Chapter 2
EVAN
Evan got home, and the words were in his chest. He stood in his kitchen with his tie loosened and a glass of water he hadn’t touched, staring at the backsplash until the grout lines blurred.
You watch me.
Fuck.
He set the water down, the glass clinking against the counter harder than he meant, then sat at the table.
The faucet dripped its metronome. Shelves he’d filled himself, counters he kept clear, everything in its place because if everything was in its place, then nothing was wrong.
He rubbed the back of his neck, the same small ritual he mocked in others, and caught himself doing it. Idiot.
It was the same house David had walked out of.
David had stood in this kitchen, overnight bag on his shoulder, and said the sentence Evan couldn’t unhear: the house was beautiful and emotionally unavailable, and he wasn’t sure he was talking about the house.
Five years together, and the thing David couldn’t forgive wasn’t the distance or the hours or the way Evan’s job ate every weekend from October to March.
It was that Evan had never once introduced him as his boyfriend at a university function.
Always David. Always just David. And when David finally asked why, standing in this kitchen with his coat already on, Evan had opened his mouth and nothing had come out, because the answer was that he’d spent so long calibrating what was safe to show that he’d forgotten how to stop.
David left. Evan had not changed a single thing since. Not the furniture, not the paint, not the habit of setting the table for one.
* * *
Finn Holloway had been on this team since freshman year, and Evan had been so goddamn disciplined about it.
Discipline built into a career, into a posture, into the exact distance he kept from every player who walked through the facility.
He’d told himself the awareness prickling under his skin was nothing.
Proximity. The standard response to having someone who looked like that in the building five days a week.
It was not a standard response. Evan had known that since Finn’s sophomore year, when he’d come in early to sign for an equipment delivery.
The rink was unlit, just the emergency floods throwing long shadows across the ice.
He heard the blades before he saw anyone, and he stopped in the tunnel because the sound was wrong.
Too fluid. No stops, no crossovers, no drills.
Finn was alone on the ice in sweats and skates, no pads, no stick, gliding through what Evan’s brain needed a full ten seconds to process as a spin sequence.
Not hockey. Not even close. His arms pulled in tight, one foot lifted, and he turned so fast the emergency floods smeared around him.
Then he opened up, coasted backward on one blade, and transitioned into something slower, almost lazy, his body loose in a way Evan had never seen during a game.
Evan stood there long enough for his coffee to go cold in his hand, the ceramic growing slick against his palm.
Finn spotted him coming off the ice, toweling his face, breathing hard. Finn didn’t look embarrassed. His mouth twitched, one corner up, chin lifted, like he’d caught someone peeking through a window and decided to leave the curtain open.
“My parents wanted me balanced.” Finn hadn’t been asked. “Figure skating and hockey until I was twelve. Hockey won, but”—A shrug. “Old habits.”
“You’re good.” Evan was an idiot, and it was the only thing in his head.
Finn held the look a beat past comfortable, a beat past professional. “Yeah,” he said. “I am.”
Finn walked off toward the locker room, and Evan stood in the tunnel until the Zamboni driver showed up and asked if he was lost.
What stayed with Evan wasn’t how Finn skated, though that was part of it, the sandy-brown hair damp with sweat, the lines of him fluid and unhurried. What stayed was that Finn had offered something real without being asked, and Evan had leaned toward it like a man hearing music through a wall.
Evan had been running ever since.
Evan thought he’d handled it. Told himself the rink was a single morning, an anomaly.
Then at the gala, Evan brought his boyfriend and Finn brought a date, and they spent the entire evening on opposite sides of the ballroom, and Evan told himself that was fine, that was appropriate, that was the end of it.
But a few weeks later, Finn showed up at a program event with a girl on his arm, laughing at something she said, filling the room the way he filled every room.
Finn kissed her goodbye in the parking lot afterward.
Evan was getting into his car three rows away, and their eyes met over the roof of a Honda Civic.
Finn smiled. Every tooth visible. The kind of smile that didn’t need words because it was already a sentence.
I see you watching.
