Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Alberto
The anger finally stops pretending it’s just frustration and turns into something I can’t keep contained anymore.
“That’s exactly what it is,” I say, and my voice climbs. I start pacing barefoot on hardwood that stays cold no matter how long I’ve lived here. “I’m not wanted. I’m used.”
He starts to respond, but I don’t let him.
“Do you know what it’s like,” I say, because the truth is clawing its way up and I can’t hold it down anymore, “to keep proving you’re enough and still getting told to pack your life into boxes like it’s nothing?”
“Monty—”
“I was six,” I spit, and the number tastes like metal. “I was six when I learned people leave. I didn’t choose that. I didn’t earn that. It just happened, and everyone called it tragic like that word could make it softer.”
“I know this is triggering,” he says carefully.
I laugh, harshly. “Triggering. That’s a nice word. Corporate grief.”
“Albert,” he says, quieter, “I’m not your enemy.”
I press my palm to my forehead. My skin is hot, my pulse too fast, my whole body buzzing like it wants to bolt.
There’s so much going on, including the part that my name is Alberto.
Bert for some, Monty for others. Never Albert.
It’s like he doesn’t give a fuck, but at the same time he’s been good at his job for years.
“Yeah, I know you’re not my enemy,” I agree. “You’re just the guy who gets me sponsors and tells me when my life changes.”
“Listen,” he says, doubling down. “Portland is going to be good. Bigger contract. Endorsements in the Pacific Northwest. A fan base starving for a Cup. You can buy a place. You can settle—”
“Stop saying settle,” I snap.
I stand in my living room and look around at the furniture I didn’t pick, the art I’d never have chosen, the couch I bought because it fit the space, not because it felt like me.
I’ve built my life like a hotel room—clean, efficient, nothing too personal, nothing I can’t leave behind without ripping something open.
And now I’m supposed to go to Portland and pretend I’m excited about this fresh start.
Believe that I’m not already picturing myself standing in a new empty apartment, keys in my hand, staring at blank walls, and realizing the only thing I’ve ever been allowed to keep is the part of me that performs.
I’ve done that on purpose.
It still hurts.
“Do you know what I think when I hear ‘trade’?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer. He knows better than to interrupt when my voice goes quiet. Quiet is where the truth lives.
“I think of my uncle,” I continue, and the words come out wrong—too personal, too old.
“I think of his hands packing my clothes into a suitcase that wasn’t mine because I was too small to do it.
I think of him driving me to a new house and telling me it was going to be okay, telling me I’d get used to it. ”
My vision blurs for a second, and I blink hard, as if that can erase memory.
“At least I was done with foster families,” I add, because humor is the only thing that keeps grief from swallowing me.
I inhale. The air in my apartment smells like coffee and detergent. It doesn’t smell like me. It never does, and soon I’ll be forgotten.
“I got used to it,” I say. “That’s the problem. I got used to leaving. I got used to not belonging anywhere.”
“I’m sorry,” Conrad says, and it’s the right sentence, delivered in the wrong voice, too practiced to reach me.
It doesn’t help.
Because I did everything right.
I have the stats. I have the numbers. I have the wins. I kept them alive in games they had no business surviving. I gave them everything. I always do. I take pucks to the body and keep standing. I take the blame, the pressure, everyone’s fear, and hold it in my hands like it’s mine to manage.
And they still send me away.
I stare out the window again. Somewhere in this city, people are waking up next to the same person they woke up next to yesterday.
Somewhere, someone is making pancakes in a kitchen they’ve owned for ten years.
Somewhere, a kid is complaining about school, and his parents are alive to roll their eyes and tell him to eat.
My jaw starts to tremble. I clamp down on it.
My hands start shaking—worse than nerves, worse than anger. It’s my whole nervous system staging a mutiny, like my body is trying to climb out of itself.
I set my phone on speaker and walk to the kitchen sink. I turn on the faucet.
I shove my hands under the water as if the cold can reset me, like it can shock me back into control.
It doesn’t.
My thoughts keep snapping back to the same place, like my mind has one obsession and it refuses to let go.
Portland.
Oregon.
Juniper Ridge.
Vesper.
And him—fucking Callaway Winthrop.
Being traded isn’t just moving cities. It’s being shoved closer to the people I’ve been trying to keep at a safe distance. Closer to the rivalry the league loves to feed. Captain of the Colorado Cobras versus the goalie who won’t bow. It’s always framed like a game.
Like we didn’t have a life before the cameras.
As if we didn’t have summers together playing the game, practicing.
I know his tells just as he does mine. No matter how much time has passed, I can tell how he’s going to hit the net—and make sure he fails.
Unless I’m off that day, and he can get to me.
The point is that I hate Callaway more than I love the game.
We were best friends until that night. Until—
Fuck.
That night lives in me like it owns the place.
The bonfire smoke in my hair. The way Ves’s laugh turned thin when she realized what she’d started. The way Callaway looked at her like she was a prize and a problem and a miracle all at once.
And me.
