20 - Sage
Sage
The bell over the door jingled just as I snagged the keys from the counter.
Aiden leaned against the frame, hoodie slung over his shoulders, hair damp at the roots. He was dressed in jeans and a hoodie, but it was clear he’d come from the arena the way sweat and adrenaline clung to him in a faint tang that made heat crawl along my spine.
“Catch the game?” He sauntered inside with that easy swagger that told me he was pretending to be totally chill when inside, he totally wasn’t.
“Nope,” I said. “Had to work late, then prepped for the convention.” My fingers brushed the side of my sketchbook on the reception desk by reflex, and Aiden didn’t need a second invitation.
I snapped for it at the same time he reached, but he was faster.
“Wow. This is a new one?” He flipped through the pages, pausing over some drawings longer than others.
“Careful.”
He traced a shadowed line with the tip of his finger. “This is unbelievable.”
“It’s all experimental at this point,” I said, fighting the urge to allow that look of awe to seep into my insecurities. “Pushing textures, color blending, all that technical stuff I’ll be judged for in Denver.”
In his distraction, I managed to snatch my sketchbook from his hands.
But before he could protest, I gave his hoodie a tug and led him to the armchairs in the waiting area.
He followed, sitting close enough for his shoulder to brush mine.
His scent right under my nose stirred something in me I had no intention of acknowledging.
I cleared my throat and flipped the page to an intricate portrait I was still working on. “Micro-realism on skin is always a gamble. Everyone will be watching.”
“You can use my body to practice,” he said with a smirk. “In fact, you can use my body for anything you want.”
“You wish.”
Aiden let out a soft laugh and studied my work again. “You’ve got nothing to be nervous about, just so you know. You’re one of the best I’ve seen, and I’ve been around.”
“Yeah, but you’re biased.”
He reached over to turn the page, lingering where his arm brushed over my breasts. That was the first tell. Not the quiet. He’d done quiet before. This was something else. Slower. Like he was buying time inside the space between one page and the next.
I closed the sketchbook abruptly and stood, the movement cutting through whatever tension had settled between us.
“Coffee?” I said, already heading for the back. “You’re obviously here for a reason, and I’m gonna need some caffeine while I wait for you to tell me what it is.”
The machine clicked on with a tired whirr. I filled it, measured by habit, not looking at him yet. Either he’d follow, or he wouldn’t. But right now, I needed something to do with my hands.
Aiden ended up following me. Steady footsteps crossed the floor, and stopped a few feet behind me. Close enough that the room seemed to shrink around us.
“You think you know me.”
“You look like someone canceled Christmas,” I said, fitting the carafe into place. “And unless I missed a rule change, first line center doesn’t usually come with that.”
Silence stretched just long enough to confirm it hadn’t been a throwaway observation.
“We won,” he said.
Water started its slow drip through the grounds. I leaned a hip against the counter, arms folded, and finally looked at him. Hoodie sleeves pushed up, forearms marked faintly from the game, a line at his mouth that didn’t belong to a guy who’d just lit up the ice.
“Yeah, I gathered that much.”
His gaze dropped to the counter, then lifted, not quite landing on me.
“I don’t know what it is. I should be happy.
I am. I’m crawling out of my skin with it.
It’s just...” He rubbed the back of his neck, fingers dragging over skin like he could work something out of it.
“Everyone’s acting like it means something now. ”
“It does,” I said.
He gave a short laugh that didn’t carry any humor. “All it means is that getting replaced is gonna suck even more now.”
The machine gurgled louder, filling the tense space between us. I watched him instead of the coffee. The way the words sat in his mouth like they’d been there a while, just waiting for the wrong moment to slip out.
“You just won a game, Aiden.”
“That’s tonight.” His hand dropped, fingers flexing once at his side. “It’s always tonight. Tomorrow someone else is faster in practice, or Mason heals up, or Coach decides he wants a different look. When that happens, I stop being the answer and turn into the extra piece real fast.”
I turned back to the machine, more for the excuse than the coffee. Steam curled up past my hand. Something about the steady drip grounded the space, kept it from tipping into something neither of us could walk back from.
“So don’t enjoy it,” I said, reaching for two mugs from the shelf. “That’ll show them.”
A quiet huff behind me. “You’re the best when it comes to advice.”
I set the mugs down, poured, slid one across the counter toward him. Our fingers met for half a beat when he took it. “Yeah, well, serves you right for looking for advice on this in the first place, because that’s a shit plan.”
He looked at the coffee, then at me, something more open in his expression now that the words were out and couldn’t be stuffed back in. “It’s the only one that makes sense.”