* * *
Earlier that fall, Evan had been in the hallway when Sarah Kellerman cleaned out her office.
He’d known her as a nodding acquaintance from an adjacent program.
Volleyball. Good coach, seven years in, a steady presence nobody noticed until she was gone.
She’d started seeing one of her former players after the girl graduated and went overseas to play professionally.
Disclosed it to the department. Did everything right.
The athletic director terminated her contract anyway. Abundance of caution.
Kellerman came through the hallway with a box of personal items in her arms, her spine straight, her eyes fixed on the exit sign at the end of the corridor.
Evan stepped aside to let her pass. They exchanged the kind of look people exchanged when they both knew the score and neither was going to say it out loud.
The next day, his father mentioned it during their weekly operational meeting. “Heard about volleyball,” he said, not looking up from his tablet. “Athletic department doesn’t mess around with that stuff anymore. Not worth the exposure.”
“She didn’t break any rules.”
His father looked at him then, held the gaze two seconds too long, the way he did when he was reading between lines. “Rules and optics aren’t always the same thing. You know that.”
Evan nodded. Let the silence close over it.
Evan spent the rest of that week taking a different route through the building, the one that didn’t pass Finn’s locker.
It lasted four days.
* * *
The laptop sat open on the table. Evan had pulled it out with some vague intention of catching up on emails, but his fingers hadn’t touched the keyboard. Instead, he’d opened his employment contract, the PDF he’d signed when he took the job and hadn’t looked at since.
Section 7.3: Prohibited Relationships. The language was broad enough to be unambiguous: any student enrolled at the University, regardless of supervisory relationship.
Not just students you coached, or recruited, or supervised.
Any student. The university didn’t draw fine lines about proximity or influence.
They built walls and told you not to climb them.
The conflict of interest clause was worse. The word doing all the heavy lifting was perceived. Not actual harm, not proven favoritism. The appearance of it. The suspicion. The whisper in a hallway that maybe something wasn’t quite right.
Evan thought about Kellerman again. She’d waited until Cruz graduated. Disclosed the relationship. Done everything the policy theoretically allowed. And the athletic department had decided the optics were too risky anyway. Abundance of caution.
His father’s voice: “Not worth the exposure.”
Evan closed the laptop.
Before the season started, the quarterly compliance meeting.
The same conference room that smelled like burnt coffee and dry-erase markers, the same folding chairs that never had enough padding, the same slideshow Laura Rodriguez had been running for years.
Evan sat in the third row and wrote in his notebook while she clicked through the slides.
Conflict of interest. Title IX. Prohibited relationships. Mandatory reporting requirements.
She lingered on a flowchart titled “Is This Relationship Appropriate?”
The first question: Is the other person a current student?
If yes, the chart led to a red box labeled NO.
“I know this feels repetitive,” Rodriguez said, glancing around the room.
“But these policies exist for a reason. One bad judgment call can sink a career. It can sink a program. We’ve seen it happen.
” She clicked to the next slide, a photo of the volleyball team at conference finals.
“We’ve made hard calls here to protect this department’s integrity. I won’t apologize for that.”
His pen had not stopped the entire time.
He’d signed the acknowledgment form. And sitting at this table now, he could see his own handwriting on the notebook page: the word professional four times in his margin notes.
Four times. He’d sat in a compliance meeting about prohibited relationships and written the word professional like it was a ward against evil, which said more about where his head had been than any flowchart.
One bad judgment call can sink a career.
And Evan, like an idiot, had all but confirmed it. “I can’t tell you that.”
He pushed the laptop away and reached for his phone. It buzzed before he got there. A text from his mother: “We’re on for dinner? Making that potato salad you like.”
Evan typed back: “Looking forward to it.”
He set it down. Normal. Everything was normal.
He was closer to forty than not, the director of hockey operations for a Division I program, and his life was exactly what he’d built it to be.
Stable. Respectable. Organized in ways that would look like contentment from the outside and felt, from the inside, like the rooms of a house where every surface was clean and no one ever visited.