CHAPTER 18 — CLOSED LOCKER ROOM #2
Damon took the ice with his minutes strictly controlled.
I'd warned him. My father had reinforced it.
Damon had nodded with a silent obedience that made me more nervous than if he'd fought back.
He played with contained anger, and that was worse for the shoulder than open anger, because his body was trying to prove discipline while his head boiled.
In the first two sequences, he stayed within limits.
In the third, a rookie defender got too close, and Damon used a quick pivot to protect the puck.
It was beautiful. It was efficient. It was exactly the kind of movement he shouldn't be making.
I saw the shoulder protest before Damon even stopped. His body seized for a millisecond, compensated with his torso, and he kept going as if nothing had happened. My blood pressure spiked.
“Blackwood!” I shouted from the side.
He didn't look.
Mason, in goal, looked over for him. And from Mason's expression, I knew he'd seen it too.
Damon completed the play, passed the puck, and glided to the bench with an expression that could fool students, sponsors, and maybe a careless doctor.
It didn't fool me. When he got close, I was already at the edge of the ice, arms crossed, tablet pressed against my chest like it was the only thing stopping me from grabbing him by the collar.
“Off,” I said.
“The shift's over.”
“Off practice, Damon. Out.”
He leaned his face toward mine, eyes cold, breathing heavy from exertion. “Not now.”
“Yes, now. Or I stop the entire practice and explain out loud why Northaven's captain is trying to turn inflammation into a personal spectacle.”
My father heard. Of course he heard. He came from the bench wearing the expression of a coach who'd already run out of patience for injured men playing immortal.
“Damon, medical room,” he ordered. “Noah, evaluate. Mason, keep the others running reduced drills.”
Damon looked at me like he wanted to argue.
His eyes carried anger, but it wasn't all for me.
There was frustration, fear, humiliation, and the weight of that invisible photo circulating somewhere.
The problem was that his body didn't distinguish the source of the tension; it just paid the bill. He left the ice.
The medical room was busy—two players icing down and an assistant restocking supplies—so I took Damon to the empty main team locker room in the arena's inner wing.
The place was clean but still carried the smell of gear, men's soap, damp wood from the benches, and melted ice in the drains.
White overhead lights, lockers in rows, towels folded in stacks, showers dark at the back.
I closed the door behind us and locked it from inside.
Damon heard the click. His eyes went to the doorknob, then to me.
“Professional.”
“Medical privacy,” I replied, dropping my bag on the long bench. “And before you turn this into something, take off your upper gear and sit down.”
“You're angry.”
“I'm past angry. Angry was four o'clock this afternoon. Now I'm considering adding a new category to the report: athlete clinically suicidal from hereditary arrogance.”
He pulled off his gloves slowly, then the shoulder pads, the thermal shirt riding up for a moment and revealing the crooked white tape beneath reddened skin.
My stomach clenched—not from desire, not first, but from concern.
The area looked worse. Not disastrous, but worse.
Damon sat on the bench, too big to look vulnerable, and yet vulnerable in a way the empty room made impossible to ignore.
I approached without being gentle about it. I touched the skin around his shoulder, then his collarbone, then the muscle above his shoulder blade. He held his breath.
“Pain?” I asked.
“Six.”
I looked at him.
“Seven,” he corrected.
“Thanks for deciding to participate in your own chart.”
“I did one spin.”
“You did the spin I told you not to do.”
“It was instinct.”
“Then train a different instinct before your body decides to collect on them all at once.”
I started peeling off the tape, more irritated than gentle, but still careful enough not to hurt him. Damon was too quiet. That worried me. His anger usually made noise; when it didn't, it meant he was going somewhere inside himself where I couldn't reach him with simple directions.
“Did the photo surface?” I asked, because the silence was too heavy.
“Not that Mason's seen.”
“Then why are you playing like you've already been convicted?”
The question landed. Damon looked at the lockers ahead, not at me. The white light caught the side of his face, his lashes damp with sweat, his mouth set hard. For a second, I thought he wouldn't answer.
“Because if it drops, I want to be on the ice when it happens.”
