Chapter 9
FINN
Finn had gone back for his keys, which was the kind of stupid, forgettable errand that wasn’t supposed to change anything.
The side entrance was unlocked, the corridor dim on the after-hours setting, and Finn was halfway down it when he heard his name through a door that was open a crack. Coach Tremblay’s office. Finn stopped mid-stride.
“Peterson’s groin holding up?”
Evan’s voice. “Day-to-day. I’ll check with training staff in the morning.”
“Marchetti cleared from that upper-body thing?”
“Cleared for contact practice. Should be full go by the end of the week.”
“Good. How’s Holloway’s head this season? Kid seems distracted.”
“Holloway’s fine. Nothing to worry about.”
Finn stood in the corridor. The fluorescent above him hummed. His keys were in his fist, the teeth pressing into his palm where he was gripping too hard.
Peterson’s groin. Marchetti’s shoulder. His name, third in the sequence, in the same voice.
The same cadence. The same flat professional tone Evan used for every piece of program business that crossed his desk.
Holloway. Not even Finn. Holloway, filed between an injury update and a scouting logistics note, delivered with less inflection than Evan gave the weather.
Finn’s throat closed. Not all at once. A tightening from the inside, his sinuses burning, his ribs aching, his breath going too fast and too shallow for the air to fill.
He pressed his spine to the cinder block wall, the cold of it went through his shirt, and he stood there and listened to the man who’d had his grip on Finn’s waist an hour ago file him between a groin injury and a scouting report.
No hesitation. No catch. Not the smallest shift that might have meant this one is different.
All that patience. All that waiting, all that believing that the real Evan was the one in the truck and the film room and the apartment, and the guarded Evan was the performance.
Standing in this hallway with his spine to the wall and his throat burning, Finn heard it for what it was.
The guarded wasn’t the performance. The guarded was the reflex.
It came out of Evan without effort, without thought, the way breathing came, and Finn’s name in that voice was what Evan sounded like when he wasn’t trying. When he was just being himself.
The man who touched Finn like he was the only real thing in the room could stand on the other side of a door and make him invisible without flinching.
“Scouts at every game now,” Coach said. “Last thing we need is personal drama tanking his draft stock.”
“I know.”
“Keep an eye on him.”
“I will.”
Finn’s vision blurred. He breathed through it, one inhale and then another, the air cold in his nose, the fluorescent buzzing above him.
His sternum ached like a fist was pressing into it from the inside and he couldn’t stop it and he couldn’t make a noise because Coach Tremblay’s office was six feet away and the man inside it was Evan’s father and Finn was a player in this program and players did not stand in hallways with their teeth clenched and their lashes wet because someone they loved had just made them a line item.
Finn pushed off the wall. Walked through the side entrance, into the parking lot. The cold hit his face and went into his lungs and sat there.
Then Finn leaned on his truck and waited.
When Evan came out and crossed the lot toward him, Finn opened the rear entrance.
He did not know yet that this was the last time.
His body knew. His body climbed in and pulled Evan after him and held on with a grip that was too tight and a pace that was too fast and an intensity that Evan would misread as the game running through Finn’s blood.
It wasn’t the game. It was grief wearing the clothes of desire, and Finn held on because letting go meant starting the conversation he wasn’t ready to have.
* * *
The puck hit the boards, and Finn’s stick was there, and his feet were right, and nothing about the drill required him to think, which was the problem, because when his body ran on autopilot, his brain went to the hallway.
Not the words. The tone. Evan answered his father about Finn in the same register he used for arena conflicts and travel logistics.
Coach asking about him was Coach doing his job.
Finn understood that. But Evan’s voice did not change, not even a fraction, not even the smallest hitch that might have cost him something to suppress.
That was what Finn couldn’t stop replaying.
He had given Evan every chance to be different in that moment, and Evan hadn’t even known there was a moment to be different in.
