11. Cyaire #2
I stop entirely, just looking at it. Looking at this unguarded snapshot of the man I’m slowly discovering is far more layered than I ever gave him credit for. A man I genuinely want to keep knowing, to keep unravelling. At least for the time I have left here.
Jamie’s voice carries from somewhere farther down the hallway.
“. . .and that’s the guest room.”
I glance up, but he’s already halfway ahead of me. When he notices I haven’t followed, he backtracks and finds my gaze fixed on the photographs.
“That one was Jacques’ graduation.” He tilts his chin toward one frame in particular and my eyes settle on it.
The whole family is crowded together on a front lawn.
Nobody is standing straight or holding still for the camera.
My mother would have had a quiet but devastating coronary at the sheer lack of composed presentation.
Someone is mid-blink, arms flung wide. Someone else is laughing so hard their face is barely visible.
The whole thing is gloriously, unapologetically imperfect.
The picture shouldn’t stand out more than the others, but it does. Julian and I were never afforded that kind of freedom in front of a lens.
“You all look happy.” The words leave me before I’ve thought them through, but they’re true. These walls say everything about the people who surround this man, about what he comes home to.
Jamie’s expression softens, the corner of his mouth lifts in a quiet smile as he glances back at me.
“We usually are,” he replies, simply and matter-of-fact, as though happiness isn’t something they labor toward but something that just runs through the foundation of them.
All I can manage is a nod as we continue deeper into the house.
The farther we go, the more photographs I find.
A young Jamie standing beside his father after a hockey game, both of them windswept and grinning.
Family barbecues in full summer heat. Thanksgivings crowded around a table that looks barely large enough to hold everyone.
Christmas mornings with the whole lot of them in matching pajamas.
Again, matching pajamas. Then a photograph of Jamie holding the Stanley Cup aloft while what appears to be half his family surges around him in pure, unrestrained chaos.
The trophy is there, but it isn’t the point. The point is the people pressing in around it, arms around shoulders, faces tipped back in laughter, the whole scene spilling slightly out of frame.
That tells me more about him than the trophy ever could.
The kitchen stops me all over again.
White cabinets stretch toward the ceiling above dark countertops, and modern appliances sit comfortably alongside original architectural details in a way that feels entirely deliberate, updated without surrendering any of the history.
A large island anchors the center of the room, surrounded by stools that carry the quiet evidence of actual, regular use.
Against the far wall, anchoring the entire space with obvious authority, sits a six-burner stove that belongs in a professional kitchen.
“You cook.” I say it as a statement, because the room makes the argument for itself.
Jamie pauses, turns, and crosses his arms over his broad chest. His white t-shirt pulls tight around his biceps with the movement, and I am forced to perform a swift, quiet act of self-discipline. “What kind of accusation is that?”
I laugh, startled. “It’s not an accusation.” I shake my head, because I genuinely didn’t frame it as a question. The room simply doesn’t look like it’s there for appearances.
“It sounded like one.” He gives me a frown that dissolves almost immediately into a small, reluctant smile. God, this man.
I gesture broadly around the room. “This kitchen gets used. That’s all I’m saying. No offence intended.” I hold both hands up in a gesture of surrender.
“None taken. I get it.” He turns toward the refrigerator, opens it with the ease of pure habit, and pulls out two bottles of water.
He walks back toward me and I become suddenly, acutely aware of how much space he occupies when he moves, “My mother didn’t raise an inadequate man,” he continues, holding out one of the bottles.
I take it from him, immediately in desperate need of hydration, though not entirely because of the walk from the front door. “Fair,” I manage. My voice comes out marginally rougher than intended.
“Tazja cooks. Jacques cooks. I cook.”
The answer arrives so naturally, with so little fanfare, that I know he has never once thought of it as remarkable. It simply is.
I twist the cap off and take a long, grateful sip.
“My mom did all the cooking growing up,” I say eventually, once I’ve recovered something resembling composure.
Jamie’s eyebrows climb. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
He shakes his head with the solemn gravity of a man delivering a formal verdict. “That’s tragic.”
A laugh breaks out of me despite myself, because he’s not wrong.
