5. Cyaire #2
“You stopped walking,” Cameron says with a knowing smile, turning to face front as our driver pulls smoothly away from the curb and merges into the airport traffic.
“I paused.” I huff, with an air of wounded dignity that is approximately eighty percent performative, and apparently enough to make even our driver laugh softly from the front seat. At least my ability to entertain a room remains intact. A divo I am not. I refuse to become one on principle.
“Cyaire,” Cameron says, not sparing me so much as a glance. “You were standing there long enough for three separate families to walk around you.”
Julian laughs so hard and so suddenly that I wince at the volume.
The sound fills the back of the SUV, slightly distorted through the speakers, and somehow still exactly the same as it was when we were kids.
Then he stops laughing, and I can hear the pause before the next words arrive, which means I’m about to get an earful.
I know this man. I have known this man my entire life.
“You did what?” he asks, the teasing entirely stripped from his voice.
“Oh, here we go.” I announce out loud, for the benefit of Cameron, who of course laughs.
“This is exactly why Malik keeps telling you to use the jet,” Julian says, and now there’s something under the humor, something genuine and careful.
“Cy, there’s going to come a time when you can’t move through public spaces the way you have been.
It’s not safe, and it doesn’t get easier the longer you wait to acknowledge it. ”
I groan and let my head fall back against the leather headrest. The Seattle skyline appears briefly outside the window, gray and overcast and oddly beautiful for it.
“Can you and your husband please stop trying to turn me into a billionaire stereotype? I’m fine. I promise. I was wearing the glasses and everything.”
“It is a very nice jet, thank you very much,” he continues, with the serene confidence of someone who has fully made peace with the luxury in question. “I worry about you. You chose a life of being in the public eye, Cy. That means the public eye is always a possibility.”
“It is unnecessary,” I say stubbornly.
“It has leather seats,” he offers, the tone shifting again toward teasing, though I can hear beneath it that he has more he wants to say and is choosing not to, because he knows this particular argument won’t land today.
“So does my car.”
“Cy. Seriously. You’re world famous. Some degree of practical consideration is not selling out, it’s just sense. Think about your privacy, if nothing else.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose.
“That is the most Malik Carter argument I have ever heard come out of your mouth. He’s gotten into your head completely.”
Julian laughs again, easy and warm, and despite myself I find myself smiling properly for the first time since the airport.
The last few years have altered all our lives in ways none of us anticipated when we were younger and everything seemed either impossibly fixed or impossibly far away.
Hearing my brother laugh still feels exactly the same as it always did.
Some things don’t change regardless of how much everything else does, and I’ve decided those things are worth holding onto.
Eventually he quiets enough for the conversation to continue.
“So,” he says. “Seattle.”
“We just left the airport.”
The SUV merges into traffic as I glance out the window. The familiar skyline rises beyond the glass, gray clouds hanging low and full over the city in a way that Seattle seems to specialize in, like it’s cultivated the atmosphere deliberately.
“And how long are you staying?” Julian asks.
I shrug, even though he can’t see it.
“Honestly? I have no idea. Jasper told me to get on a plane and promised he’d explain everything once I arrived. Apparently, there’s a meeting tomorrow. Other than that, your guess is as good as mine.”
Julian hums thoughtfully. The sound means he’s processing something, filing it somewhere, deciding whether to say the thing he’s thinking or let it sit.
“So, you’re flying to another state entirely on trust.”
“I’ve worked with Jasper for years now,” I reply, wondering where he’s heading with this.
“That wasn’t a no,” he deadpans.
A reluctant laugh escapes me.
“Fair. But he is my agent, and I trust he has my best interests at heart. He’s never given me reason to think otherwise.”
The conversation softens into a comfortable silence for a few moments. Traffic rolls past outside while Cameron scrolls through something on his phone in the front seat, performing his own practiced brand of not listening while absolutely listening.
Then Julian clears his throat.
The sound immediately makes me suspicious. It’s a specific kind of throat-clearing, deliberate in the way that means he’s been working up to whatever comes next for the last several minutes at least. I narrow my eyes at the phone.
“What?” I ask.
“What, what?” he replies, with an innocence so studied it becomes its own kind of evidence.
“Julian.”
