Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
Kyle
I’m mad before I’m even fully awake. It’s not the sharp anger I’m used to, the kind that burns quick and hot when a ref blows a call or a defenseman takes a cheap shot in front of the net.
This sits low in my chest like something heavy and corrosive, turning over and over with every breath I take, making it hard to tell where fury ends and hurt begins.
My eyes crack open to the dim light squeezing around the edges of my blackout curtains.
It feels like every muscle in my body was braced for impact all night.
The last thing I remember from yesterday is walking away from Alycia in that garage, feeling like I’d just handed her my heart.
Then I watched myself keep walking, because anything else would have been taking the choice away from her.
I told her I loved her and then walked off before I got down on my knees and begged her to love me back.
I stare at the ceiling for a few seconds, the memory replaying on loop, and underneath the ache is that simmering, restless anger.
Not at her, but at the fact that she is this scared to love me.
At the man who taught her that letting someone close meant losing everything.
At this whole goddamn world for rewarding the people who hurt her and questioning the one thing that has ever felt pure between us.
My phone is buzzing nonstop on the nightstand.
Vibration stacked on vibration until it sounds like the thing is trying to crawl off the table and save itself.
I should ignore it. I know the feeling of a bad day before I see it written anywhere.
But eventually, the noise gets under my skin enough that I roll onto my side and reach for it.
The lock screen is a mess of social media tags and unknown numbers, but it's the message from Cole that gets my attention.
Cole
You see this?
My stomach drops as I open the text and tap the link underneath it. The first thing that hits me isn’t the headline, but the photo. It’s Alycia and me in the parking garage outside the elevator, frozen mid-argument in that fragile moment when everything between us was hanging by a thread.
The angle is from the other side, grainy enough that you can’t make out every detail, but clear enough that the tension is unmistakable.
My body angled toward her, hand half lifted like I’m reaching for her or bracing myself or both.
We weren’t alone after all. Someone had been there.
Staff. Media. A fan with a long lens. It doesn’t matter who.
What matters is that they caught enough to twist the story.
“Fairy-tale Fading? Timberwolves Star and PR Intern Caught in Heated Late-Night Confrontation.”
My jaw clenches so hard my teeth ache, but I continue to scroll.
Photos from the charity event. Me walking off mid-interview while she laughed it off for the cameras.
A still of us on the ice, smiling like everything’s simple.
The new photo, circled in red. Analysis.
Speculation. Anonymous sources wondering if the relationship was “a stunt” that “went too far.” Comment sections trying to decide whose fault it is that things “imploded.” People accusing her of sleeping her way into the spotlight.
People calling me unstable and too emotional for a franchise player.
There it is, everything she was afraid of.
Everything she told me about that man and what he did to her, coming back in a different costume.
A second link pops up from another number.
Another photo. This one is us in the garage, caught at the tail end of our fight.
No audio, just our faces, raw and exposed, slapped onto a slideshow and called “evidence.” I want to throw my phone hard enough to crack the wall.
For a few seconds, I seriously consider it.
I squeeze the phone so tightly my knuckles pale, then shove it onto the mattress instead, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes until sparks bloom behind them.
“I’m so fucking tired of this,” I mutter to the empty room.
My phone buzzes again. This time it’s a name I can’t ignore: Cooper. I answer on the third ring. “Yeah.”
“You alive?” he asks, no preamble.
“Define alive.”
There’s a beat of silence, then a quiet exhale. “You’ve seen the coverage.”
“Yeah.” I let my head fall back against the pillow. “I’ve seen it.”
“We’re on for a call with Janine in an hour,” he says. “She wants to talk about next steps.”
“Next steps?” I echo, and the words bruise as they move through me. “So, we double down on pretending? Smile for the cameras while the narrative eats us alive? Play along while the internet decides who we are and what we meant to each other?”
“Kyle—”
“Because that’s working out so fucking well.”
Cooper doesn’t scold me. He doesn’t tell me to calm down or be rational. He understands I feel like the floor underneath me isn’t holding. There’s a stretch of loaded silence before he exhales and says the one thing I’m not braced for.
