Twenty-Seven #3
My voice barely clears my throat. Feels strange to hear something that isn’t a moan or a curse.
“My place is ten minutes.” I stare at the cracked ceiling instead of him. “Your penthouse or whatever has to have an actual bed. One that fits a human shaped like a fridge.”
His forearm slides across my stomach, heavy and hot, hauling me in so my side welds to his bare chest. His eyes stay closed.
“No.”
I twist enough to see his face. Stubble shadow, lashes dark against his skin, like he’s choosing not to look at me instead of falling asleep.
“No?” I prod.
His jaw ticks hard enough I can feel it through his cheek.
“Walk out there and it starts,” he murmurs. “Cameras. The League office calling from Toronto. Questions about why I went rogue on live TV.” His mouth curls, not amused. “I’m not giving them that tonight.”
He tightens his hold, palm firm on my hip.
“In here, door’s locked.” His voice drops. “They can wait.”
He means it. He’d rather wedge himself onto a glorified lawn chair in my office than step back outside and hand himself to the wolves. The other wolves.
The heater rattles again, pushing another breath of too?hot air across our legs. My skin prickles. I let my body settle into his anyway.
For a second, it almost works. The noise from the Village feels far away. Just the harsh whisper of our breathing and metal complaining whenever either of us shifts.
My gaze drifts sideways, past the rumpled sheets, to the desk.
The compliance order glares at me from under my dad’s old stapler, edges wrinkled from the number of times I’ve crushed it in my fist.
The quiet lets the math come roaring back.
“You know this doesn’t fix it.” My voice goes flat. “Retrofits, expedited fines, ‘inspection fees’—the city’s proposed repairs start at seventy?five grand.”
His arm stays around me, unmoving.
I keep going because stopping means I might cry, and I refuse to do that with him wrapped around me.
“Deadline’s January fifth.” My throat scrapes on the date. “That’s in four days. Banks are closed today. Contractors are on Westfield’s payroll or down south.”
I swallow; it scratches going down. I turn my head on the pillow. Gabriel’s profile sits hard and quiet in the half?light.
“We humiliated Westfield, sure,” I push on. “But he still has the City in his pocket. By Tuesday, the fines kick in.”
I close my eyes, picturing the fine print I’ve memorized.
“Ten thousand dollars a day,” I whisper. “Every day the doors stay open. They don’t have to lock me out, Gabriel. They’ll just bleed me dry until I hand them the keys myself.”
Gabriel finally shifts. He rolls onto his side, closer, propping himself up on one elbow. The mattress drags me toward him with the movement, bar digging into my hip. His eyes catch mine—clearer than they have any right to be after the night he’s had.
“Then we don’t let them.”
His hand slides from my hip to the edge of the duvet. He hauls it higher, tucking it under my chin like he’s insulating me with cotton and stubbornness.
“We fight in the daylight,” he says, then adds, “We figure it out when the sun comes up.”
We.
The word sits in my chest like a foreign object. Heavy. Dangerous. Nobody’s ever said it about me. Not one boyfriend, not one anybody. The bar, the funeral, the seven years—first person singular, all of it, and I built a whole personality out of that being fine.
That one little syllable shouldn’t do anything, but it does. Warmth wraps around my heart, squeezing until it’s almost painful, completely uninvited. I look at the ceiling until it passes.
The ugly truth, when the lights in my head flick back on, is this: I have four days before the city kills my bar. He has, what, three hours before Sportsnet loops that speech every ten minutes and Westfield drafts a new “we thank him for his service” press release.
He pulls the blanket tighter around us and all I can see is everything he just lit on fire.
I shift onto my back. The springs squeal and bite into my shoulder blades.
“You destroyed it,” I blurt.
He blinks. “What?”
“Your whole setup.” Heat spikes in my chest. “The C they were dangling, the clean?cut ‘face of the franchise’ bullshit, the legacy—your name in rafters, all of it.”
I flick a hand at the ceiling like the banners from Whistler Peak might magically appear above the water stains.
“You torched that on a microphone. For this.” My arm sweeps in a circle around the cramped office, gesturing to the bar beyond the thin wall. “For a broke beer joint with a failing freezer and one pissed?off ex?player.”
Anger feels easier than the thing under it.
He watches me ride it out and doesn’t look away once.
