11. Cyaire #3
“This thing is dangerous,” I say, in something very close to a moan.
A laugh escapes him, genuine and bright. “That’s exactly what my mother said.”
“I believe her completely.”
Jamie drops onto the opposite end and reaches forward to collect the remote resting on the coffee table. SportsCenter appears on the screen a beat later, before he mutes it and tosses the remote aside.
Highlights flash across the screen in silence. Neither of us pays them much attention.
I try. For perhaps three seconds. Then my gaze wanders again, drawn back toward the bookshelves, the photographs, the quiet accumulation of all these small, chosen things.
So many memories, all of them easy and warm and uncomplicated, and I become aware of something low and persistent in my chest that takes me a moment to name.
Envy.
By the time I’ve pulled my focus back from somewhere near the far bookshelf, I find I’ve pulled it straight into Jamie’s waiting gaze.
“What?” he asks, his voice quiet enough that it doesn’t disturb the stillness of the room.
I try to arrange my expression into something that doesn’t require explanation, but the smile I manage is too careful and I know the moment it lands that he’s already clocked the shift in me. He watches with the kind of unhurried patience that makes deflection feel more effort than it’s worth.
I look at the photographs on the shelf. Then around the room. Then I gesture with one hand, an open, loose motion that takes in all of it, the walls, the light, the bookshelves, the whole worn and breathing warmth of the place.
The words arrive before I’ve fully decided to say them.
“I don’t think any version of you that existed in my head lived here.”
For a moment, Jamie says nothing. He shifts slightly in his seat, lets his gaze travel slowly around the room as though seeing it briefly through a borrowed lens, then brings it back to me. “Is that a bad thing?”
“No.” The answer comes immediately, without hesitation. “It’s really not.”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “Then why do you look like you’re having an existential crisis on my couch?”
A laugh escapes me, and this one, at least, is real. “Because I think I’ve spent the last two weeks steadily realizing how wrong I was about you.”
That gets his attention. He shifts again, turning toward me, brow lifted pensively. “Wrong how?”
I lean back against the cushions and let my gaze move through the room one more time.
Every direction I look, I find another piece of him, a photograph, a particular book spine, a small, remembered object placed without ceremony on a shelf.
Evidence of a life that has nothing to do with arenas or cameras or carefully constructed public narratives.
“I thought I had you figured out,” I admit.
“When?”
“When I first saw you at the airport.”
One eyebrow climbs. “The airport?”
“You were standing with your teammates on a billboard the size of an entire building.”
That earns a surprised, slightly self-conscious laugh. “Okay, I think I follow.”
“I saw the hockey player.” I let my gaze drift to the Stanley Cup photograph on the mantel.
“The professional athlete.” I find another photograph, this one of a much younger Jamie standing beside his father after what looks like a youth tournament, still in full kit, beaming with the uncomplicated joy of a kid who hasn’t yet learned to hold anything back. “The man who won championships.”
I let out a slow breath.
“What I didn’t see was any of this.” I gesture around the room, vague but encompassing. “Everything in this place tells the same story.”
Jamie’s expression settles into something quieter, more open. “What story is that?”
I look at him directly. “You love your family.”
It sounds almost too simple the moment it leaves my mouth. And yet the moment I say it, it’s the most accurate thing I’ve said all evening. “You don’t just talk about them. They’re everywhere.”
My gaze moves toward the hallway, where the photographs begin. “Tazja.” Toward one of the frames on the bookshelf. “Jacques.” Then back to him. “You built your life around the people you care about. Not around the career, not around the image. Around them.”
Jamie is quiet for a moment. He looks around his living room slowly, taking it in with the particular expression of someone seeing something familiar suddenly made strange by another person’s attention.
When he speaks, his voice has dropped slightly. “I guess I did.”
The simplicity of it hits harder than it should. It sits somewhere in my chest that makes me ache with a want I’m only beginning to understand.
Because the truth of this house isn’t in the bones of the renovation, or the neighborhood, or the square footage. It’s in the moments preserved behind glass and hung on walls. It’s in the evidence, everywhere and overwhelming, that this isn’t a place Jamie sleeps between commitments.
It’s a place he belongs.
My fingers tighten slightly around the water bottle in my hands.
“I don’t have this.” I say it quietly, plainly, because if I’ve climbed aboard the honesty train I may as well see where the tracks end.
Jamie shifts beside me, and for a moment I think he might reach across the space between us, his arm lifts slightly, almost involuntarily, before he stops himself and redirects, beginning to pick idly at the paper label on his own bottle instead. “What do you mean?”
I stare down at the bottle for a second, then look back up.
“I have the high-rise apartment in Los Angeles.” A small, dry smile finds its way to my mouth. “It’s nice.”
“Well,” Jamie says, completely deadpan, “that’s a ringing endorsement.”
I laugh, but it’s hollow. “It has a good view. It’s close to my brother and Malik.” The smile fades slowly. “But it’s still just an apartment.”
We sit with that for a moment. The muted television flickers at the edge of my vision but I’m not looking at it.
I’m thinking about bare walls and clean countertops and a space that reflects back exactly as much of myself as I’ve been willing to leave in it, which, I’m realizing now, is very little.
“I think that’s what caught me off guard,” I say finally. My eyes find his. “This feels like home.”
Jamie looks around the room again, a slow and thoughtful sweep, before his expression softens into something unhurried and warm. “You know, I wasn’t looking for any of it.” He gestures around him, loose and easy.
“The house?” I ask.
“The house. The street. The neighborhood. None of it. If I’m honest, it was Tor’s wife, Jazz, who suggested I start looking around here because some of my other teammates are close by.
It made sense.” He shrugs, and there’s something entirely unaffected in the motion. “It just fell into place. Felt right.”
His words settle into the space between us, and I find myself nodding slowly, turning them over in my head.
Because that is exactly the problem.
I wasn’t looking for this either. I wasn’t looking for Jamie Maxwell. He was a chapter from a night I thought I’d closed the moment I walked away without ever asking his name.
I wasn’t looking for whatever this has quietly, insistently become over the last two weeks.
Yet every day I spend in his orbit makes it harder to imagine the shape of my days without him in them.