Chapter 24
Jamie
I love morning practice.
I have loved morning practice every single day since I was old enough to lace up skates by myself.
The early quiet. The empty rink. The feeling of being ahead of everything before the day starts.
The ice was the first place my father ever took me to punish me.
But then it became the only place I ever felt safe.
I've never been able to explain that to anyone. Probably never will.
I also have never hated it like I hate it today.
I slowly drag myself through getting ready like every motion costs me something. Brush my teeth. Stare at myself in the mirror too long. Consider faking an injury serious enough to bench me for a month.
I can’t avoid him forever. But forever would have been nice.
I get to the rink earlier than usual. Early enough that the locker room should be empty. Early enough to get on the ice and put distance between us before I have to see his face.
Sadly, it is not empty.
Rhys is leaning against the lockers with his arms crossed and that smirk already in place, like he's been there long enough to get comfortable and pose, as if he's been waiting specifically for me.
Which he has.
Which somehow makes it so much worse.
I stop walking.
He pushes off the lockers and crosses toward me and the distance between us closes in a way I feel in my chest before it lands anywhere else. He stops close — too close, always too close — and his hand finds my shoulder. My bad shoulder. Squeezes once.
His mouth drops to my ear. "It's so nice to see you again."
The tingle of his breath against my neck. The words landing right at the place where my pulse is already going. I feel the goosebumps before I can stop them — a full-body thing, immediate and involuntary — and I ignore them the way I ignore everything I can't afford to feel.
I look at him. Dark eyes glittering. That exact grin. The one that means he knows something and is deciding how to use it. I think about punching him again and weigh the consequences. The consequences are bad. I'm still thinking about it, though.
While I'm thinking about it he reaches down and pulls his shirt off.
One motion. Unhurried. Deliberate. Just for me.
The shirt hits the bench and he trails one finger slowly down the center of his chest — past the spaceship, past the snake tattoo, all the way down to the low waistband of his shorts where the tail of the snake and trail of dark hair disappears.
My eyes follow it.
I feel them follow it.
He watches them follow it.
The grin gets worse.
"What was it about the photo?" His voice drops into something low and sensual.
"That got you so interested." I can't move.
That's the thing. I'm stuck — a fly trapped in amber, every intelligent thought gone, every defense I've spent years building just vacated — and he knows it.
He can see it. He's standing there watching me come apart and enjoying every second of it.
He reaches up. Two fingers under my chin.
Tilts my face up until I have nowhere to look except at him.
"Focus, Jamie." Quieter now. Just for me. "What made you drive all that way? What was it that made you want to fuck me so bad?"
I slam the locker beside me so hard my hand stings. The sound cracks through the empty room. The distance between us disappears in one step — chest to chest, heat off his skin, peppermint on his breath, close enough that every nerve ending I have is screaming and I cannot make myself step back.
We always end up here.
"Stop." Low. Controlled. Everything I have left going into keeping my voice even. "Fucking. With. Me." My hands are shaking. I’m aware of that. I’m aware of everything and powerless over all of it. I close my eyes.
His fingertips find my chin again. Tilts it up slightly. A soft tsk. “Trust me,” he murmurs. “You’d know if I was fucking with you.”
Voices down the hall. Footsteps. The team arriving, getting closer. I step back hard and put distance between us.
Rhys looks down. Looks back up. Winks.
“You might want to hide that before anyone comes in.”
I turn to my locker and stare into it with the focus of a man trying to remember he wouldn’t do well in prison. Practice hasn’t even started. It’s going to be a very long day.
――――――――
Apart from the locker room, practice is actually fine.
More than fine.
I ignore Rhys with the focused dedication of a man whose freedom depends on it and pour every single thing I’m feeling — the humiliation, the fury, the very specific agony of having been turned on in a locker room at the break of dawn — directly into my game.
Like I wasn’t hard the entire time. Like he didn’t know I was.
My shots are clean. My passes are sharp. I’m everywhere I’m supposed to be and nowhere I’m not. “Nice, Nash!” Fitch thumbs up from the boards.
I nod and keep moving. Kowalski falls into stride beside me on the next lap, quiet for a beat before he speaks.
"Heard about the captain thing," he says.
Eyes forward. "For what it's worth — still captain to me. Won't be long." It hits somewhere I wasn’t expecting. I’m also not sure what everyone else knows either, but it’s definitely not the full story.
“Thanks, man.” I give him a nod and he knows I mean it — that’s the thing about Kowalski, you never have to over-explain.
He’s just solid. Steady. The kind of person who shows up without making it a whole thing.
We coast to a stop at the boards, both of us watching Fitch run Rhys through a drill at center ice.
Rhys who is skating like he was born to do it, all loose confidence and stupid natural talent, looking unbothered by this morning, by any of it, by me.
I look away.
“There’s another party tonight,” Kowalski says. “You in?”
Normally no. Normally I’d be in my room by nine with the TV on low, running through plays in my head until I fell asleep.
Normally I don’t need any of this. But I think about Fitch’s office.
About the gap he named. About the fact that Rhys Callahan has been pushing all my buttons and maybe the best thing I can do is make myself harder to isolate.
If the team actually knows me, maybe this thing with Rhys won’t matter as much.
“Yeah,” I say. “Pick me up at nine?”
Kowalski’s face splits into a grin. “Fuck yeah.” He claps me hard on the shoulder. “Let’s go.” He skates off and I turn back to the ice. Rhys is looking at me from center ice with that expression — the knowing one, the one he’s been wearing all morning like a second skin.
I hold his gaze for exactly one second. Then I look away first. Not because he won. Because I’m done letting him push me around.