Chapter 2 #3
Carter blew a hole in that the second he showed up to get me.
He'd changed out of team gear into a plain dark shirt, and he had the slightly-too-careful look of a man who'd put actual thought into it, and when I opened the door he went quiet for a second and then said, "You look—" and didn't finish it, just sort of gestured, helplessly, at all of me.
For a professional athlete who lived his life in front of cameras, he was doing a spectacularly bad job of hiding how glad he was to have me to himself. It should not have been as endearing as it was.
So much for the settled stance.
He took me to a quiet place a few blocks from the hotel, nothing showy about it, and across the table from him without an audience of small boys I noticed things I hadn't fully let myself notice before.
The way he asked questions and then actually waited for the answers instead of using the pause to plan what he'd say next.
The way he talked about the team — about Liam, about Cole, about a rookie named Ty he clearly thought of as a little brother — with none of the surface-level bravado I'd half-expected from a professional athlete.
The way he asked about Justin not as small talk, but like he genuinely wanted to understand who my son was as a person.
"He's a good kid," Carter said, somewhere between the appetizer and whatever came next, like it wasn't a big deal to say even though it hit me like one. "Smart. Funny. He asks better questions about the game than half the reporters I deal with."
"He likes you a lot."
"I like him a lot." He said it simply, without performing anything around it, and went back to his food like he hadn't just said something that rearranged my whole evening. It should have felt like a lot, coming from a man that much younger than me — I kept waiting for the flicker of someone in over his head, someone who’d eventually notice the six-year gap and the six-year-old and quietly find the exit.
It never came. He just kept looking at me like the math didn’t worry him in the slightest.
I'd spent years building a very specific, very deliberate life — one where I didn't need anyone to make it work, where I'd stopped waiting for a man who understood what mattered to me to show up, because waiting had never once paid off.
I hadn't expected to sit across a dinner table from a professional athlete with a reputation for not staying anywhere and feel, for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, genuinely steady.
Not swept away. Steady. Like he was exactly as solid as he looked, all the way through.
We talked until the restaurant started stacking chairs around us, and then we walked back to the hotel slowly, in no hurry at all.
At my door he told me he'd see me tomorrow for the next game, and kissed me goodnight like he had all the time in the world to wait for whatever came next — and then he strode off down the street, and I went up to my room with a smile on my face, dizzy with delight.
I lay awake a long while after, replaying the whole evening, trying to figure out exactly when my "keeping an open mind" had quietly become something else entirely.
The Blaze won Game 2 the next night to tie the series, and two days after that, I drove Justin home to Chicago.
I had a job. He had school he was already missing too much of.
There was no version of reality where I could justify camping out in a St. Louis hotel indefinitely for a man I'd known for four days, however solid he'd turned out to be.
Carter called every night the team was in Carolina.
Not texts — actual calls, late, after games, his voice still rough from yelling on the bench, telling me about the game and asking, every single time, how Justin's day had been, like it genuinely mattered to him whether Justin's class had done well on a spelling test three hundred miles away.
I told myself it was just nice. I mostly believed it.
Then the Blaze won Game 4 in Carolina, and the series stood at 3-1, one win from the Cup, and Carter called the morning after sounding like he hadn't slept.
"Come back," he said, no preamble at all. "For Game 5. For however many more games it takes — I don't care if it goes to seven, I'll buy the flights myself. I just need you here when it happens. You and Justin both."
"Carter, I have work?—"
"I know. I know you do. I'm not asking you to quit your job, I'm asking for a few days." A pause, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped into something quieter, more honest than the rest of the call had been. "I want you there, Jess. I haven't wanted anything this much in a long time."
I requested the days off before I'd fully decided to say yes. By the time I called him back, I think we both already knew what I was going to say.
That was two weeks ago.
Tonight, the St. Louis Blaze were Stanley Cup champions. I had champagne drying in my hair and Carter’s mouth still warm against mine.
And somewhere underneath all the noise, a small, careful voice was asking me what, exactly, I thought I was doing. It sounded a lot like the woman I’d been for years — the one who’d decided, on purpose, that she was better off not wanting anything like this.
I didn't have an answer yet.
I wasn't sure I wanted one tonight.