Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
Toni Amato
I see movement through the windshield and lift my head a small fraction automatically.
Max. Even from this distance I recognize the way he walks.
The broad shoulders. The easy athletic stride.
He slows. Then stops. My pulse stumbles.
For a second neither of us moves. He's standing less than thirty feet away, close enough that I know he can see me sitting here.
Close enough that he can probably tell I haven't started the car.
Close enough that he might recognize exactly what this is.
Because he has seen me like this before. Seldom and not willingly. But enough.
The weeks since the photo surfaced have hollowed something out inside me.
Every conversation feels complicated. Every decision feels impossible.
My father is disappointed. The league is watching.
The media won't let it go. And through all of it I've kept telling myself that distance is the responsible choice.
Necessary. Professional. I watch him standing there and something shameful rises inside me.
Hope. Hope. The selfish, irrational kind. The kind that whispers cross the parking lot. Knock on the window. Tell me we're being idiots. Tell me this isn't worth losing each other over. Tell me you're still here.
My fingers tighten around the steering wheel. Because I know exactly what would happen if he walked over. I would roll the window down. I would see his face. And every vigilant constructed reason I've spent three weeks building would collapse in under thirty seconds.
He remains where he is. Still. Watching. For one terrible moment I think he might actually come. Part of me wants him to. A larger part is terrified that he will. Then he lowers his head slightly, as though arriving at a decision.
And turns away. I watch him walk back toward his truck. Each step feels strangely unreal. As if my brain keeps expecting him to change his mind. He doesn't.
The truck starts. The headlights sweep across the concrete. A few seconds later he's gone. I stare at the empty space where he had been standing. In the span of a minute, the parking garage has become very large, very quickly. This is what I asked for. The reality of it.
The actual experience of watching someone who loves you choose not to come closer because you asked them not to. The realization settles. Max respected my boundaries. He respected it so completely that it hurt.
I close my eyes and rest my forehead against the steering wheel. For weeks I've been telling myself that space would make things easier. Instead, all it's done is show me exactly how much of my life he had silently become.
I don't know how long I sit there after his taillights disappear.
Long enough that the fluorescent light above my stall flickers twice and holds.
Long enough that the security guard at the east entrance finishes his crossword and switches to Wordle.
I know this because I have catalogued the rhythms of this building for three months and I cannot stop cataloguing even now, even here, even when the thing I want most is to stop knowing things and just feel them.
I start the car.
The drive home takes twenty-two minutes. I count the stoplights. By the time I unlock the front door to the apartment, my hands are shaking so badly the keys clatter against the deadbolt.
Elena is on my couch because she likes my television more than hers, an oversized Guardians sweatshirt hiding her frame, a bowl of popcorn balanced on her knees while some reality TV show babbles on the screen.
She looks up, her expression shifting from a welcoming smile to instant, sharp concern the second she sees my face.
"Toni? Hey, what's wrong?"
I don't answer. I can't. If I open my mouth, whatever is holding the walls up inside me is going to snap. I drop my work bag on the entryway table, the heavy leather strap hitting the wood with a hollow thud that sounds entirely too much like an ending.
In the kitchen, my hands grip the edge of the granite counter. I stare down at the polished stone, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, trying to utilize every centering exercise I’ve ever taught a rookie official. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
It’s not working. The air feels like glass in my throat.
"Toni, you're scaring me a little bit," Elena says, her socks padding against the hardwood as she follows me into the kitchen. She sets the popcorn down on the island. "Did something happen at the arena? Did the league call again? Did your dad—"
"I can't do this anymore."
The words cut through the peaceful room, sharp and raw. They don't sound like me. They sound like someone else entirely. Someone who has run out of fight.
Elena goes still, her eyes searching mine. "Can't do what? The compliance oversight? Toni, if the stress of the media drop is too much, you can talk to HR, you can take a leave—"
"Not the job," I whisper, and the first tear finally spills over, hot and humiliating against my cheek. I wipe it away aggressively with the back of my hand, but three more take its place. "Not the job, El. Him. I can't do this with him anymore."
Understanding clicks in Elena's eyes, her features easing into that deep, unconditional sisterly sympathy that usually makes me want to defensive-posture my way out of a room. But tonight, I don't have any opposing energy left to adjust.
"He was standing there," I choke out, the dam finally bursting.
"Tonight. In the parking garage. He was just thirty feet away.
Looking at my car. He knew I was breaking down inside, Elena.
I could see it in the way he stood there.
He wanted to walk over. I know he did. Every single line of his body was vibrating with it. "
"Why didn't he?" Elena asks gently, stepping closer.
"Because I asked him not to," I say, and a sob tears out of me, brutal and ugly.
I cover my mouth with my hand, trying to anchor myself, but the kitchen is spinning.
"Because I told him I needed space. I told him we had to be professional.
