at her face.
“My leg hurts.”
She gave him a flat look.
He let out another breath. “I was scared to see you after the hearing because I thought if you looked disappointed enough, it would finish what I already suspected about myself.”
Her hand tightened on his jersey.
“And now?” she asked.
“Now I think you looked at me more clearly than I’d ever let anyone else do.”
Something vulnerable flashed across her face then, quick and unhidden. It undid him more than tears would have.
So when she tipped her chin up and gave him the final inch of permission, he took it carefully.
He kissed her like a man setting something down instead of seizing it.
Slow first. Cold air still clinging to her mouth, the faint taste of coffee gone stale, the press of her hand at his chest anchoring him in the exact body he’d played and bled and told the truth inside tonight.
His good hand went to her jaw. His taped left stayed at his side until she shifted closer and made a soft, impatient sound into the kiss that felt like reward.
Then he touched her with that hand too—careful, reverent, aching—and she kissed him harder.
Everything outside the two of them blurred.
The heater click. The faraway music. The sting in his leg. The throb in his thumb. Even the championship still somewhere glittering under arena lights.
He played like the world was watching.
He kissed her like no one was.
When they broke, both of them breathing differently, Talia kept her forehead against his for one precious second.
“You still need imaging,” she murmured.
“Cruel thing to say after that.”
“Truthful thing.”
He smiled against her mouth. “You really are impossible.”
“And yet.”
“And yet.”
He could have stayed there. In the narrow corridor, with snow stitching white lines beyond the glass and her hand still fisted in his jersey, he could have stayed until the building shut off around them.
But from deeper in the arena came the unmistakable thunder of the locker-room door flying open, followed by Owen’s voice, loud enough to wake the dead.
“Mercer! If you’re not actively dying, get in here!”
Talia closed her eyes briefly.
Noah laughed under his breath. “Family.”
“Loud,” she said.
“Frayed. Honest.”
Her gaze sharpened at that, catching the echo.
Then her phone buzzed.
Once. Twice. A third time in fast succession.
She frowned, pulling it from her coat pocket with her free hand. The screen lit her face pale blue in the dim hall. Noah watched her eyes move.
Then stop.
The warmth between them shifted.
Not vanished.
Complicated.
“What is it?” he asked.
Talia looked up slowly.
“The report summary shouldn’t be public until morning,” she said.
Another buzz.
Her expression went flat in the precise way he had learned to fear.
“It’s out now.”