20. Colton
COLTON
The food was already on my desk by the time I finished changing my shirt.
Texas Roadhouse. Takeout bags, everything still steaming.
She’d set it out like she knew what she was doing: peppercorn sauce on the side, loaded sweet potato in its own container, the kind of setup that said she’d done this before, thought about it, cared about the details.
I stood in the doorway for a second longer than I meant to.
“You could’ve just said where you wanted to go,” I said.
She looked up from rooting around in one of the bags. “I had a craving. Also I panicked a little.” She held up a container of extra butter. “Do you want this? I wasn’t sure.”
“Yeah.”
“Great, me too.” She set it between us like she’d just solved something.
I pulled my office door mostly closed and sat down across from her. She’d pushed some of my paperwork aside to make room, which should’ve annoyed me. It didn’t.
She handed me a fork and didn’t make a thing of it.
We ate for a while without talking much, which was something I hadn’t done with a woman in longer than I wanted to think about.
Most dinners I’d sat through in the last few years were performances — careful conversation, someone always managing the impression they were making.
Brynn just ate her food. She made a small sound when she tried the steak, closed her eyes for exactly one second, then went back to cutting.
“Good?” I asked.
“Obscene,” she said.
I got us drinks from the stadium stand — root beer for her, the same for me once I tasted hers, and when I came back she’d kicked one foot up onto the edge of the chair like she’d been sitting in my office for years.
“Your mom get settled this morning?” I asked.
“Mhm. She’s got back-to-back calls until two, so.” She stabbed a piece of roasted vegetable. “You’ve got a few hours before she comes looking for anyone.”
“I wasn’t worried about that.”
She glanced up. “No?”
“No.”
She held my look for a beat, then went back to her food. There was something careful in the way she did that, not shy, just deliberate. Like she was deciding something.
“You watched practice this morning,” I said.
“I did.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.” She took a pull of her root beer through the straw. “Jett’s faster than he looks when he’s not showing off. I don’t think he knows that about himself yet.”
I looked at her. “You clock that just from watching?”
She shrugged. “My dad played for the Vipers back when they were still minor league. When he retired from playing he moved into coaching, and Mom bought the team so he could keep doing what he loved. I’ve been watching hockey since before I could read.
” A pause. “I know what good looks like when it’s trying too hard to prove it. ”
“What else did you see?”
She considered it seriously, which I appreciated. “Rhett plays smaller than he is when he’s near the boards. Like he’s trying not to take up too much space.” She set her fork down. “Which is insane, because he’s a wall of a human being.”
“He’s unlearning something,” I said. “I’m working on it.”
“His confidence, or his technique?”
“Both. They’re the same problem.”
She nodded slowly, like that answered something for her. We went quiet again. Outside in the hallway, I could hear the distant clang of the weight room, somebody dropping a barbell they had no business picking up.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“The scandal.” She said it plainly, no softness around it, which I respected. “You’ve never talked about it publicly. Not really. The articles all quote sources, people around it. But not you.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I turned my cup in my hands. “Because anything I said would’ve been used to keep it going.
The story wasn’t about me. It was about the donor.
About his money and what the team owed him.
” I looked at her. “She was twenty-four years old and she had a law degree and she knew exactly what she was doing. But that didn’t matter, because her father wrote a check.
And a man who writes a check gets to rewrite the story. ”
Brynn was quiet. Not uncomfortable quiet. Thinking quiet.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” she said finally.
“I’m sorry it happened to her. She didn’t ask for her name in the papers either.”
Something shifted in her face. Small, but I caught it. Like I’d said the right thing without knowing I was being tested.
“Dad would’ve liked you,” she said. The second time she’d said that to me. I didn’t think she realized it.
“You keep saying that.”
She blinked. “Do I?”
“Twice now.”
She looked down at her food, and a smile crossed her face that she didn’t seem to intend. “He had a thing for people who told the truth sideways. Like they couldn’t help it.” She glanced up. “You do that.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“Probably.”
The weight room went quiet. Somewhere down the hall, a door swung open and shut.
The stadium was emptying out around us and neither of us moved to acknowledge it.
I watched her finish the last of her sweet potato, scraping the sides of the container with the methodical focus of someone who grew up being told not to waste food.
Then she looked up and caught me watching, and she didn’t look away.
“I should get back,” she said. She didn’t move.
“You should,” I agreed. I didn’t move either.
She set the container down. The air between us was doing something I was going to have to address in about thirty seconds or let go entirely, and I already knew which one it was going to be.
I pushed back from the desk and stood, and I watched her track the movement.
I came around the side of the desk without thinking about it too hard, and when I stopped in front of her she tilted her head back to look up at me the way she always did — like the height difference was interesting to her, like she was taking stock of it.
“Colton,” she said. Just my name. Not a protest.
I tucked a curl behind her ear. Left my hand there, my thumb against her cheekbone.
Her eyes stayed on mine. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to decide something.”
“What?”
“Whether to do this right or do this now.”
She held very still. “Those are different things?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They are.”