I built this stupid, perfect, rigid cage out of my father's expectations and the NHL rulebook, and Max...
god, Max just stepped back and let me lock myself inside it.
Because he respects me. Because he loves me enough to let me go if it saves my career. "
Elena reaches out, pulling my hands away from my face and holding them tight. Her grip is the only solid thing in the apartment. "Toni, look at me."
I lift my gaze, my vision swimming with tears.
"Do you want your career to be saved if it means sitting alone in a dark car every night?" she asks gently.
"No," I whisper, the truth of it hollow and terrifying.
"No, I don't. I've spent three weeks pretending.
Every morning I look him in the eye and call him Mr. Stevens.
I give him spreadsheets. I lecture him on lateral movement during film review while my heart is trying to kick its way out of my chest just to be near him.
I act like I hate him because it's safer than admitting how terrified I am that I can't live without him. "
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes, but the image of Max turning around in the flickering light of the parking structure is burned into my eyelids.
"I'm stuck, El. If I cross that line, my dad will never look at me the same way.
The league will think I'm a joke. But if I stay on this side...
" My voice breaks completely. "If I stay on this side, I have to watch the only man who has ever truly looked at me walk away because I forced him to.
I can't keep pretending I don't want him.
It's killing me. It's literally killing me. "
Elena doesn't offer a platitude. She doesn't tell me it'll be fine, because we both know fine is a word people use when they're entirely out of options. Instead, she just steps forward, wraps her arms around my shoulders, and pulls me into her chest.
I bury my face in the soft cotton of her sweatshirt and let myself totally fall apart, the quiet apartment echoing with the sound of a woman who has finally run out of reasons to stay inside the walls she built.
"I don't know how to stop," I say into the fabric of her sweater.
"I know how to choose correctly. I know how to protect things.
I learned how to build a schedule and fill it so there isn't space for anything I can't control.
" Everything aches. Specific and deep. The kind of ache that has been there for three weeks disguised as discipline.
"I don't know how to just want something without making a case against it. "
Elena holds on. She is warm and solid and she smells like the lemon candle she burns regardless of season and she has been my most reliable person since before Max Stevens existed in my life and she does not try to fix this. She just holds it with me.
"He was twenty feet away," I say. "And he turned around because I asked him to."
"Yes," she says.
I press my eyes shut. "That's the thing. That's the part I can't file. He's doing exactly what I asked and it's making everything worse."
Elena pulls back. Not all the way. She holds my shoulders and looks at me with green eyes that miss nothing and have missed nothing since the night she arrived at my apartment with wine and waited for me to say his name.
"What do you want?" she asks directly. No tempering of the question.
I know the answer.
I've known it since I watched his taillights reach the garage exit and disappear. Since I sat with my forehead against the steering wheel in an empty parking structure and felt the specific shape of what I'd been calling the responsible choice.
"Him," I say. The word sits there, plainly. No qualifier attached. No case built around it. "I want him.”
Elena's expression does something I've only seen it do twice before. It goes completely still with relief. The specific relief of a woman who has been waiting for someone to stop fighting the truth and finally say it out loud.
"Okay," she says.
"It's not—" I start.
"Okay," she says again. Firmer this time.
I look at her.
"You've been afraid of wanting things since I've known you," she says. "You dress it up as discipline. You call it professionalism. You make it look so much like strength that you almost convinced me." She holds my gaze. "But you've been afraid."
I automatically clench my muscles. "My father—"
"Your father is a person who loves you and makes mistakes like every other person who loves someone." Precise. Not unkind. "He is not the last word on what you deserve."
I don't answer. Because she's right and I've known she's right for months and knowing it and living by it are two different architectures entirely.
"What are you going to do?" she asks.
The thing is — I know this answer too. I've known it since the parking garage.
Since watching him respect the space I asked for so thoroughly that it became the most honest thing he'd ever shown me.
A man who could have come. Who had every reason to come.
Who stood twenty feet from a woman he wanted and walked away instead because she needed him to.
That's not performance. That's who he is.
And I've been treating it as a liability.
"I'm going to stop," I say.
Elena tilts her head. "Stop what."
"Pretending the cautious choice is the same as the right one." I pick up my wine glass. My hands are steadier now. "I've been careful my whole life." I look at her. "I'm tired of it."
Elena reaches for her own glass. Her eyes are bright.
She raises it toward me without speaking.
I raise mine. We don't make a toast. We don't need one.
She fills my glass a second time and we sit together on the couch with the city going on outside my window, and she doesn't say I told you so and I don't say she did, and somewhere across Chicago Maxwell Stevens is in his apartment not sleeping, and I am finally, at twenty-four years old, done making a case against the thing I want.
My phone is on the counter. I don't pick it up tonight. Tonight belongs to this. To saying the true thing in the kitchen and feeling it land. Tomorrow belongs to what comes next.
But the decision is made. It was made the second I watched him walk away.