“I saw her this morning.”
Everything inside me goes absolutely still. “And?”
“She looked wrecked.”
My hand tightens around the phone, knuckles aching with the effort of not showing what it does to me. He keeps going, dragging the truth out of a wound that hasn’t stopped bleeding.
“She had back-to-back meetings with PR. She barely said more than a sentence at a time. I don’t think she’s stopped long enough to eat.” His voice softens. “She won’t let anybody take the narrative, but she’s breaking herself trying to hold the line.”
My jaw clenches so hard it hurts. “Has anyone actually checked on her?”
“I have,” he says gently. “She won’t talk. Not about last night. Not about you. She tensed up the second I asked if she was okay.”
“She asked about me?”
“No,” Cooper says, and somehow the gentleness in his tone makes it worse. “But she didn’t have to.”
There’s a silence so heavy it feels like it presses my ribs inward, like my lungs don’t know how to expand around it. He lowers his voice even more, almost brotherly in a way he doesn’t show often.
“She’s not okay, Kyle. And whatever you’re feeling right now, it’s the same storm. She’s standing in the other half of it.”
I close my eyes, and everything inside me turns over, anger and love knotting together until there’s no way to tell where one ends and the next begins. Thankfully, he doesn’t push.
“I’ll send you a link for a virtual meeting in a few, we can talk more then. Be careful today.”
The call clicks off, and I drop the phone onto the mattress and stare up at the ceiling like maybe the plaster knows what to do with me.
The condo is quiet in that hollow way it gets when you’ve been awake too long, and nothing in you feels settled.
Every sound feels too sharp. Every breath feels like I’m trying to pull air through bruised lungs.
I try to stretch, to roll my shoulders, to get up and make coffee, but nothing sticks.
The anger from earlier has dulled into something heavier, coiling behind my ribs like it’s waiting for the next strike.
I spend most of the morning in a daze, wandering the condo without purpose, picking things up only to set them down again, and watching cars crawl along the main road below.
Trying to lace my thoughts into something coherent and failing every time Alycia’s face flashes behind my eyes.
She’s not okay. Cooper’s words loop, over and over, until I’m leaning forward against the counter like I might fold in half beneath the weight of them.
Knowing she isn’t fine, that the distance is hurting her, too, should help, but it doesn’t.
Not the way I thought it would, in some vindicating way that balances anything out.
It just makes everything burn deeper. It sets every moment from the last few weeks on fire until I can barely breathe from the smoke of it.
When our Zoom meeting starts, I stare at my laptop as if it’s a punishment. Janine’s expression is the professional concern people wear when they’ve been prepping for disaster-control meetings all morning.
“Kyle,” she says carefully, like she knows I’m hanging on by a thread. “Before we discuss next steps, are you capable of handling this conversation?”
“I’m here,” I answer, which is technically the truth.
She nods, tapping her pen once. “Your walk-off from the interview is being framed as emotional instability. The charity footage is being dissected. The parking garage stills are everywhere. We have rising speculation that the relationship was a PR fabrication gone wrong.”
“And Alycia?”
“She’s fielding a lot of the blowback. People are putting things on her they shouldn’t.
” Janine hesitates, and that hesitation is worse than any spoken answer.
“I want to be clear; Alycia didn’t ask for protection.
She’s not claiming victimhood. But the comments aimed at her are… misogynistic and dangerous.”
My hands curl into fists at my sides. “Does she know how bad it is?”
“She knows enough,” Janine says carefully.
That’s when something inside me cracks, deep enough to change the shape of the air in my lungs.
“We are not throwing either of you into the fire. The plan is to stabilize the narrative until we know what story you two want to tell.”
The story we want to tell. As if we’re capable of wanting the same thing right now. By the time the meeting ends, my chest feels scraped raw.
I spend the afternoon pacing my condo again, fighting the urge to run to her door, to force the conversation she needs space for, to be what she needs even if I’m the last thing she can handle. Every time my hand twitches toward my keys, I pull it back like touching fire.