Chapter Thirty-Three
Brotherhood
Banks
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s team bonding, Banks. You can’t say no to team bonding.” Logan grins at me.
“I can. I am. Watch me.” I turn to walk away, but Logan grabs my arm with surprising strength for someone who looks like an oversized golden retriever.
“Nope. You’re coming. Coach’s orders.”
“Coach ordered this?”
“Well…” Logan’s grin turns sheepish. “He suggested team bonding. Which is basically the same thing.”
I stare at the building in front of us. It’s a nail salon. A fancy one, with cursive lettering on the window and the faint smell of acetone wafting through the door every time someone enters or exits.
“Logan. Why are we at a nail salon?”
“Because we’re getting pedicures.”
“We’re doing what now?”
“Pedicures. You know, when they soak your feet and scrub off all the dead skin—”
“I know what a pedicure is.”
“Then why did you ask?”
I close my eyes and count to ten. It doesn’t help.
The rest of the team is already inside. I can see them through the window—a dozen massive hockey players crammed into massage chairs, their feet submerged in bubbling water, looking varying degrees of confused, horrified, and resigned.
Zayden catches my eye and waves, his expression somewhere between apologetic and amused.
Archer is in the chair next to him, scrolling through his phone with forced casualness, like he gets pedicures all the time.
Weston—one of the new rookies—looks like he’s contemplating murder.
Rhys, the other rookie, is just staring at the ceiling, clearly dissociating.
“This is your idea of team bonding?” I ask.
“It’s my idea of getting everyone in touch with their feelings.” Logan steers me toward the door. “And you, my friend, have a lot of feelings to get in touch with.”
“I don’t have feelings.”
“You’re a terrible liar.” Logan pushes open the door, and the wall of chemical smell hits me full force. “Now get in there and let a nice lady touch your feet.”
I’m going to kill him. I’m going to wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze until—
“Banks!” One of the salon employees—a tiny woman with an aggressively cheerful smile—appears in front of me. “You must be Banks. We have your chair ready. Right this way.”
She leads me to an empty massage chair between Zayden and Logan, who’s already settled in and looking entirely too pleased with himself.
“This is a nightmare,” I mutter, lowering myself into the chair. It immediately starts vibrating, which does nothing to improve my mood.
“It’s self-care,” Logan corrects. “Very important for athletes. Reduces stress, improves circulation—”
“Did you read that off a pamphlet?”
“Maybe.”
The tiny woman returns and turns on the water in the basin, then gestures for me to put my feet in. After removing my shoes, I do, reluctantly, and have to admit—privately, where no one can hear me—that it does feel kind of nice.
“See?” Logan says, reading my expression. “Not so bad.”
“Shut up.”
“You’re welcome.”
Around us, the salon is chaos.
Grayson—who I’m surprised is even here, given our history—is sitting in a chair near the window, trying very hard to look cool and failing miserably. His foot keeps twitching away from the technician’s touch.
“Dude,” one of the rookies calls out. “Are you ticklish?”
“No.” Grayson’s voice is at least an octave higher than normal. “I’m just—she’s touching a sensitive—STOP THAT.”
The technician looks up, unimpressed. “Sir, I need to scrub between the toes.”
“Do you, though? Do you really?”
On the other side of the room, I hear Weston let out a string of profanity that would make a sailor blush.
“What’s wrong with him?” I ask.
“Calluses,” Zayden replies, not looking up from his phone. “Apparently, he’s got some serious ones. They’re using some kind of… blade thing.”
“A blade?”
“For the dead skin. Don’t think about it too hard.”
I think about it too hard and immediately regret it.
“This is nice, though,” Zayden continues, wiggling his toes in the water. “Tori makes me get pedicures with her sometimes. It’s actually pretty relaxing once you get past the weird parts.”
“The weird parts being…?”
“The stranger touching your feet. The pumice stone. The thing where they push back your cuticles.” He shrugs. “You get used to it.”
I don’t want to get used to it. I want to be literally anywhere else.
