Chapter 22 Not Ashamed Of Myself
At five forty-two in the morning, Luca told Claire the revised Boreal authorization was still not ready to sign.
Her face filled his laptop screen from a home office where one lamp was on and the rest of the room remained dark. She wore glasses Luca had never seen at the rink and the expression of a woman who had expected this call.
"Which clause?" she asked.
"Page eleven. They removed the dating questions, then gave themselves permission to describe my chemistry with Nadia however they want."
Claire looked down at her copy. "They call it campaign narrative."
"They can call it weather. It still implies something we said no to."
"If we strike it, they may walk."
Luca considered the number at the end of the agreement, the visibility, and the part of him trained to accept admiration before anyone changed his mind.
"Then they walk," he said.
Claire looked up. "Are you sure?"
"I want the campaign. I do not want it enough to let them rent a version of my life. Separate talent, separate frames, no romantic copy. Put that in the approval clause, not an email they can forget."
Claire's expression eased by a degree. "Anything else?"
"Closed set for the skin work. My approval on final selects. And strike heartthrob, eligible, and fantasy unless I approve the exact copy."
"You have become inconvenient."
"You told me that was what representation was for."
"I told you representation gives inconvenience letterhead."
She sent the changes while they were still on the call. Boreal's counsel returned the document twenty-one minutes later with every material protection accepted.
Luca read the final language himself. Separate campaign frames. No implied relationship with Nadia Bell. No questions about his dating life. Approval over loaded copy. A closed set and image rejection rights.
At six twelve, he signed.
It was still a fragrance campaign. It was still going to put his face on glass walls and transit shelters across the city. It would still give strangers a larger, cleaner version of Luca Bennett to want.
But the terms belonged to him now.
He signed because he wanted the money, because his mother would understand what it meant without pretending not to be proud, and because saying no solely to prove Rowan's advice had hurt him would make Rowan the author of that choice too.
Luca was tired of giving him authorship.
Claire remained on the call while he opened the campaign calendar.
The first fitting would take half a day.
Photography required two days during a home stand, with one protected recovery morning afterward.
Publicity would be limited to the launch event and one interview whose questions Claire would receive in advance.
"Training gets priority," Luca said. "If a shoot moves, it moves around the team schedule. Not the other way around."
"Already in the rider."
"And the youth-equipment percentage?"
"Boreal matched it. Five percent of your fee to the Northstar access program, separately credited."
That part had been Luca's request before Rowan offered any opinion. New skates would not make the campaign honest, but they would make the transaction useful beyond him.
He added the dates to his calendar himself. Fitting. Closed set. Launch. None felt like a verdict on who he was allowed to want. They were work he had chosen under terms he had helped write.
"Now are we done?" Claire asked.
"Now we are done."
He thanked her before ending the call. Then he saved the agreement in the folder where Theo had taught him to keep every contract, amendment, and approval. The decision had witnesses, language, and a paper trail.
It did not need Rowan's blessing to become real.
He set his phone facedown on the kitchen counter. The apartment was gray with early light. His gear bag waited by the door, packed with the neatness he used when everything else felt uncontained.
At six fourteen, he texted Rowan.
Can you meet me on P2 before skate?
The reply came before Luca had put on his coat.
Yes.
No question mark. No attempt to move the conversation into a video room, an office, a controlled category.
For one dangerous second, Luca loved him for that.
Then he picked up his bag and left.
The arena parking level smelled of cold concrete and exhaust. Fluorescent lights hummed above rows of cars belonging to staff who had arrived before the city woke. Luca parked near the service elevators and stood beside the hood with both hands in his coat pockets.
Rowan's truck came down the ramp four minutes later.
He parked two spaces away. When he climbed out, there was stiffness in the first step from the cab, a guarded catch at his right side that disappeared by the second. He wore a black Wolves coat zipped to the throat and carried coffee he did not drink.
"You are early," Rowan said.
"So are you."
"I usually am."
