Chapter 13 Garrett
Garrett
The walk from the arena to my truck is a slow grind, each step heavier than the last.
I grip my keys so tight the metal bites into my palm—anything to distract from the image of Sloane’s face when she heard someone walking outside that door. The way she went rigid. The way her walls slammed back up so fast it left me dizzy.
I sit in the driver’s seat for five full minutes, engine off, just staring at the dash. The silence in here is a solid thing, thick with everything we didn’t say. Everything.
This is insane.
We’re adults. Not teenagers sneaking around, always checking for a teacher or a parent. But that’s what this is. Stealing moments in closets, texting in code, always looking over our shoulders.
The secrecy is a physical weight, pressing down until it’s hard to breathe.
I think about how she leaned into my touch—just for a second—before reality tore it away. How her breath changed when I said her name. The heat between us, so charged, so close, before the sound of footsteps crashed it all down.
If I want to know the real Sloane—not the marketing director with the firewall gaze, not the woman managing perception like oxygen—I need to get her out. Away from the arena. Away from the surveillance. Away from the pressure to perform.
My phone feels heavy in my hand. My thumb hovers over our message thread. I type, the words coming out raw and unfiltered.
This hiding is killing me. We need to go out. For real.
I stare at the message. Too much. Too fast. It's a demand, not an invitation, and it ignores every risk she’s taking. I delete it, the frustration still simmering. I need a better play. Something that gives her an out.
Finally, I settle on something cryptic enough to maintain plausible deniability.
Know any good places to find stories that don't involve hockey? Could use a tour guide.
I hit send before I can second-guess myself, then immediately want to throw my phone out the window. What if she doesn't get it? What if she does get it and thinks it's stupid? What if—
My phone buzzes.
Sloane
A bookstore, maybe? Unless a poetry section is too much excitement for you.
Relief floods through me so fast I actually laugh out loud in the empty truck. She gets it. And she's teasing me. I grin as I type back.
Never. I know a place. Wild Rumpus Books on Grand Ave. It's... different. Sunday 2pm?
Intriguing. See you in the stacks.
Come in disguise.
Wild Rumpus Books feels like someone's incredibly well-read grandmother's house—all mismatched furniture, floor-to-ceiling shelves, and the kind of comfortable chaos that comes from prioritizing books over aesthetics.
Afternoon light filters through dusty windows, casting everything in golden warmth.
I'm early. Fifteen minutes early, because sitting in my apartment pretending to focus on anything else wasn't an option. I've been wandering the aisles, picking up books without reading them, my attention fixed on the door like I'm waiting for the game-winning play.
The bell chimes.
My heart kicks against my ribs like a puck hitting the boards.
She's here.
Sloane stands just inside the entrance, scanning the store with that focused intensity she brings to boardrooms and press conferences.
But something's different. Softer. Dark jeans instead of tailored slacks.
A loose cream sweater that makes her look both powerful and approachable.
Her auburn hair falls in loose waves past her shoulders—no severe ponytail, no corporate armor.
She looks like herself. Just Sloane.
Our eyes meet across the store, and I watch her face soften. Shy warmth. A slight uncertainty that makes my chest tight with the urge to close the distance between us.
"Hey," she says, weaving past a display of local authors and a tabby cat sleeping on a stack of mysteries.
"Hey yourself." I close the book I haven't been reading—something about urban planning that might as well be written in Sanskrit for all the attention I've paid it. "Find it okay?"
"GPS and divine intervention." She glances around, taking in the towering shelves and cozy reading nooks. "This place is incredible. Very niche. Very you."
"Very me?"
"Thoughtful. Layers you don't show everyone." Her cheeks flush slightly, like she's revealed more than intended. "How did you find it?"
"Used to come here as a rookie. Needed somewhere quiet to think that wasn't my empty apartment." I gesture toward the back corner. "Come on. There's something I want to show you."
I lead her past fiction and self-help, past dusty cookbooks that probably haven't been touched in years. The history section sits tucked away like a secret, quieter and more private.
"This," I say, pulling a worn paperback from the shelf, "changed how I think about leadership."
She takes it from my hands, our fingers brushing in a way that sends heat straight up my arm. Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose. She turns it over, studying the back cover with the same careful attention she gives everything else.
"Lewis and Clark," she says. "Not what I expected from a hockey player."
"What did you expect? The Art of War?"
Her laugh is soft, genuine. "Maybe something with more hitting."
"There's plenty of conflict. It's just..
. different." I lean against the shelf, watching her flip through pages marked with years of reading.
"Lewis is leading men into completely unmapped territory.
Making life-or-death decisions with incomplete information.
Keeping everyone alive and moving forward when he's probably terrified. "
Her fingers still on the pages. "Sounds familiar."
"That's what wearing the 'A' feels like most days.
You're making calls that affect people you care about, and you won't know if you were right until it's too late to change course.