But as I look around the room—at my teammates, these men I’ve fought beside and bled beside, and won and lost beside—a knot loosens in my chest.
They’re here. Despite everything. Despite the rumors, the lies, and the mess I made.
They’re still here.
“Alright, everyone!” Logan stands up in his massage chair, water sloshing dangerously. “Can I have your attention, please?”
“Sit down, dude. You’re going to fall.”
“I’m not going to fall. I have excellent balance.” He wobbles and catches himself. “Okay, I have moderate balance. But that’s not the point. The point is—” He gestures dramatically at me. “Banks has something to say.”
Every head in the room turns toward me.
I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill him slowly and painfully and enjoy every second of it.
“I don’t have anything to say.”
Logan’s expression softens slightly. “Come on, man. Clear the air. We’re all here. We’re all listening. And no one’s going anywhere until these pedicures are done, so you’ve got a captive audience.”
He’s not wrong. And maybe—maybe—this is something I need to do.
I take a breath and look around at the faces watching me. “Fine.” I clear my throat. “I, uh… I owe you guys an apology.”
Silence. Even Grayson stops twitching.
“The thing with Winnie—it started fake. That part’s true.
She was having problems with some of you—” I carefully don’t look at Grayson, who has the decency to look ashamed— “and we came up with a plan to get everyone to back off. It was supposed to be temporary. Just so she could do her job in peace.”
“But it didn’t stay fake,” Zayden adds quietly.
“No. It didn’t.” I run a hand through my hair. “I fell for her. For real. And I should have told you guys that. I should have been honest instead of letting you think… whatever you thought.”
“We thought you were happy,” Archer says. “That’s what we thought.”
“I was happy. I am happy. I just—” I struggle for the right words.
“I’m not good at this. Talking about, uh, feelings.
Letting people in. After growing up in foster care and group homes, I spent most of my life convinced that everyone would leave eventually, so I never bothered getting close to anyone. ”
The room is quiet now. Even the technicians have paused their work, sensing the shift in atmosphere.
“But you guys…” I look at them—at Zayden, who’s been my friend since day one; at Archer, who gives advice without judgment; at Logan, who never stops trying to include me no matter how many times I push him away.
“You guys are the closest thing I’ve ever had to a family.
And I’m sorry I let you down. I’m sorry I made you feel played. That wasn’t fair.”
More silence. Then Logan starts clapping.
“That was beautiful, man. Truly. I’m getting emotional.” He clutches his chest.
“Please stop.”
“I can’t. I’m overwhelmed with feelings.” He wipes an imaginary tear. “My grumpy giant is all grown up.”
“I will drown you in this foot bath.”
“Worth it.”
Archer stands up, somehow managing to look dignified despite having cotton balls between his toes. He walks over—awkwardly, trying not to ruin his pedicure—and pulls me into a hug.
“You’re our brother, Banks. That doesn’t change because you made some mistakes.” He claps me on the back. “Just don’t do it again.”
“I won’t.”
“And for the record, we all knew it wasn’t fake. At least not by the end. The way you looked at her…” He shakes his head. “That wasn’t acting. That was a man in love.”
One by one, the others join in. Zayden gives me a fist bump and a nod. Logan tackles me in a hug that nearly sends us both into the foot bath. Even Weston, who I’ve barely spoken to, grunts something that might be “we’re good” before retreating to his chair.
And then there’s Grayson.
He hangs back while the others disperse, his expression unreadable. We’ve never been close—for obvious reasons—and part of me expects him to take this opportunity to twist the knife.
Instead, he walks over and sticks out his hand.
“I was an asshole,” he says. “To Winnie. To you. I spread those rumors because I was pissed that she picked you over me, and that was a dick move.”
I stare at his hand. Then at his face. “You’re apologizing?”
“Don’t make it weird.” He shakes his hand impatiently. “Just take it.”
I take it. We shake. It’s awkward and uncomfortable—exactly how two emotionally stunted hockey players would handle a reconciliation.
“We good?” he asks.