“I didn’t do it for the bar,” he says at last.
I snort. “No?”
“I mean—” He drags a hand over his face, knuckles catching on a two?day shadow. “I did it for you. And for every kid Westfield plans to run through that place like they’re disposable. But it wasn’t just that.”
He stares up at the ceiling, one arm folded beneath his head, bicep flexing.
“I saw myself in those photos,” he pushes on. “Smiling next to Westfield, selling his shiny new lounge while they strangled this place and buried what they did in Calgary. Smiling while Braxton kept his job. While you lost yours. While his buddy Raj signed that order.”
His mouth twists.
“I hated that guy. The one in the photos. The one parroting his lines.”
He sucks in a breath through his teeth. Lets it out slow.
“I couldn’t be him anymore.”
The fan on the heater spins, pushing hot air across my toes. The pullout creaks when he rolls back toward me.
“I don’t know who I am if I’m not the version somebody’s selling,” he admits.
The words come out low, like they taste sour.
“My whole life is jerseys. Rosters. Systems. Westfield in my head telling me what leadership is. Tonight I cut that out in front of a camera and I have no fucking idea what I wake up as tomorrow.”
I lie beside him and take in the confusion coming off a guy who, until a few hours ago, walked like he owned whatever room he was in.
The same guy who ruined my life by protecting his image instead of the truth.
The thread wasn’t his, but the words still were.
Nothing that happened tonight erases that reality.
I know exactly what I’m lying down next to—a debt that isn’t paid, might never be paid in full. And I’m choosing it anyway. Eyes open.
I roll toward him and plant my palm in the middle of his chest again. Feel his heart hammer under the tangle of muscle and bone.
“You’re just Gabriel,” I say.
His gaze snaps to mine.
No number. No jersey. No title. Just him. The only version I’ve ever been able to stand, if I’m being honest with myself—the one apologizing at my bar during the storm, the one shaking on my bar floor tonight instead of hiding in a PR-crafted booth.
His throat bobs. He breathes out, long and rough, like that simple line knocks a piece loose inside him.
The heater cycles off. The quiet that follows has weight to it. Everything we just did. Everything we can’t fix yet.
We shuffle closer without talking, because the pullout doesn’t give us a choice.
He bends his knees, wedging them between the armrest and my calves, ankle hooking behind my shin to keep from slipping through the gap where the cushions meet.
I tuck one foot under his calf, my knee over his thigh, trying to find angles that don’t end with one of us hitting the floor.
Elbows bump. The metal bar under the foam digs into my spine. His hip jams into mine. It’s not comfortable, not really. But it’s contact. Warmth.
His shoulder under my fingers feels like rock—cords of muscle knotted tight near his neck. Tomorrow he’ll wake up with his back screaming from this disaster of a bed, his name plastered across every sports site with words like “controversial” and “meltdown.”
He could be anywhere else. In a real bed with real sheets in his overpriced condo. On a plane out of here.
He’s here. In my office, on this crap mattress, like planting his broken body between me and the rest of the mess is suddenly non?negotiable.
My hand moves without permission, thumb tracing the hard line of tension at the base of his neck. His skin is hot, pulse steadying under my touch.
He flinches, barely.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
His hand covers mine. Holds it there.
“Feels good.”
The words land in my heart and settle there, awkward and important.
I slide down, lay my head on his chest. His heartbeat thuds slow and sure against my ear, syncing with the faint rattle of the heater and the distant muffled thump of bass from somewhere down the Village.
For the first time since the envelope showed up from the city, the panic doesn’t claw right away. There’s fear, yeah. Fury. A clock ticking loud in the back of my brain.
But under it, something new: I’m not the only one bracing for impact anymore.
“You’re an idiot, Castellano,” I mutter into his skin.
It comes out soft, edges worn down by everything we burned tonight. Almost fond.
His chest rises under my cheek. The breath he lets out is long and shaky, exhaling more than air. His arm tightens around my back, palm spanning most of my ribs.
“Go to sleep, Hayes.”
The threats aren’t gone. The city notice still waits on the desk. Westfield’s lawyers are probably already drafting something nasty.
But on this flat pullout, wrapped in his body heat, my eyes finally slide shut.
I let the darkness take me with his heartbeat in my ear and his hand on my back.