CHAPTER 14 — PAIN DOESNT LIE
POV: Noah Bennett
I spent the next morning with Damon's words lodged in the back of my mind, not as an accusation, but as something even worse: a possibility.
Maybe, after four years, he was finally looking in the right direction.
Julian knew. Julian threatened. Julian had left marks on documents I still didn't fully understand, and Damon was starting to realize that the story he'd been fed had been too convenient to be the whole truth.
The problem was that realizing wasn't enough.
Realizing could open questions, but it could also drive a man like Damon Blackwood insane—a man who turned rage into a blade and his own body into a weapon.
Northaven's arena was nearly empty when I arrived for the midday evaluation session, the stands bathed in cold winter light and the rink still wet from the morning's closed practice.
The smell of freshly scraped ice mixed with rubber, old sweat, and bad coffee drifting from the coaches' room.
I had my medical bag on my shoulder, the report folder pressed to my chest, and my phone in my pocket, heavy as though Julian's message still carried physical weight.
“Tell the truth, and I'll end your father's career.” Every time I tried to think of a safe way to talk to Damon, the threat returned with the brutal calm of a hand closing a door.
Damon was already on the ice when I walked in.
Of course he was. The closed practice should have ended ten minutes ago, but he was still gliding alone along the blue line—no helmet, just a thermal shirt, practice pants, gloves, and the unbearable stubbornness of someone who confused limits with humiliation.
Mason sat on the bench without his full gear, watching with an expression that mixed concern with the urge to hit him with his own stick.
My father was talking to an assistant near the exit, but his gaze tracked Damon with a tension I knew well: the tension of a coach who needed his captain in one piece, and a father who knew I was caught in the middle of a fire.
Damon accelerated into a sequence of rapid direction changes, and I saw the mistake before the pain showed on his face.
He guarded his left side too late, compensated with his torso, used his arm to balance a turn that didn't need it, and froze for less than a second.
Anyone in the stands would have called it an adjustment.
I called it getting worse. My whole body went on high alert, and the anger came with it—hot, sharp—because he had promised.
Maybe not in so many words, maybe not in a report, but after the night on the couch, after the almost-open conversation, after looking at me like he finally understood I wasn't just a source of guilt, Damon had let me believe he would listen to his own body before trying to destroy it.
“Blackwood!” I shouted from the side entrance, without thinking about tone, audience, or diplomacy.
He stopped near center ice, turning toward me with that cold irritation that made freshman players regret existing.
The difference was that I wasn't a freshman, wasn't a fan, wasn't a sponsor, and I already carried the forbidden memory of his body relaxing under my hands when he stopped pretending pain was a personality trait.
I crossed the side area along the rink, slipping blade guards over my shoes, and didn't stop until I reached the edge of the ice.
“Off,” I said, pointing to the bench. “Now.”
Damon glided to the boards too slowly, and the slowness wasn't provocation—it was disguised pain.
He braced his stick with his right hand, avoiding any natural movement on his left side, and my stomach sank with the confirmation.
The tape I'd put on his shoulder had to be pulling tight under his shirt.
I could imagine the irritated skin, the inflamed muscle, the joint protesting every time he insisted on proving to invisible ghosts that he was still invincible.
“Good morning to you too, Bennett,” he said, his voice low enough not to carry across the arena, but loaded with enough defiance to make me grip the strap of my bag tighter.
“A good morning would be you respecting the agreement you made with your own body last night,” I replied. “Get off the ice before I ask Mason to drag you off by the collar and destroy whatever's left of your indomitable captain myth.”
Mason raised his hand from the bench. “I'd accept that mission with honor, but I'd like to note that he bites when contradicted.”
“Reed, shut up,” Damon said, without taking his eyes off me.
“I would, but the scary physiotherapist is right, and I like you better when you have a functional shoulder.”
Damon shot Mason a look that promised revenge, but he got off the ice.
With every step off the rink, I saw more clearly what he was trying to hide: the excessive care he took keeping weight off his left arm, the clench of his jaw, the slightly shallower breathing.