It was the kind of exchange they could have survived inside forever. Hockey offered a thousand harmless sentences for two people who could not say the necessary one.
Rowan stopped an arm's length away. "What happened?"
Luca almost laughed. The question made disaster sound recent.
"I accepted Boreal."
Something moved through Rowan's face, too fast to name. "All right."
"Claire got the protections. Separate frames, no romance angle, approval on the copy. Nadia is a coworker. The campaign is work."
"That sounds better."
"It is better."
Rowan nodded. "Then I am glad you got terms you can live with."
"I didn't ask you here for permission."
"I know."
"Do you?"
The coffee cup flexed once beneath Rowan's fingers.
Luca had rehearsed this conversation in three languages and trusted none of them. In English he could be precise. In Italian he could be honest. In the wordless language they had built on the ice, Rowan would understand everything and still find a way not to answer.
So Luca chose precision.
"I can live with private," he said. "I need you to understand that first. I am not asking you to tell the team. I am not asking for photographs, or a date in public, or some announcement that puts your career in danger."
Rowan's shoulders lowered a fraction, relief arriving before he could stop it.
That hurt more than Luca expected.
"But I cannot live with being treated like something you are ashamed of," Luca continued.
"I am not ashamed of you."
The answer came immediately. Captain-fast. Protective and insufficient.
"Then why do I disappear every time this becomes real?"
"That is not what is happening."
"Graham disappeared. Now I disappear. You call it privacy, but privacy is when two people protect something together. This is you protecting yourself from the fact that it exists."
Rowan looked past him toward the empty ramp. No one was coming.
"Graham had no right to involve you in that."
"He didn't. You did."
Rowan's gaze returned to him.
"You brought the same rules," Luca said. "You used the same door. You told me he wanted more, and your face told me what happened when he asked."
"This is different."
"Because I am younger? Because you are my captain? Because it is the season? Pick one. You have many good reasons. That is the problem."
Rowan set the coffee on the concrete barrier beside him with exact care. "The power difference is real. My responsibility to the team is real. If this goes badly, you are not the one people will say should have known better."
"It is going badly now."
"Because I asked for space?"
"Because every time you feel something, you turn it into a rule I have to obey."
The words hung beneath the fluorescent hum.
Rowan's jaw tightened. "I am trying not to use my position against you."
"Then stop deciding for both of us."
"It is not that simple."
"No. It is not simple. It is still a choice."
Luca heard an elevator move somewhere behind the concrete wall. Machinery, cables, ordinary systems doing exactly what they had been designed to do.
Rowan lowered his voice. "We have a game tonight that can put us above the line for the first time this season. You have a campaign that will bring more attention. We are finally getting stable. This cannot become the thing that fractures the room."
"Nobody in the room knows."
"Finn knows something is wrong. Vale knows the line is affected. That is already too much."
"They know you punished a good read because you were angry with me."
"I apologized for that."
"Professionally."
"It happened at work."
Luca stared at him. Rowan's expression shifted; the sentence had demonstrated the problem without Luca needing to explain it.
For an instant Rowan looked tired rather than controlled. Thirty-two years old, hurting, frightened, and still beautiful enough that Luca's body remembered every place his hands had been.
Luca let the memory pass through him without moving closer.
"I am not asking you to be fearless," he said. "I am asking you to be honest with me when no one else is here."
"I have been honest."
"You have been accurate. That is not the same thing."
Rowan flinched so slightly another person might have missed it.
Luca did not.
"Tell me you want this," Luca said.
Rowan's expression closed.
"Not forever. Not in front of anyone. Here. Now. Tell me that what happened between us matters enough that you are not only managing the consequences."
"Luca."
"That is my name. It is not an answer."
"You know I want you."
The admission landed low and hot, exactly where it would have once undone him.
Luca held still. "Want is not the question."
"Then what do you need me to say?"
There it was: even now, Rowan wanted the approved language. The correct answer. A sentence he could deliver without surrendering the system that kept him safe.
