Chapter 25
Samantha
The training facility parking lot was almost empty.
A maintenance van. The security guard’s sedan. My car pulled crooked into a space because, apparently, decisiveness did not extend to parking.
The building sat in the late-day light, looking less like a sports facility and more like a place people went when they could not outrun themselves.
I turned off the engine and sat there for ten seconds.
Not hesitating.
Organizing.
There was a difference.
Okay, Sam. Let’s review the plan. Step one: walk inside. Step two: find him. Step three: say the thing you’ve been not saying for six weeks.
Step four: don’t throw up.
Step five: there is no step five. After step three, the universe takes over, and you either get what you want or you get a really good story for Bella. Either way, you are not sitting in this parking lot anymore.
I got out of the car. Walked to the side entrance. Used the badge Sandra had given me on day one: the badge that said I belonged in this building, whether the man inside it was ready for me or not.
The hallway was dim. After-hours lighting, the facility was running on its overnight settings, everything turned down to a hum.
My footsteps echoed on the polished floor.
Somewhere deeper in the building, an industrial washer thumped through a load of practice jerseys, and the air carried the layered smell of rubber mats and the training staff’s medicinal clean.
I walked past the media room, past the coaching offices, past Silas’s door, closed and dark, and turned toward the weight room.
The security guard’s sign-in log sat on the front desk on my way past. My name was already on it, timestamped at 4:47, because policy required every after-hours swipe to be recorded.
Permanent.
Retrievable.
At the corner of the front-office wing, the ceiling camera still had its status light on. The building was actively monitored, because the building was always actively monitored.
I noted both things. Thought about Silas saying we would be having a different conversation, with more people than just him.
I kept walking.
If this cost me the job, it cost me the job.
I was past the point where the job was the thing that mattered most.
The weight-room door was cracked open. The sound of plates came through: the soft clink of metal meeting metal, the controlled exhale of effort.
He was in there.
Of course he was.
The man’s coping mechanisms had two settings: skate until he could not think or lift until he could not feel. Either way, the prescription was the same: exhaust the body until the mind went quiet.
I pushed the door open.
He was at the squat rack. Shirt dark with sweat, forearms tensed around the bar, mouth set with the concentration of a man trying to bury something heavy under something heavier.
The weight room was otherwise empty: just him and the iron, the low hum of the HVAC, and the kind of silence that felt less like absence and more like pressure.
He did not see me at first. He was mid-rep, deep in the movement, his body locked into the rhythm athletes used the way other people used therapy.
Up. Down. Reset.
The world shrinking to the width of a barbell and the distance between the floor and standing.
He racked the bar. Exhaled. Reached for the towel hanging beside him.
Then he looked up.
And froze.
Not the defensive freeze I had seen a dozen times. Not the walls going up, the face rearranging into something controlled and safe. This was different. This was a man caught between one version of himself and another, and both of them were looking at me.
“Sam?” His voice was rough, like he had not used it in hours, which he probably had not.
I stepped into the room. Let the door close behind me.
The sound of it clicking shut was definite. It meant something neither of us could pretend it did not.
“I needed to see you,” I said.
His hands tightened on the towel. Not nervous. More like his body was processing information his brain had not approved.
“Sam…” he started, and I heard the beginning of a sentence that would have been reasonable and measured and absolutely wrong for this moment.
“No.” I stepped closer. “Let me talk.”
He closed his mouth.
Good.
I took another step.
We were close now. Close enough that the heat from his workout radiated toward me, close enough that the scent of clean sweat and soap registered in my lungs like a language I had been learning without knowing it.
“I’m done hesitating,” I said.
My voice was steady. My hands were not, so I kept them at my sides where they could tremble privately.
“I’m done waiting for the timing to be right, because the timing is never going to be right. There will always be a contract, a trade, a Silas Vane with a reasonable objection, or a David Walsh with a cleaner, colder version of the same one.”
He watched me with an expression I had never seen on him. Not calculated. Open. The look of a man whose walls were standing but whose door was wide.
“I want you,” I said. “And I’m tired of acting like I don’t.”
The sentence stayed between us, alive with the electricity of a thing that had been true for weeks and was only now being said out loud.
He stayed still.
Did not breathe.
His eyes were dark in the low light, and what I saw in them was not hesitation. It was the last second before a decision that had already been made.
I reached up and touched his jaw.
Lightly. Deliberately. My fingers against the line of bone I had been photographing for six weeks, the jaw I had watched clench and tighten through a thousand frames, and under my hand it was rough with the day’s stubble and entirely human.
