CHAPTER 10 — JUST PHYSICAL #3
My whole body went cold. Not like shock—like preparation. The kind of reaction I learned when I was eighteen and discovered that some questions arrive too late and can still destroy everything.
“She’s a journalist,” I said, moving to the counter to organize materials that were already organized. “Her job is making sentences seem bigger than they are.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“And I’m not obligated to answer a question that sounds like an accusation.”
He stepped closer, but this time there was no desire in the foreground.
There was distrust. That hurt more than I expected, maybe because minutes ago he’d been about to kiss me again.
Damon could want my body and still believe the worst of me with devastating ease.
The realization left me calm in a dangerous way.
“You get like this when Julian’s name comes up,” he said. “You got like this just now. And Valerie just mentioned documents that disappeared. If there’s something I should know, Noah, maybe it’s time to stop playing the wounded martyr and talk.”
“You want me to talk?” I asked, turning to face him with a tight throat and a steady voice. “Or do you want me to hand you a version you can use to confirm what you’ve already decided?”
He didn’t answer. The answer was in the silence. Not entirely, maybe, but enough to make me take a deep breath and draw the line before the desire in the room confused me again.
“Your evaluation is finished,” I said. “And I have work to do.”
Damon stood there for a few more seconds, looking at me as if he could pull the answer out by sheer force of presence. Then he grabbed his jacket, put it on carefully, and walked to the door. Before leaving, he stopped without looking back.
“It was just physical,” he said, but this time the words sounded less like certainty and more like punishment.
The door closed behind him, and I was left alone in the medical room with the bitter taste of those three words.
Just physical. I repeated them in my head, trying to force my body to accept it.
If it were just physical, I wouldn’t want to break something.
If it were just physical, the suspicion in his eyes wouldn’t have torn a hole through my chest. If it were just physical, I wouldn’t want to tell him the whole truth just to see if, after everything, Damon could choose to believe me—just once.
I worked until late afternoon because stopping would be worse.
I saw two players, updated reports, answered Marjorie, checked the stock of wraps and ice.
The room emptied gradually, until only the hum of the ventilation system and the persistent smell of cleaning product remained.
I was putting away the last roll of tape in the cabinet when I noticed my materials drawer was slightly open.
Not much. Just enough to show someone had gone through it.
I froze for a second, my hand still on the roll of tape.
Then I pulled the drawer open slowly. Inside, under a stack of elastic bandages I hadn’t left there, was a manila envelope with no name.
The paper was dry, clean, too new to have been forgotten.
My pulse quickened before I even touched it.
I picked up the envelope and locked the door with the manual latch, hearing the click as if it could protect me from a story that was already inside me.
I opened the envelope on the counter. There was a single copy inside: an old medical authorization dated four years ago, with the Northaven athletic program letterhead and the name of a player I vaguely remembered—he’d left the team after a poorly explained injury.
The signature at the bottom made my vision narrow for a moment.
It wasn’t Damon’s father. It wasn’t my father.
It was elegant, slanted, perfectly recognizable from the formal letters Julian Blackwood still sent when he wanted to appear civilized.
Julian Blackwood had authorized the return of an injured player against medical recommendation.
I sat in the nearest chair before my legs could give out.
The paper trembled slightly in my hands, but it trembled.
Four years ago, I’d seen fragments, heard threats, held enough evidence to understand something was rotten—but not all the pieces.
Julian had always stayed on the edges: clean, polite, distant enough to deny.
Now his name was there, in black ink, inside my drawer, as if someone had decided to drag the past out from under the ice and drop it in my lap.
My phone vibrated on the counter, and the jolt almost made me crumple the document. A message from an unknown number appeared on the screen, simple and unsigned: “You came back. So finish what you started.”
I looked at the closed door, then at the paper with Julian’s signature, and for the first time since I’d set foot in Northaven again, I was absolutely certain it wasn’t just Damon I needed to face.
Someone else had waited four years to see me return.
And now that person wanted me to bleed the truth in the right place.