“We’re getting there.”
He nods and walks away, and something that’s been tight in my chest for weeks finally releases.
“So,” Logan says, appearing at my elbow with his pedicure completed, toenails painted a shocking shade of electric blue. “How do we feel? Cleansed? Renewed? In touch with our emotions?”
“I feel like I need to do something aggressively masculine to counteract this experience.”
“Funny you should say that.” His grin is terrifying. “Because I have a plan.”
Two hours later, I’m covered in paint.
Blue paint. Green paint. An alarming amount of orange paint that I’m pretty sure Logan targeted me with specifically.
“Paintball was an excellent idea,” Archer wheezes, hunched behind a barricade next to me. “I’m so glad we did this.”
“You suggested it.”
“I was high on foot massage endorphins. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
Across the field, I can hear Logan cackling as he unloads on the rookies, who made the mistake of forming an alliance and immediately turning on each other.
Zayden is somewhere on my left, methodically picking off targets with the precision of a sniper. Weston has gone full Rambo, streaking across the field with two guns blazing, looking like he’s been waiting his whole life for this moment.
Surprisingly, Rhys is terrifyingly good at this. He’s barely visible—a ghost slipping between obstacles—and every few minutes, someone yelps as a paintball hits them from an impossible angle.
“I think Rhys might be a secret assassin,” Archer observes.
“I think Rhys might be the only one of us who knows what he’s doing.”
A paintball whizzes past my head, close enough to feel the air displacement. I duck lower behind the barricade.
“This is chaos,” Archer says.
“This is perfect.”
And it is. It’s messy and loud and ridiculous—a bunch of overgrown children shooting each other with paint in the name of masculine bonding—but it’s exactly what we needed.
We’re a team again. A family. Whatever fractures formed over the past few weeks are healing, filled in with laughter, competition, and the shared absurdity of professional athletes getting pedicures and then immediately ruining them in a paintball war.
By the time we call a ceasefire, everyone is exhausted, paint-splattered, and grinning like idiots.
“Wings?” Logan suggests, somehow still energetic despite the paint dripping from his hair. “There’s a place down the street. Best Buffalo wings in Brooklyn. They have like forty different sauces.”
“I could eat,” Zayden says.
“I could eat a horse,” Weston adds, which is the most words I’ve heard him string together at once.
We pile into cars and head to the restaurant—a dive bar with sticky tables and sports memorabilia covering every inch of wall space. The kind of place where no one cares if you show up covered in paint.
We commandeer the back room, order approximately forty pounds of chicken wings, and settle in.
The conversation flows easily. Zayden tells a story about Maisie’s latest obsession—she’s switched from dinosaurs to unicorns.
Archer shares an update on his kids; he’s working on things with his wife, trying to make their relationship better.
Logan talks about his plans for the townhouse, which now apparently include a “gaming suite” and a “meditation garden,” which Weston immediately vetoes.
Somewhere in the midst of it all, surrounded by my teammates—my brothers—I feel something I haven’t felt in a long time.
Joy.
Real, uncomplicated joy.
“Hey,” Zayden says, nudging me with his elbow. “You good?”
I look around the table at these men who showed up for me, who forgave me, and who reminded me that family isn’t just about blood—it’s about the people who choose to stay.
“Yeah,” I reply, and I mean it. “I’m good.”
“Good.” He raises his beer. “To Banks. Who finally got his head out of his ass.”
“To Banks!” the table choruses.
I flip them all off with one hand and raise my beer with the other.
“To the team,” I counter. “The ugliest, loudest, most annoying group of idiots I’ve ever had the misfortune of playing with.”
“Aw,” Logan coos. “He loves us.”
“I tolerate you. There’s a difference.”
“Sure there is, buddy. Sure there is.” He throws an arm around my shoulder, and for once, I don’t shrug it off.
I let myself be part of it. Part of them.
As the night wears on—wings disappear, beers multiply, and laughter grows louder—I realize something.
I’m not alone anymore.
Maybe I never was.