His breath came out in a sound that was not quite a word. His hand lifted toward my waist, then stopped before it touched me.
That stopped me too.
“I want you,” he said.
His voice was low. Wrecked. Honest in a way that cost him something before the sentence was even finished.
“I want you so much I have not known what to do with myself since the first day you walked in with that damn camera and told me to look at you like I wasn’t scared.”
My fingers stayed against his jaw.
“Then stop hesitating,” I whispered.
He closed his eyes once.
When he opened them, the heat was still there.
So was the restraint.
“I need to say this first.”
The office seemed to hold its breath.
I lowered my hand.
“Okay.”
He swallowed. His throat moved once. The towel was still in his hand, twisted between his fingers like it was the only thing keeping him grounded.
“I hurt you,” he said. “In front of the room. With something you gave me.”
The words hit clean.
Not easy.
Clean.
“Yes,” I said.
He nodded once, like he deserved that. Like he needed the truth of it to stay in the room.
“I used it because I was scared,” he said.
“Seattle had called. The number was real. The trade was real. Everything I thought I had under control started moving under my feet, and I did what I always do when I can’t find a place for the weight.
I made myself colder. Then I aimed it at the person closest to me. ”
His eyes held mine.
“That was you.”
I did not look away.
“And it was not your fault,” he said. “You were not the problem. You were never the problem. You saw something good in me and gave it a name, and I took that name and made it hurt because I did not know how to admit I needed you.”
My chest tightened.
He kept going.
No defensive nonsense. No apology version. The truth with both hands.
“I am sorry,” he said. “But I know sorry is not enough. I know you do not owe me comfort because I finally figured out where the wound is. I do not want you to fix me. I do not want you to carry this because I was too late to handle it correctly.”
The room hummed.
HVAC. Iron. The sound of both of us breathing.
“What do you want?” I asked.
His answer came without calculation.
“To be honest with you before I touch you.”
Oh.
That was the sentence.
Not the romantic one. Not the easy one. The one my body had been waiting for before my brain knew how to ask.
I stepped closer.
“Then be honest.”
He drew a slow breath.
“I want you. I want San Antonio. I want a life that does not make me choose between the thing I built and the person who made me realize I had built it too small.” His voice tightened under the strain of saying it.
“I do not know what happens with Seattle. I do not know what Walsh does. I do not know whether I can keep all of it. But I know I do not want to lie to you, or push you away, or pretend you are not already in the middle of it.”
The words settled between us.
Heavy.
Costly.
Enough.
Not everything. Not forever. Not a clean answer tied with a ribbon and handed over for my approval.
But enough for this moment.
Enough for me to choose what came next.
I touched his jaw again.
“Evan.”
“Yeah.”
“Kiss me.”
He did.
Not like Paramour. That kiss had been a surprise, a door opening in a wall neither of us had expected. This was different. This was a man who had told the truth and was standing in the cost of it.
His hand found my waist, not grabbing, just arriving there, his palm spreading heat through the fabric of my shirt. When I leaned into him, he pulled me closer, one slow inch at a time, giving me every chance to change my mind.
I did not.
His mouth moved against mine with an intensity that was controlled and consuming at the same time: the way he skated, the way he played, the way he did everything when he stopped pretending he was not all in.
I kissed him back with everything I had been holding.
Every frame I had almost taken and stopped myself.
Every night I had spent editing photos of him and pretending the tightness in my chest was professional interest. Every second of wanting that had survived the hurt because wanting did not always have the decency to leave when pain entered the room.
His hand slid to the small of my back. Mine found his hair. We fit together in the narrow space between iron and light, between what he had broken and what he was finally trying to repair.
He pulled back just enough to rest his forehead against mine.
We were both breathing hard. His hand was still on my back, warm and steady, and mine was still in his hair, and neither of us showed any interest in moving.
“This is going to complicate everything,” he said.
His voice was wrecked.
I loved it.
“Good,” I said.
He laughed.
A real laugh. Low and startled, like the sound had escaped before he could file the paperwork to deny it.
I leaned into him. He held me.
The weight room hummed around us, dim and quiet and ours for as long as the cameras allowed us to pretend it was.
We stood there holding each other in a building that smelled like rubber mats, iron, and the faint ghost of ice, and I felt, for the first time in longer than I could calculate, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Not at the edge of the frame.
In it.
And for once in my life, I did not reach for the camera.