"I need you to know without me writing it for you."
Rowan's eyes shut for one beat.
When they opened, the captain had returned.
"I care about you. That is why I am trying to protect what you are building here."
"Do not make this for me."
"It is partly for you whether you like that or not."
"No." Luca's voice stayed quiet. "That is the part you do not get. You can choose fear. You can choose the team. You can decide the risk is too high. But you do not get to take something away from me and rename the empty space protection."
Rowan breathed in through his nose. His hands were empty now, held loose at his sides like he was stopping himself from reaching.
"What do you want from me?" he asked.
"A choice."
"Between you and the team?"
"No. Between telling the truth to me and continuing to hide from yourself."
"You think those are separate from the team because you have been here three months."
Luca absorbed the blow. Rowan seemed to regret it before the sentence ended, but he did not take it back.
"Maybe," Luca said. "And you think everything is the team because then nothing has to be Rowan."
Silence opened between them.
A car turned onto the level at the far end. Headlights swept across the columns, touched Rowan's coat, and moved away. Neither man stepped back. There was nothing incriminating in two teammates standing apart before work.
There was the whole problem.
"I cannot give you what you are asking for," Rowan said at last.
The words were gentle. They were also clear.
Luca had believed clarity would feel like relief. Instead it felt like a blade laid flat against his ribs, not cutting yet, only proving where it could.
He nodded once.
"All right."
Rowan's control broke at the edges. "Luca."
"No. You answered. I asked you not to hide the answer inside responsibility, and this time you didn't."
"I don't want to hurt you."
"I know."
"This is not because you do not matter."
"Then you should have been able to say that before I left."
Rowan took half a step toward him.
Luca stepped back.
It was small. It was final.
Rowan stopped.
"I am not ashamed of myself," Luca said. "Not for wanting you. Not for sleeping with you. Not for believing the way you saw me on the ice might mean you could see me everywhere else too."
His throat tightened. He let it. Dignity did not require pretending pain was absent.
"I will keep your privacy," he continued. "I will protect the room. I will play the system. But I will not keep auditioning for the right to exist when the door closes."
Rowan's face had gone still with the effort of holding everything inside it.
"So what happens now?" he asked.
"Now the rules have what they were built for. Nothing."
"You mean that?"
Luca nearly said no. The body was treacherous; it remembered Rowan's kitchen, Rowan's bed, the rough warmth of his voice against Luca's skin. It remembered safety before safety became a weapon.
"Yes," he said.
Rowan looked down at the painted line between the parking spaces.
"All right."
The same two words. A different surrender.
Luca picked up his gear bag from beside the car.
"At the rink," he said, "you are my captain. I will not make you guess whether I can do my job."
Rowan looked at him then. "Neither will I."
Luca believed him. Almost unbearable too.
They walked to the elevators separately. Rowan pressed the call button. Luca stood far enough away that their coats could not touch.
When the doors opened, equipment manager Cal Mercer was already inside with two sticks balanced against his shoulder.
"Morning," Cal said. "You two planning the whole game without us?"
"Just timing," Rowan answered.
Luca stepped in. "Apparently mine needs work."
Cal snorted. "Everyone's does before coffee."
The doors closed.
Rowan watched the numbers above them. Luca watched their reflections in the brushed metal: captain and rookie, shoulder to shoulder, composed enough to fool anyone who was not looking for the distance.
On the practice ice twenty minutes later, Rowan called the first line through a neutral-zone entry.
Luca received the pass on his backhand. Finn crossed high. The defense shifted toward the obvious lane.
Luca delayed.
Rowan arrived exactly where the opening would be.
The puck met his tape without either of them looking at the other.
Rowan shot. The net snapped.
"Again," he called.
Luca circled back to center.
The play still worked.
It did not prove they had been wrong.
It was proof that losing something did not always destroy its shape.
Sometimes the body remembered where to send the puck after the heart had been told there was nowhere else to go.