Practice ran hard. Coach Tremblay pushed the defensive structure drill until the breakout pass started working, and Finn called adjustments from the slot, his voice carrying across the ice, his reads three seconds ahead of the play. The drill clicked into place and Coach blew the whistle.
“Holloway. Good positioning. Keep that.”
“Yes, sir.”
The words came out clean. The praise landed wrong, sitting at his ribs like a bruise he kept pressing. Finn skated to the bench and squeezed his water bottle and went out for the next rep.
He pushed harder than the drill required.
His left edge bit the ice at an angle that sent a judder up through his ankle and into his shin, and he leaned into it instead of correcting, driving the crossover sequence with his legs until his quads burned and his lungs screamed and the noise of his own breathing was louder than anything in the arena.
Two more reps. His stick tape was fraying.
He could taste the chemical bite of arena air at the root of his tongue.
His body was trying to outrun something that wasn’t in his legs, and the ice didn’t care.
The ice was the one place that didn’t ask him how he was doing or look at him with the sideways attention that meant someone had noticed he was off.
Coach blew the final whistle and Finn skated to the boards and stood there with his gloves off and his fists on the ledge and his chest heaving.
His fingers were numb. His jersey was soaked through at the collar and down his spine.
The arena was emptying around him, players heading for the tunnel, and Finn stood at the boards for ten extra seconds because the walk to the locker room meant taking off his skates and the skates were the last thing between him and the rest of his day.
Hayes caught him at the locker room entrance.
“You good, Cap?”
“Yeah.”
Hayes looked at him for one second longer than casual. His gaze tracked across Finn’s face, reading, and then he went to his tape job. Didn’t push. Finn’s throat ached with something he would not give a name to, because naming it would make it real, and he was not ready for it to be real yet.
* * *
Finn showered. Dressed. Walked out through the hallway toward the side exit. His bag was over his shoulder and his hair was damp at the temples and his fists were in his jacket pockets because if they were free they would do something he didn’t want them to do.
Evan was coming from the other direction.
Same stride Finn had memorized without meaning to.
Long, unhurried, weight centered, a folder at his thigh.
They were walking toward each other in the hallway they’d been navigating all season, and Finn could see the nod assembling itself on Evan’s face before they closed the distance.
Chin lifting half an inch. Gaze meeting and releasing.
The professional acknowledgment Evan gave everyone who worked in this building.
Evan’s expression softened at one corner the way it did when he saw Finn, the one tell he’d never managed to control, and Finn’s chest compressed around the recognition of it because that softening was real and it wasn’t enough.
Finn walked past.
Didn’t nod. Didn’t slow. His fists stayed in his pockets and his teeth ground together and he walked past Evan Tremblay the way Evan had been walking past him for months. Player and operations staff and nothing else.
Behind him, Evan’s footsteps stopped. The rubber sole of his shoe caught on the linoleum with a small squeak. The hall held a different kind of silence.
Finn kept walking. His vision blurred. He didn’t wipe his face.
* * *
Finn’s apartment pressed in on him when he walked through the entrance. No music, no TV, no second set of footsteps. Just the radiator ticking and the hum of the refrigerator and the silence of a room that held only him.
Finn sat on the couch with his phone on the cushion beside him and did not pick it up.
He’d checked it once after practice, the screen blank, no messages.
Evan had never gone this long without texting after a hallway encounter.
Every other time Finn had given him the professional nod and kept walking, the text would arrive within the hour.
Dinner? or Your place tonight? or just an address, the logistics of their arrangement delivered in the same efficient shorthand Evan used for everything.
Nothing.
The apartment smelled like the laundry he hadn’t folded and the coffee grounds in the French press from that morning.
His gear bag sat by the entrance where he’d dropped it, the zipper was open, and he could see the edge of his practice jersey crumpled inside, and for some reason, that was the detail that made his sinuses ache.
The crumpled jersey. The open bag. The apartment that used to smell like cedar and bergamot when Evan stayed, and didn’t anymore, and might never again.