“Only if you’re planning to be miserable on purpose.” I took a sip. It was way too hot, but I didn’t care. “Which feels like overkill when the league already does that for you.”
His mouth twitched, but it came to nothing. This was clearly bugging him in a way that couldn’t be joked into submission.
“I just…” He stared into the cup, thumb tracing the rim. “I don’t want to get used to it. The ice time. Being the answer. I’ve learned from experience the second that happens, it’s gone.”
And that did something under my ribs I didn’t have a neat label for.
I set my mug down, not sure what he needed from me but hating to see him like this. “So the solution is to stay half out of it?”
“It’s safer.”
“Safer,” I repeated. “Right.”
The machine clicked off behind me, and the quiet that followed felt more loaded than any sold-out arena. My gaze dropped to a faint nick in the laminate, and I tracked it with my nail, once, twice. Let the thought circle until it either died or came out.
It came out.
“Funny,” I said, keeping my eyes on that nick. “I had a version of that.”
He didn’t interrupt. Didn’t push me to go on. Just stayed there, close enough that I could feel the heat of him without turning. Part of me screamed to shut the hell up, but there was another part—one reaching for Aiden in the dim light of the tattoo studio—that wouldn’t be silenced.
“My dad spent his whole life chasing a break that never quite showed up,” I went on.
It felt weird hearing the words out loud that I’d never spoken to anyone except Ramona.
“Always the next thing, the next shot, the next reason to not settle. Which sounds great if you ignore what it does to the people waiting around for him to pick a place and stay there.”
I picked up the mug again, turned it in my hands, and watched the coffee settle.
“My mom…” A breath, far steadier than it felt. “She just… let it happen. Over and over. Like if she held everything together hard enough, it would eventually make him satisfied with the life he had, instead of intent on chasing a dream that was never gonna be his.”
I finally looked at Aiden. He hadn’t moved. His full attention was on me.
“He left,” I said. “But not all at once, because that would’ve been easier. He left us in little bits. Long enough that by the time it was obvious, there wasn’t much left to argue over. Long enough so it became my mom’s fault he didn’t make it.”
Heat pressed into my palm, something real to anchor to. Aiden sensed the tremor in me, and stepped closer, a hand touching my arm.
“And she stayed,” I added. “Stayed exactly where he’d left her. Same excuses. Same waiting. Like the ending might rewrite itself if she didn’t acknowledge it.”
The laugh that followed didn’t carry anything light. “So now every time I look at her, that’s all I see. Not my mom. Just… the woman who couldn’t hold the line. Who gave up on herself and her family for no reason at all. Not that there ever is one.”
The words hung there, heavier than anything I’d said all night. He’d cracked something open, and I’d walked right through it without checking the drop on the other side.
“Which is unfair.” My voice cracked. “And there’s a whole list of reasons why that’s not how any of that works. I’m aware. But still.”
Silence settled in again, pressing in on us from all sides.
His hand stayed where it was, steady against mine, like he hadn’t second-guessed the contact once since it started. I waited for him to fill the space. Or fix it. Or tell me I was wrong in a way that let me keep being right.
What I got instead was, “You don’t have to keep choosing sides in something that’s already over.”
The words didn’t hit all at once. They moved through me in pieces, catching on every loose thread of my past that they could find on the way down.
Already over.
There wasn’t anything to push against. No angle to twist it into something more comfortable. Just the truth of it, sitting there, uncomplicated in a way that made it harder to ignore.
I looked at him, searching for the catch. There had to be one. There was always one.
“You’re mad at your mom for staying and putting up with it,” he went on, quieter now, not backing off, not quite lecturing me either. “But you’re still living in it too. Just from the opposite side.”
The words scraped on the way in, and I swallowed hard.
“You ended up building your life around the same thing,” he said, thumb shifting once against mine. “Decided what it meant. Decided what you’d never be part of.”
My mouth opened, then closed again. I had nothing. Because every option sounded thin next to what he’d just put in the open. He watched me take it in, and let the silence stretch long enough that it stopped feeling like something that needed fixing.
“Look at what we would’ve missed out on,” he said then, the corner of his mouth lifting, just enough to take the edge off without dulling it. “If it weren’t for my striking good looks and winning personality breaking through your military-grade defenses.”
That did it.
A breath slipped out, uneven, something in my chest loosening whether I’d signed off on it or not. My eyes dropped for a second, then lifted back to him, catching on that slight shift in his expression. Not asking for anything back.
Which somehow made it worse.
Or better.
It was hard to tell.
I stepped into him before I could overthink it. Up on my toes, closing the small distance that had been doing entirely too much work between us. My hand found the front of his hoodie, fingers curling into the fabric, and I kissed him.