15. Jax
Chapter fifteen
Jax
Isee her face change.
That’s it. That’s all it takes.
One second — her eyes dropping to the screen, something moving across her face before she locks it down — and my whole body knows before my head catches up.
Griffin’s number.
I don’t need her to say it. I know.
My jaw locks so hard I feel it in my teeth.
I say goodnight. I leave.
Get three blocks away and turn the car around because fuck that. Fuck driving home wondering. Fuck giving that asshole room for shit.
I buzz her doorbell.
She lets me in.
She’s still holding the phone when she opens the door.
“You came back.”
“Yeah.”
“Why.”
I shut the door behind me. “Because you looked at your phone like you just took a puck to the face.”
That lands.
She steps back, but not all the way. Holds the space between us.
The space looks like her even in the dark— notebooks everywhere, camera bag by the door, the bowl out back for that dumb cat that still won’t come inside, like she has any idea what’s good for her. It smells like coffee and onions from the pasta we ate earlier.
“The text,” Nova says.
“I saw your face.”
“Jax—”
“I don’t need to know the whole story.” I hold her eyes. “I just needed to come back.”
Not to fix it.
Just so she wasn’t standing here alone with it.
She holds my gaze for a long time.
Then: “Griffin.”
Just the name. Flat. Like she’s tired of carrying it.
Something kicks hard in my chest. I keep it there. Barely.
“We dated. Six weeks. He’s a narcissistic fuck. It was nothing until it wasn’t, and then I got out.” She says it like she wants the whole thing gone. “He does this. Shows up when he thinks something’s happening. When he thinks he might be losing something he decided was his.”
I’m no stranger to fuckers like him.
Every team’s got one — mouth always running, always leaning too far into people’s space, the kind who mistakes getting away with shit for being untouchable. The kind you don’t turn your back on, because they mistake that for permission.
“You’re not his.”
Her eyes come up to mine.
“No,” she says. “I’m really not.”
Griffin Novak.
That fucker’s been a nail in my ass for years. Every time the Cyclones face the Reapers, he’s out there running his mouth, taking cheap shots, skating right up to the line and somehow never catching the penalty because he’s always one step ahead of where the officials are looking.
Now he’s texting Nova out of fucking nowhere.
No.
“He doesn’t get near you again.”
She blinks like she doesn’t understand what I’m saying.
“Jax—”
“I mean it.”
She stares at me. Not scared. Not startled. Just looking at me like she’s taking the full shape of it in.
“Okay,” she says quietly.
“Okay,” I say.
I sit down on her couch. Don’t mean to. Do it anyway.
She sits next to me, and neither of us reaches for the silence.
“You always ask if I’m okay.”
“Yeah.”
“Before anything else.”
“Yeah.”
“Even when you’re—” She gestures at me.
“Pissed off?”
“I was going to say impossible.”
“Same thing.”
That gets the smallest smile out of her.
“Are you?” she asks.
“Yeah. Not at you.”
“I know.”
She does know.
That’s the thing with her. She usually knows.
We sit with the phone between us like we already decided where to put our attention.
“He’s not going to stop,” she says.
“Probably not.”
“Then what?”
“Then we deal with it.”
She turns her head. “We.”
“Yeah. We.”
That should feel like too much.
It doesn’t.
Something flickers across her face. Not surprise exactly. Something steadier than that.
“He doesn’t get to have anything to do with what’s happening here,” I say. “He doesn’t get that.”
“No,” she says. “He doesn’t.”
She nods once.
I know I should go.
Six AM skate. Round 2 already under my skin. I’ve got a hundred reasons to be somewhere else right now, and I can’t make myself move toward any of them.
“Can I ask you something.”
“Yeah.”
“You turned the car around because you saw his number.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s…”
“What.”
“A lot.”
I look at her.
She’s almost smiling now. The real one. Not the one she wears in scrums when she wants a player to forget she’s paying attention.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”
She studies me for a second. “You really don’t do anything halfway, do you.”
“Apparently not.”
That lands between us and stays there.
“He’s going to keep trying.”
“Let him.”
“It’s going to get messy.”
“Probably.”
“You’re not worried about that.”
“Are you?”
She takes a second with it. A real second. No bullshit.
“No,” she says. “Not right now.”
“Good.”
We sit there after that.
No one trying to fix the room.
I’ve sat in a lot of silences. Press silences. Locker room silences. The silence after a bad loss when nobody has anything useful to say.
This one’s different.
This one has her in it.
She reaches over at some point and puts her hand on my arm.
Doesn’t make it a thing. Doesn’t look at me. Just puts it there and leaves it. I look down at her hand on my arm like it belongs there. Then I put mine over hers.
Neither of us says anything about it.
That’s how I know it matters.
I lose an hour in that room without noticing.
I should go.
I don’t want to.
I could stay all night. But I leave anyway.
The house is quiet when I get home.
Josie’s been by — Brick’s bowl is clean, his toys scattered across the floor the way they get when she’s really gone at it with him. She spoils him rotten. He deserves it.
I plop on the couch. Brick finds me and settles in.
I should pull up film.
I don’t.
That’s how I know this shit’s bad.
It’s always been a good house. Aurora claimed roomie status first, filling the place with plants, color-coded calendars, and opinions nobody asked for. Then Aiden showed up, and somehow the place bent around the two of them until it felt impossible to remember it any other way.
I stayed out of it. Let them figure themselves out while I played the reliable one in the background. Turns out that role costs more than you think.
Now it’s just me in here with the history of everybody else’s life still hanging around these walls.
Honestly, that never bothered me before tonight.
Three blocks.
That’s how long I made it.
I turned the car around in three blocks, and I’m done pretending I don’t know exactly what that means.
She let me back in — unannounced, no questions, no making me explain myself first.
Just opened the door.
Nobody really does that.
Not like that.
Just her.
And that sticks.
I sit with that for a while.
The Reapers are going to make it through. I know it the way I know reads in the crease — before it happens, in the bone. And when they do, when we face them across the ice, Griffin Novak is going to be standing on the other side.
And I’m going to be standing on mine.
He thinks he has room to play here.
He doesn’t.
I close my eyes.
Griffin texting her pisses me off.
Her opening the door for me anyway does something worse.
It makes it mine to protect.
And I’ll be goddamned if Griffin Novak gets to put his hands anywhere near it.