It is tragic. Julian and I are both paying for it now in our own way, yes, we can afford private chefs and every conceivable convenience, but there’s something quietly humiliating about being a grown man who couldn’t feed himself from scratch if the occasion required it.
The conversation might have continued naturally from there if something at the far end of the counter hadn’t immediately hijacked my attention.
Three oversized glass jars, sitting in a neat row. I drift closer before I’ve consciously decided to move, and when I get near enough to see the contents clearly, I stop dead.
“Jamie.”
He glances over. “What?”
I point. “Why do you own an alarming quantity of Jolly Ranchers?”
His eyes follow mine to the jars and the grin that appears is immediate and entirely unapologetic. “My candy,” he says, with a faint but unmistakable note of territorial possession that makes me laugh.
Every single jar is filled exclusively with red and green ones. Nothing else. No variety pack compromise. No orange stragglers.
I pick one up and turn it slowly in my hands, examining it the way one might examine a piece of evidence. “Why only red and green?” I ask.
“Cherry and green apple,” he says, as though this is obvious. “They’re my favorites.”
I set the jar back down carefully, and I notice the way Jamie watches my hands while I do it, with the mild vigilance of someone monitoring an interaction with something irreplaceable. “That is still a genuinely alarming amount of candy,” I say, turning back to him.
“They’re a staple. Very important to my game,” he replies, with the serene composure of a man delivering completely reasonable information.
My eyes go wide. He has my full, undivided, slightly baffled attention. “Explain,” I say slowly. “Please. For the non-athletes in the room.”
Jamie leans back against the island, looking precisely as pleased with himself as the situation warrants. “Game-day superstition.”
I blink. “No shit?”
“No shit. One of each, every time, while I’m getting suited up. Without fail.”
I look at the candy. I look at the Stanley Cup champion leaning against his kitchen island as though this is perfectly ordinary. I look back at the candy. My expression must be doing something fairly transparent because Jamie simply shrugs, completely unbothered.
“I buy them wholesale.”
The laugh that comes out of me is involuntary and complete. “Of course you do.”
“It saves me having to sort through a mixed bag,” he says, pointing his water bottle at me with the confidence of a man who has thought this through extensively and arrived at the correct conclusion.
“It’s ridiculous.”
“It’s efficient.”
“It’s ridiculous and efficient.”
His laugh follows me as we leave the kitchen, warm and unhurried, trailing through the hallway behind us, and it takes me a moment to register something I haven’t felt in quite a while.
I haven’t thought about filming. I haven’t thought about the press schedule, about the careful architecture of my public image, or about the clock quietly ticking down on the time I have left in this city.
Not once since I stepped through that front door.
I’m simply here. Present in a way I don’t recognize immediately because I’m so rarely in it. And the realization, when it settles, feels far more significant and far more dangerous than whatever mystical connection exists between a professional athlete and his bulk-purchased hard candy.
Jamie leads me into what is easily the largest room in the house.
The living room manages the rare trick of feeling both grand and genuinely comfortable at the same time.
The original woodwork frames the room along every edge, rich and dark against lighter walls, anchoring the space with a sense of permanence that no renovation could replicate from scratch.
An oversized sectional dominates the center of the room, clearly chosen for the singular purpose of being deeply, irresponsibly comfortable.
A stone fireplace anchors one wall, the chimney breast rising all the way to the ceiling.
Above the mantel, a television large enough to leave no doubt about the profession of the man who lives here, dominates the space.
Built-in bookshelves bracket the fireplace on either side, filled with books stacked both upright and flat, with more framed photographs tucked between them, because of course there are.
At this point, none of it surprises me. The entire house speaks the same language, every room another verse of the same story. A place someone genuinely comes home to rather than retreats from.
I find, with some quiet surprise, that I wouldn’t mind doing the same.
“Go ahead.” Jamie gestures toward the couch with an easy openness. “Make yourself comfortable.”
I lower myself onto the nearest corner of the sectional and immediately, without warning or ceremony, sink.
My eyebrows rise toward the ceiling as something close to a sound of involuntary pleasure escapes me before I can stop it. Every tension I’ve been carrying since this morning, since last week, possibly since longer than that, dissolves on contact.