" The honesty slips out easier than expected.
Something about this corner, her attention, makes it feel safe to be seen.
She looks up, and I catch something shift in her expression—recognition, maybe, or understanding.
"The responsibility must be crushing sometimes."
"Sometimes." I study her face, noting the way she holds herself even here, even in this safe space. "What about you? What shaped how you think about leadership?"
"That's assuming I read about leadership instead of just marketing metrics."
"Sloane. I've seen your office. You have more leadership books than Harvard Business School."
Her smile turns wry. "Guilty. I think...
Hidden Figures. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson.
" She slides the book back onto the shelf with deliberate care.
"They didn't just break barriers—they made themselves indispensable first. Proved their worth so completely that discrimination became an obvious inefficiency. "
"Strategic brilliance."
"Survival," she corrects, and there's steel beneath the soft words. "They couldn't just be good. They had to be perfect. Every day. One mistake would become evidence that women didn't belong in mathematics."
The weight of it hits me like an unexpected check. Of course. The pressure she lives under, the perfection she maintains—it's not paranoia. It's pattern recognition, learned from generations of women who paid the price for being human in spaces that demanded they be flawless.
"That's exhausting," I say quietly.
"That's reality." She touches the spine of another book, not meeting my eyes. "Sorry. You probably didn't bring me here for a lecture on workplace dynamics."
"I brought you here to get to know you," I say, stepping closer. "The real you. Not the version of Sloane who has to be perfect all the time. Not Easton's sister. Just... Sloane."
The words hang between us like a bridge. She looks up, and I see her weighing the invitation, calculating the risk of letting me see her without her armor.
"That's a dangerous proposition," she says softly.
"The best ones usually are."
Something shifts in the air between us.
The bridge, once built, holds. For the next hour, the conversation flows, easy and unguarded.
I learn about the summer she spent trying to build a treehouse and the terrible poetry she wrote in high school.
I watch the brilliant, guarded woman I know recede, replaced by a woman with a quick laugh, and we forget we're supposed to be hiding.
We get lost in the simple act of finally, truly seeing each other.
Her phone buzzes, sharp and insistent in the quiet.
She glances at the screen and sighs. "Sorry. Brynn. She's... persistent when she needs advice."
"Take it."
She offers an apologetic smile and answers. "Brynn, please tell me you're not calling to complain about your assignment again."
I can't hear the other end, but I watch Sloane's expression cycle through fondness, exasperation, and concern.
"I know you think he's an arrogant Neanderthal, but he's still your subject. Professional objectivity, remember?" A pause, then an eye-roll that makes me smile. "Fine. But if this interview goes sideways, don't blame me."
She hangs up and looks at me, contrite. "Sorry. Best friend. Journalist. Currently convinced her latest assignment is going to be a disaster."
"Anyone I know?"
"Probably. Hockey player. Apparently has a reputation for being... difficult with female reporters."
The protective instinct that flares up surprises me in its intensity. "She meeting him somewhere public?"
"Already handled." Her smile is softer now, touched with something that might be gratitude. "Thank you. For caring about someone you don't even know."
"I care about you," I say, the words coming out more intense than intended. "Which means I care about the people who matter to you."
The honesty lands heavier than expected. More real. But instead of deflecting or stepping back, she moves closer.
"Garrett..."
We're standing in a narrow aisle between towering shelves, surrounded by stories and golden light.
Time slows. The bookstore around us fades until there's nothing but her—the way afternoon sun catches the copper in her hair, the soft curve of her mouth, the way she's looking at me like I'm the only thing in her universe.
"Sloane," I say, my voice rough with something I'm not ready to name. "I'm not playing games anymore."
"Neither am I," she whispers.
When I lean down to kiss her, it's warm and comfortable. This is deliberate. Tender. A promise instead of a secret. Her lips are soft and sure beneath mine, and when she sighs into my mouth, I taste something that makes me not want to stop.
Her hands fist in my jacket, pulling me closer, and I'm drowning in the rightness of this—holding her in the golden light of a place that feels like sanctuary, hidden in winding bookshelves, finally free to show her exactly what she means to me.
We break apart slowly, foreheads resting together, sharing breath in the quiet space between heartbeats.
"We should go," she whispers, but she doesn't pull away.
"Separately," I agree, though every instinct I have is screaming to keep her close.
"You first." She's smiling now, soft and slightly breathless. "I need a minute to remember how to function around other people."
I press a kiss to her forehead—gentle, reverent, a promise of more to come—and force myself to step back.
"See you tomorrow."
"Tomorrow."
I walk away before I can change my mind, past new releases and sleeping cats, toward a future that suddenly feels full of possibility. At the register, I buy the first book I can grab without really seeing it.
Through the window, I watch her emerge from the history section five minutes later, browsing the poetry shelf like nothing world-changing just happened. But I catch the way she touches her lips when she thinks no one is looking.