I stopped with the tape between my fingers. “That doesn't make sense.”
“It does to me.”
“Then explain.”
He let out a laugh with no humor in it. “If the team looks at me and sees scandal, I want them to remember first that I can still win.”
My chest ached with anger. Not for me. For him.
For that learned reflex of making himself useful before anyone could judge him as human.
For Damon thinking performance could shield what a photo might expose.
For Julian, for Northaven, for all the men who'd taught that body to pay emotional debts with physical pain.
“Sponsors don't bleed,” I said, quieter. “Administration doesn't bleed. Julian doesn't bleed when you force your shoulder. You bleed. You lose movement. You lose the season. You lose the body that still has to live after everyone's done using your image.”
Damon turned to me. His expression was hard, but his eyes weren't. “And you?”
“What about me?”
“You'll bleed if the photo comes out.”
The question disguised as a statement knocked me off balance for a moment. I went back to the tape so my face wouldn't say too much.
“I've survived worse than a bunch of immature athletes.”
“That's not what I asked.”
“You didn't ask anything.”
“Noah.”
My name in that voice almost made me close my eyes. I hated that Damon had learned, too quickly, to use my name not as a weapon but as a way in. I kept working because I needed to keep my hands busy.
“I'll be furious,” I replied. “I'll feel exposed, used, diminished.
I'll want to leave. I'll want to stay. I'll think about my father, the internship, you, Julian, all the versions they'll construct before asking a single question.
And then I'll do what I always do: breathe, think, and decide what can still be saved.”
Damon looked at me for too long. “You shouldn't have to do that alone.”
The words crossed the locker room with quiet force.
My hands stopped on his shoulder. For a moment, there was no closed practice, no photo, no folder, no threat.
There was only Damon sitting on the bench, half-undressed, injured, finally saying the thing I'd needed to hear at eighteen. The air caught in my throat.
“No,” I said, and my voice came out smaller. “I shouldn't.”
He raised his good hand and touched my wrist. He didn't grip it like before.
He just rested his fingers there, giving me the choice to stay or pull away.
I stayed. The empty locker room seemed to contract around us.
I was standing between his knees, bag open on the bench, tape hanging from my fingers, his skin warm under my palm.
Professionally, I should finish the evaluation, rewrap the support, call my father, and end the night.
Personally, I'd already been lost for entire chapters of this story.
“I want to come out before they use it against you,” Damon said.
“No.”
“Noah.”
“Not on impulse. Not as a reaction. Not as a shield so you can pretend a public statement will fix everything. Coming out has consequences. For you, for me, for my father, for the team. If we do this, it has to be because we chose it, not because someone backed us into a corner.”
“What if I’ve already chosen?”
The question landed like a blow to my chest. I searched his face for bravado.
Found none. Damon was serious, pale with pain and something deeper, his hand still on my wrist, fingers warm against my skin.
My body responded before I could stop it, moving half a step closer—enough for his knee to brush my thigh.
“Then prove you chose strategy,” I said. “Not spectacle.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “You and that word.”
“It’s the only thing keeping us from becoming a badly written headline.”
He tugged my wrist gently—not to dominate, just to bring me closer.
I could have resisted. Instead, I let him.
Damon pressed his forehead against my stomach for a second, over my shirt, a gesture so intimate and exhausted that something shifted in the desire I felt.
My hand rose to the back of his neck by reflex, fingers sliding into his sweat-damp hair, and he exhaled against me like he’d been holding his breath too long.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“The shoulder?”
“That too.”
I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them, Damon had already lifted his face.
The closeness was ridiculous. Him sitting, me standing between his legs, my hand on the back of his neck, his on my wrist. The locked door.
The empty locker room. The whole world on the other side, full of phones and threats and competing narratives, and us in here, turning silence into a dangerous choice.
“This is a bad idea,” I said.
“You always say that before you kiss me.”
“Because it’s always true.”
“And it never answers whether you want to.”
Anger should have come. Desire came instead. Fear too, and caution, and a fierce need to reclaim at least one thing Julian hadn’t calculated. I leaned in and kissed Damon.