I was close, pretending I wasn’t watching her lips part like an invitation.
Pretending I wasn’t hard just from the way she leaned in like her spine had dissolved under our gaze.
Ves between us, trembling like a live wire, her breath catching every time Callaway brushed her bare thigh with the backs of his fingers, like he was marking territory.
She was pretending—pretending she had control, like she wasn’t the one being worshipped, devoured in slow motion.
But her body was louder than her mouth. She arched into every touch.
Her knees fell open wider, thighs brushing against ours, the hem of her dress creeping higher with every breath.
Her fingers curled into the blanket beneath her, clutching the fabric like it might ground her while her world tilted.
Sparks popped in the fire beside us, but she was burning hotter—her body straining toward us like she couldn’t decide who to beg first.
Callaway kissed her first. His mouth caught hers in a messy, hungry slide of lips and teeth, like he was chasing a memory he hadn’t made yet. She whimpered into him. And I lost the plot.
Because watching him kiss her didn’t calm the fire under my skin. It made it worse.
It made me greedy.
I reached for her—hand on her wrist, thumb tracing the pulse there as my mouth found the side of her neck, open and flushed, like she’d been waiting for me.
“Fuck—” she whispered, and her voice broke apart right there, in the hollow of her throat, where I licked the sound off her skin like it was meant for me.
I felt her fingers knot in my hair, pulling me closer, not enough to hurt, just enough to make me know she needed more. That she was unraveling.
Callaway didn’t stop.
He watched.
Watched my tongue trace the shell of her ear.
Watched my hand slide down her side, fingers pressing just under the curve of her breast, testing how far I could go without tearing this whole thing apart.
“You want both of us, Ves?” he murmured against her mouth, lips still wet from their kiss. “Or are you just playing brave?”
“I—” Her breath hitched as my hand slipped into her dress, dragging the lace of her bra upward, baring soft skin and heat.
She didn’t finish her sentence.
She didn’t have to.
Callaway kissed me next.
It wasn’t planned. Wasn’t soft.
It was war. Lust and jealousy and some kind of dark devotion neither of us could name. His mouth was hot and punishing, tongue sliding against mine like he wanted to taste her on me.
I kissed him back because I was too far gone not to.
Because she moaned when we did.
And then her hands were between us—touching both. Exploring. Stroking. Fingertips dragging down my chest, his stomach. Her palm pressed between my legs, and I growled—fucking growled—into Callaway’s mouth.
She leaned forward, lips brushing mine like a question. A dare.
I answered with a kiss that was anything but polite.
I kissed her like I owned her breath. Like she was already coming undone for us and didn’t know it.
My hand cupped her jaw, tilted her head, and I took my time learning the shape of her mouth—how she sighed when I sucked her bottom lip between my teeth, how she gasped when Callaway bit her shoulder at the same time.
We were touching everywhere now—hands sliding under clothes, across skin, stroking over heated flesh like we were mapping a new religion.
My fingers hooked under the waistband of her panties, just barely teasing the soft skin beneath, while Callaway’s mouth found the top of her breast, his tongue leaving wet trails that made her shake.
The three of us, tangled in breath and need and sweat.
Crossing a line we didn’t have a name for.
Making promises with our mouths, with our bodies, that none of us were ready to say out loud.
And afterward, when the sun came up and reality returned, we all pretended we could climb back over that line like it hadn’t changed the shape of us.
We couldn’t.
Focus on Ves, I told myself. Just fucking focus on her.
Her laugh.
Her mouth.
Her eyes when she’s angry, when she’s excited, when she’s trying to pretend she doesn’t care. She’s the only person who ever made me feel like I could belong somewhere—not because I was useful, not because I was winning, but because I was . . . me.
I hate that my mind goes to her before it goes to the Cup. I hate that even now, my heart reaches for her like it never learned restraint.
Boston was at least manageable. When she was in New York, I could see her. Either for lunch, dinner, a quick hour stolen between her flights. We’d talk like time didn’t pass. Like we didn’t fuck everything up and then wreck the best thing we ever built.
And now?
Now I’m going to Oregon.
Close enough to remember, to want, and far enough from her that I’ll have to live with the wanting.
“You there?” Conrad asks, voice cautious, like he’s approaching an animal that might bite.
“I’m here,” I say, and my voice comes out rough, scraped.
“Okay.” Papers shuffle on his end. “I’ll send you everything for you to sign. We need to talk about logistics.”
Logistics.
As if the problem is moving boxes.
As if the real problem isn’t that Portland drags me back toward her while she keeps running—toward work, toward distance, toward anything that isn’t choosing.
Toward anything that isn’t us.
I stare at the water still running over my hands, and I realize, with a sick certainty, what’s coming.
Not the trade announcement, the press conference, or even the new jersey. Nope.
The moment I see her again. Because this time, the league won’t be the only thing asking for a decision. I need her to choose. Choose me, love me.
Unless it’s him she wants and then . . . well, I’m not sure I can survive hearing her say it out loud.