My father approached at the same moment Damon stepped onto the rubber flooring, and I didn't like his expression.
There was professional calculation there, but also an old wariness, as if any decision involving an injured Blackwood was a domino connected to the past.
“Medical room,” I said, before Damon could argue. “And if you say you're fine, I'll take that as a confession of neurological damage, because only someone without brain function would try that lie right now.”
“Your humor gets worse when you're worried,” Damon replied, but he didn't smile.
“And your judgment disappears when you're afraid of looking human.”
The words landed between us with enough force to make Mason stop fiddling with his stick.
Damon didn't fire back immediately. He just looked at me, and there was something beneath the anger—something I shouldn't have exposed in public.
Not because of the truth. Because of the intimacy.
Afraid of looking human wasn't a clinical observation; it was knowledge from a dark room, from a couch, from hands on skin, from conversations cut short before they became full confessions.
My father cleared his throat, and reality returned in the form of arena, team, practice, and report.
“Noah, assess him and give me the restriction level for Saturday’s game,” my father said, looking at Damon and then at me. “No full contact until you clear him.”
“I don’t need an escort to the medical room,” Damon said, grabbing the water bottle from the bench and avoiding lifting his arm to drink.
“Yes, you do,” I replied. “Because without an escort, you’ll find a way to turn a hundred feet of hallway into resistance training.”
He walked beside me in silence, and the distance between our shoulders felt calculated by some cruel math.
Close enough for me to feel his warmth after the ice.
Far enough that no one could say anything was wrong.
I didn’t look at his mouth, didn’t think about the night before, didn’t let my hand rise to correct his posture until we entered the medical room.
But when I closed the door behind us, the tension hit full force, as if it had been waiting inside.
“Shirt,” I said, setting the bag on the counter. “And sit on the table.”
“You’re angry.”
“I’m working.”
“You use that phrase when you’re angry.”
“And you use extra training when you’re terrified. We’re all repeating patterns.”
Damon removed his shirt with barely disguised difficulty, and this time I didn’t let myself linger on the view because his skin worried me before it tempted me.
The area around the tape was reddened, the muscle above his scapula rigid, the front of his shoulder warm to the touch even before I reached him.
He sat on the table and kept his face impassive, but his body betrayed every attempt to seem better than he was. Pain doesn’t lie. Damon does.
“Zero to ten,” I said, approaching with clean hands, no gloves, because after last night the barrier would feel like punishment and I didn’t want to punish him. “And think before you answer, because I’ll know.”
“Five.”
I touched the skin around the joint carefully. He held his breath.
“Seven,” I corrected.
“If you already know, why ask?”
“Because I’m trying to figure out if you plan to participate in your own recovery or just watch while your pride answers for you.”
He closed his right hand over the edge of the table.
I watched the tension rise through his forearm, the way his left shoulder tried to follow and failed.
I placed my hand on his chest, firm, stopping the compensation before it got worse.
The touch, even now, even angry, brought back a memory too warm to ignore.
His skin under my palm. His body relaxing when he finally stopped fighting.
His name in my mouth. Damon felt the shift in the air because his eyes dropped to my hand, then returned to my face.
“Don’t do this,” I said, before he could say anything.
“Do what?”
“Turn necessary touch into provocation because you’re afraid to talk about what really happened on the ice.”
His expression closed. “I was training.”
“You were punishing yourself.”
“Don’t start that.”
“Then stop giving me material.”
I removed the tape carefully, but Damon tensed when I reached the most sensitive part.
The skin was irritated, and the inflammation had worsened.
I touched the area near his collarbone, then tested mobility with short movements.
He obeyed, but each lift came with pain hidden in small signs: the rigid jaw, the overly controlled breathing, his gaze fixed on a point on the wall so he wouldn’t give me the satisfaction of seeing more.
“You’re not cleared for full contact,” I said, after finishing the first part of the evaluation. “Not today, not tomorrow. Saturday, maybe a few controlled minutes, if the response to treatment improves. If it gets worse, you’re out.”
His gaze snapped back to me. “No.”
“This isn’t a vote.”