44. Colton
COLTON
We walked into the rink on Monday the way I said we would.
Side by side. No hand-holding, I wasn’t looking to start anything, just to not hide, but close enough that nobody with half a brain was going to misread it.
Brynn had her clipboard. I had mine. We talked about the team’s Tuesday practice the whole way down the hallway like it was any other morning, and it was.
That was the point. That was the whole point.
I hadn’t told her about that part yet.
Brynn and I stayed late after practice that Tuesday.
She was helping me update the media request log that Victoria wanted sorted before the second game of the season, and I was doing absolutely nothing useful because I kept watching her work and losing track of my own notes.
She had this thing she did when she was concentrating — the tip of her tongue pressed just barely behind her teeth.
I’d caught it three times and written the same stat down twice.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
She didn’t look up from her laptop. “You’re going to ask regardless, so yes.”
I set my clipboard down. “If you could go anywhere. Not for someone else. Not for your mom or the job or any other reason. Just for you. Where would you go?”
That made her look up. “That’s a weird question.”
“Humor me.”
She sat back in her chair and thought about it for a real second, not just throwing out an answer.
That was a Brynn thing — she never gave you the first answer that came to her.
She gave you the true one. “Somewhere with a university that has a good creative writing program. A city. Somewhere with actual seasons — I’ve lived in a desert my entire life, I’d like to find out what cold actually feels like.
” She paused. “But I’d want to be able to come back.
Like, this would always have to be home base.
My mom’s here. The team’s here. I don’t think I could ever fully leave Vegas. ”
I nodded slowly.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why do you ask?”
I picked up my clipboard and set it back down again.
Stalling. I wasn’t a man who stalled. I hated men who stalled.
“When I took this job, I had a plan. Four years. Long enough to rebuild this team, prove I still had it, and use that to get back to a top franchise. A contender. That was the whole point of coming here.”
The silence was immediate and total.
“Four years,” she repeated.
“Yeah.”
She didn’t say anything for long enough that I wanted to fill the silence, which was another thing I hated doing.
“And somewhere in the middle of all of that,” I continued, “I started thinking about what that looked like if you were in it. In my head I was already figuring out how to make it work — New York has universities, good ones, the kind that would want someone like you. I’d already decided you’d come with me. ”
Her expression shifted. Not angry. Something quieter than that, and harder to read. “You decided.”
“I know how that sounds.”
“Do you?” She wasn’t being sharp about it.
She was just asking. Which was somehow worse.
“Because I just told you I can’t fully leave Vegas.
My mom’s here, Colton. The team I grew up watching is here.
My whole life is here, not just a job I can pack up.
And you were in your head building a future where I followed you somewhere without once asking me if I wanted to go. ”
I didn’t have a defense for that. Because she was right.
“Those calls,” I said. “The ones from the 212 number the morning the article broke. That was a scout. For a top-five franchise.” I watched her face. “I haven’t called back.”
She blinked. “Colton —”
“I’m not done,” I said. “I came here for my reputation. That was the plan. Rebuild, prove the point, move on. But somewhere between that first night at The Hideout and this office and every single thing that’s happened since, I stopped thinking about the plan.
The plan stopped being the thing I cared most about.
” I looked at her straight. “You became the thing I cared most about. And I should’ve told you that before I started building futures in my head without asking you. That was wrong. I’m telling you now.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “So what does that mean? For the plan.”
I picked up my phone from the desk. Pulled up my voicemail. Held it out so she could see the screen — three missed calls, 212 area code, all from the same number.
She looked at the screen. Then up at me. “How long have you been sitting on those?”
I didn’t look away from her. “Since the morning the article broke.”
Something moved through her face. Not hurt exactly. More like she was recalculating, adding up the last two days against what she now knew had been sitting in my pocket the whole time. I let her do it. She deserved the full picture before I gave her the ending.
“You could’ve told me,” she said. Quiet. Not accusatory, which somehow made it land harder.
“I know.” I held her eyes. “I should have. I was trying to figure out who I was going to be about it before I said anything to you. That’s not an excuse. It’s just what happened.”
She looked back at the phone screen for a second. Her jaw worked once, the way it did when she was deciding something.
Then she reached out and took the phone from my hand.
I watched her pull up the voicemail screen. Watched her press delete on the first one. Then the second. Then the third. She handed the phone back to me and sat back in her chair.
“There,” she said. “Now neither of us is sitting on it.”
She stared at the phone for a second longer than felt comfortable. Long enough that I started wondering if I’d miscalculated. Then she looked up at me. “You could’ve just said you were staying.”
“I could have,” I said. “But I wanted you to see it.”
She held my eyes for a long moment. Something moved through her face that I couldn’t quite name, but I felt it land somewhere in my chest like it always did when she looked at me that way. Like I was something worth looking at.
“Next time you build a future with me in it,” she said, “you ask first.”
“Noted,” I said.
She pulled her laptop back toward her and got back to work. I watched her for a second before I picked up my clipboard. The concentration face was back. Tongue just behind her teeth.
I wrote the same stat down twice again. I didn’t care.