“Cyaire.”
I sigh. Long and resigned and entirely aware that I was never going to avoid this particular conversation, not once I told him I was coming to Seattle. I should have known the conversation was always going to find its way here. Of course it was.
“Are you planning on looking for him?” The teasing is completely gone now, replaced by something quieter and more careful.
For a moment I don’t answer.
The silence stretches long enough that I know my brother notices it. Hell, I notice it.
Because if the answer were truly no, I would have said it immediately, without hesitation, the way you answer questions that have no weight to them.
“Wow,” Julian says softly. “Okay then.”
“Don’t,” I warn him. I genuinely, sincerely do not want to have this conversation in the back of a moving vehicle with Cameron performing elaborate indifference in the front seat.
“I’m not starting anything,” he replies, which is the thing people say immediately before starting something.
“You’re absolutely starting something.”
His laughter drifts through the line again, low and fond.
I turn my attention back to the window and let it rest there.
The truth is that I have spent the last two months actively, deliberately, and spectacularly unsuccessfully trying not to think about Jamie Maxwell.
One look across that hallway at the arena was enough to unravel every carefully constructed version of him I’d been carrying around for three years. All of it gone, instantly, replaced by something far more complicated and far less manageable.
Now I know exactly who he is, and it is as though a veil has been lifted from my eyes and replaced with a spotlight pointed directly at everything I’d been conveniently not examining.
Because once I knew where to look, Jamie Maxwell became impossible to miss.
The ridiculous part is that I still don’t know what to do with any of the information I’ve collected over these two months of what can only honestly be described as low-grade, hockey-adjacent stalking.
“Do you even think he’s still here?” I ask quietly, letting a little of the vulnerability through.
Just enough. “The season’s over. They won the Stanley Cup.
Isn’t this when athletes disappear to tropical islands and spend the summer posting vacation photographs from places the rest of us can’t afford? ”
“Some of them, and Cy, you can definitely afford it.” Julian says.
“Exactly. He’s probably halfway around the world by now.” I reply, jumping on it quickly, because part of me recognizes what I’m doing and does it anyway. If he’s not in Seattle, then there’s my answer. Neat. Tidy. Decided by geography rather than anything requiring actual courage on my part.
Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t.
The problem is that I keep replaying that night at the arena, turning it over from different angles.
If Dad hadn’t been there.
If Malik and Julian hadn’t been standing beside me.
If I hadn’t convinced myself that walking away was the sensible thing to do.
Maybe I would have stayed. Waited in the hallway, found some way to begin a sentence that started with ‘I don’t know if you remember me but’.
. .Maybe something real could have happened.
Instead, I left, and I have turned that decision over in my head on more occasions than I’m prepared to admit out loud in this SUV.
If I’m being completely honest with myself, I’ve regretted it more than once over the last two months.
“At least I know who he is now,” I say eventually, to say something.
Julian is quiet.
“He’s not a mystery anymore,” I continue.
“No,” Julian agrees. “He’s not.”
After a few seconds, Julian says, “You never know, Cy. Fate has a funny way of doing exactly whatever it wants, regardless of your opinion on the matter.”
I laugh despite myself and shake my head. “Look at you getting philosophical.”
“Look at me being married and mature and generally an evolved human being.” He says it with the particular note of smug satisfaction that means he is enjoying this tremendously. I can practically hear him sitting back in whatever chair he’s in, thoroughly pleased with himself.
“Look at all the drama it took to get there,” I reply, because we’re far enough from it now that we can look back at the whole catastrophic, beautiful mess of it with something approaching affection.
“Oh, that’s cold.” He laughs, unconcerned.
“You married Malik Carter,” I say. “The enemy.”
There is a beat of silence. Perfectly timed.
Then Julian starts laughing so hard I have to pull the phone away from my ear again, and I find myself grinning at the leather seat in front of me like an idiot.
“Okay,” he finally manages. “That one was fair.”
“I know.”
“You’re lucky I love you,” he says, and beneath the laughter there is something genuine and uncomplicated, the kind of easy love that comes from years and history and understanding someone well enough to know when to push and when to simply be there.
I wish, suddenly and with some force, that he was sitting beside me.
“I hear that a lot,” I say, clearing my throat.