Chapter 7
CARTER
Iwoke up before her.
The room was still dim, the city outside the window doing the quiet thing it did in the early morning before it remembered to be loud again.
Jess was asleep on her side facing me, one hand tucked under her cheek, hair across the pillow, completely unguarded in a way she almost never was when she was awake.
I lay there and didn't move.
I'd woken up next to women before. It had never felt like this — this stillness, this specific not-wanting-to-be-anywhere-else.
Usually the morning was the part I was already mentally leaving, cataloguing exits, running through reasons why this had been good and complete and didn't need to extend any further than it already had.
I wasn't doing any of that.
I was looking at her sleep and thinking about how she'd just held my hand tighter without making it into something it didn't need to be when I'd told her about my childhood.
About the way she'd laughed when the couch got awkward — actually laughed, unguarded and real, which was somehow more intimate than anything that came after.
About Justin's face during the fireworks, head tipped back, eyes wide, sitting in my lap like it was the most natural place in the world to be.
I lay there thinking about all of it and felt something settle in my chest that I didn't have a clean word for yet.
She woke up slow, the way she did everything that wasn't an emergency — blinking against the early light, orienting herself, and then finding me already watching her and smiling before she'd fully decided to.
"Good morning," she said, voice rough with sleep.
"Good morning." I reached over and pushed a strand of hair off her face. "You sleep like someone who's made peace with everything."
She laughed softly. "I sleep like someone who works night shifts. My body gave up on being precious about it years ago." She stretched, unhurried, and looked at me with that expression — the one I was still learning, the one that meant she was deciding something. "Last night was?—"
"Yeah," I said. "It was."
She smiled — the real one — and that was enough.
She was the one who suggested the shower.
She pushed back the covers and looked at me over her shoulder. "Come shower with me," she said, like it was the simplest thing in the world.
It was.
The hotel bathroom was small enough that there wasn't a lot of room to be anything but close, which suited me fine.
She turned the water on hot and stepped in and I followed her and for a moment we just stood there under the steam, her back against my chest, my arms around her, both of us settling into the morning.
Then she turned around and kissed me and the morning settled into something else entirely.
I pressed her back against the tile and she went willingly, her hands in my hair, my hands moving over her — her waist, her hips, lower — and she made a sound against my mouth that I felt in my spine.
I'd grabbed a condom off the nightstand on my way in, because some part of me had known exactly where this was going the second she said come shower with me.
I got it open and rolled it on while she watched me with her lip caught between her teeth, and then I lifted her thigh and she wrapped her leg around me and I pushed inside her slow, taking my time about it, feeling her adjust around me with her head tipped back and her lips parted.
"Carter—"
"Right here," I said against her throat. "Nowhere else."
The shower was different from the night before — faster, more urgent, the greedy heat of two people who had figured out what they were doing and were doing it again with the confidence that came from knowing.
She moved with me, matching every push, her nails dragging across my back when I found the angle that made her gasp, and I stayed there — steady, deliberate — until she came apart with her face turned into my shoulder, biting down just enough that I lost whatever was left of my own restraint and followed her under hard, her name the only coherent thing left in my head.
We stood under the water afterward, foreheads together, breathing.
"We should go back," she said eventually, when she'd found her voice. "Justin will be up."
"I know."
Neither of us moved.
"Carter."
"Two more minutes."
She laughed and reached past me and turned off the water.
Justin was already at the kitchen table when we got back, working his way through a bowl of cereal with the focused energy of a child who had important things to do today and needed fuel for them.
Carter Junior was propped against the orange juice.
Rosa was at the stove, and she turned when we came in, looked at the two of us once, and turned back without a word.
"Carter!" Justin looked up with the delight of someone for whom this was an unexpected bonus. "Did you sleep here?"
"In the hotel," Jess said smoothly, before I could answer. "Carter's hotel is very close. He came for breakfast."
Justin accepted this without question and moved on. "Rosa made eggs. Do you want eggs?"
"I would love eggs."
Rosa set a plate in front of me without being asked, which I took as a significant endorsement.
We sat around that kitchen table for an hour — Justin narrating his plans for the day, which involved Carter Junior, the backyard, and a complicated game he'd invented that required explanation far beyond my ability to follow, Rosa refilling coffees without being asked, Jess with her feet tucked up on her chair the way she sat when she was comfortable, laughing at something Justin said with her whole face.
I watched all of it and thought: this is the thing.
Not the hockey. Not the Cup. Not the apartment in St. Louis or the career I'd built or any of the things I'd spent twelve years working toward.
This — a kitchen table in Roscoe Village on a Sunday morning in July, with a woman who held my hand tighter when I said something hard and a little boy who had named his stuffed bear after me and a nanny who put eggs in front of me without asking — this was the thing I hadn't known I was looking for.
I had a four o'clock flight.
Justin walked me to the door when it was time to go, which was something he apparently did for people he considered important, according to Jess, who told me this quietly while I was putting my shoes on and looked at me in a way that made me glad I was already sitting down.
"When are you coming back?" Justin asked at the door.
"Soon," I said. "As soon as I can."
He considered this. "How soon is soon?"
"Very soon." I crouched down to his level. "Take care of Carter Junior while I'm gone."
"I always do," Justin said, with great dignity.
I stood up and looked at Jess, and she looked back at me, and neither of us said anything for a moment because some things didn't need words — not yet, not here, not with Justin watching and Rosa pretending not to.
I kissed her once, quick and certain, and picked up my bag.
"Call me when you land," she said.
"Always do," I said, echoing Justin without meaning to, and she smiled and I went down the front steps and didn't look back because if I looked back I wasn't going to leave.
The Uber to Midway was quiet and I spent most of it looking out the window at Chicago going by — the neighborhoods, the lake glimpsed between buildings, the soft gold light of a summer Sunday afternoon — and thinking about how a city could feel completely different depending on who you knew in it.
I had a phone full of calls to return and film to review and a training camp that was coming up faster than I was ready for.
None of it felt as real as that kitchen table.
I didn't text her something clever from the gate.
I just sat there with the boarding pass in my hand, thinking about a woman in her socks in a Roscoe Village kitchen and a kid who'd walked me to the door like I mattered, and I let myself feel the early depth of what I felt for the two of them — for once, instead of talking myself out of it.
Then I boarded the plane, and spent the entire flight home already planning the next trip back.