6. Jamie #3
I force my attention back to the room, to the handshakes and introductions cycling around the table.
The production team is here to discuss a film called Blue Line, greenlit and scheduled to begin shooting throughout the summer.
The story centers on hockey, on the sport itself, on the culture surrounding it, the weight of it, the life inside it and they need someone from the organization to provide real insight.
Locker room dynamics, training schedules, the particular rhythm of a professional athlete’s life.
The things that make it feel true onscreen rather than approximated.
I listen, my mind working faster than my expression lets on.
This isn’t a quick photo opportunity. This isn’t a single afternoon.
This is a sustained, summer-long commitment, one that will pull time and energy and focus from the first real off-season I’ve had that actually means something to me personally.
When they get to the specifics, when they reveal they want me to serve as Cyaire’s hockey liaison and primary on-set consultant, my stomach drops cleanly to the floor.
Of course they do.
I push back immediately, keeping my voice level despite the noise in my chest. “I appreciate the offer. But my summer is already spoken for. Family obligations, prior commitments. I can’t dedicate that kind of time to this.”
I don’t look at Marcus, even though I can feel the sharp intake of breath he doesn’t quite manage to suppress beside me.
I don’t look at the Vipers’ executive team either, whose collective discomfort I can sense without needing to confirm it.
I have every right to say no here. I’ve done everything asked of me contractually.
This is a favor dressed up in professional language, and we all know it.
The room goes quiet. Cyaire’s gaze shifts to me, just briefly, just for a single beat, but it’s enough. Enough to make the back of my neck prickle. Enough to make the air between us feel like something with weight and temperature.
Jasper, who I recognize as Cyaire’s agent from two years’ worth of vaguely tracked industry news I never meant to absorb, leans forward.
“We understand completely, Jamie. We’re not asking you to sacrifice your summer.
We need someone who can guide Cyaire through the technical side, make sure the performance feels genuine.
He hasn’t been on the ice in years, and we’d rather not have the hockey community tear the film apart in the first ten minutes. ”
Cyaire’s mouth curves, just fractionally. “I’d rather not fall on my face in front of several million people, if it’s all the same.”
The room laughs. I don’t.
I look at him directly for the first time since I walked in.
His eyes meet mine fully this time, and there’s something sitting in them that I can’t quite name, something careful, something that isn’t quite neutral but isn’t pressure either.
He doesn’t lean on me. Doesn’t assume. Just says, quietly and without performance, “I’d appreciate the chance to learn from someone who actually knows what he’s doing. ”
It’s the restraint that does it. The fact that he doesn’t push.
I exhale and drag one hand slowly over my tender scalp. “Fine. But my family comes first, without exception. My schedule is non-negotiable. Any training sessions, any meetings, any of it, it all works around what I’ve already got planned. That’s the deal or there’s no deal.”
The production team agrees before I’ve fully finished the sentence, their relief visible and slightly undignified.
The meeting wraps quickly after that, the room breaking into the usual noise of handshakes and exchanged cards and vague pleasantries about logistics to follow.
Cyaire rises from his chair in one unhurried motion, moving with the kind of unconscious ease that cameras have always known how to find.
He extends a hand toward me. His grip is firm, his palm warm, and the contact lasts exactly as long as is appropriate and not one second more.
“Looking forward to working with you, Jamie,” he says. His voice is pitched low enough that it doesn’t carry to the rest of the room, and my name in his mouth sounds different than I expected. Deliberate. Like he’s placed it carefully.
I nod once. Don’t trust myself to produce anything more than that.
He called me Jamie. Not Mr. Maxwell, not number seventeen, not any of the dozen impersonal things a person says to someone they’ve just been formally introduced to in a professional context.
He called me by my name, like he’s been holding onto it, and something about that does things to my chest I’m not prepared to examine in a conference room with dozens of other people in it.
I get myself out of there while I still have the presence of mind to manage it.
Walking back down the corridor toward the player exit, Marcus half a step behind me and wisely saying nothing, I turn the morning over in my head and find I can’t get any purchase on it.
What was supposed to be a quiet summer, time carved out deliberately for family, for stillness, for the life I’ve been slowly, carefully building here, has just become something else entirely.
Something I don’t have a clean word for yet.
Cyaire Reed has stopped being a recollection I could hold at arm’s length.
He is now attached, irrevocably, to my entire summer.