CHAPTER EIGHT
Headlines had been good to Paul once. They told of the devoted captain, the inspirational leader, all those glossy phrases she'd fed to reporters like medicine to a reluctant child. Now they were eating him alive.
By morning, several networks ran the tunnel fight on loop. The banner drop had its own hashtag. Someone had set Paul's "You were a mistake" line to music, and it was already trending. It was kind of catchy, truth be told.
Cassidy was fired. The Breakers cited misuse of team facilities and attempted theft of security materials.
She gave a brief, angry statement outside the arena in which she accused Paul of manipulation and accidentally confirmed every detail of Martina's footage by denying specifics no one had asked about.
Paul was suspended as captain and placed on leave. Two more sponsors dropped him. The energy drink company clarified that their termination was permanent.
Martina watched it all from the same beachfront hotel, registered under her maiden name, eating room-service fries while Gabe sat across from her, cleaning the split skin across his knuckles with the same methodical patience he'd applied to everything since the arena.
"You should sleep," he said.
"I should do a lot of things."
Paul showed up around nine.
Martina knew it was him before the knock. Seventeen years of learning his footsteps, his impatience, his approach to any door like it owed him passage. Gabe was on his feet before the second knock, but Martina held up a hand.
She looked through the peephole. Paul was alone, wearing sunglasses despite the hallway lighting, a baseball cap pulled low, and the wrinkled ceremony suit stained with what might have been champagne or meltwater or simply the debris of a life that had come apart too fast to process.
"Martina. I know you're in there."
"There is no us," she said through the door.
"Open the door. Please. After everything I gave you."
Gabe moved toward it. Martina stopped him.
She opened the door. Paul saw Gabe behind her—a flicker of the old rivalry, the old certainty that Gabe had spent their entire careers waiting for this. Then he saw the hallway cameras, the security guard near the elevators, and the phone in Martina's hand already recording.
"Can we talk privately?" he asked, like they were still married.
"No."
Paul's jaw clenched. "I built that life. I built everything we had. You think those galas happened without me?”
"I think you showed up to the galas I organized, in the tuxedos I selected, reading the speeches I wrote. I think you were the product, Paul. I was the factory."
"You owe me seventeen years."
"You owe me an apology."
The security guard stepped closer. Paul ignored him, eyes fixed on Martina with the intensity he usually reserved for overtime penalty shots. "Help me fix this. One statement. One appearance. That’s all. We say it was a misunderstanding—"
"We say nothing," Martina said. "Because there is no ‘we.’ There hasn't been a we since you decided Cassidy Shaw's blouse mattered more than our marriage."
Paul slammed his palm against the doorframe. The hinges rattled. The guard moved, and Gabe was between them, but Martina didn't step back. No, she'd spent seventeen years stepping back.
"You want to fight?" Paul screamed at Gabe. "Outside. Right now."
Gabe didn't move. His split knuckles hung at his sides, his shoulders relaxed, his expression exactly as calm as it had been at five in the morning when he was bandaging her hand. "No."
Paul blinked. "What?"
"I'm not going to fight you. Not because I can't, but because you're not worth the paperwork."
Martina felt something shift in her chest, some tectonic plate finally settling.
She looked at Paul—at the man who'd grabbed her car door, who'd threatened her with restaurant decor, who'd called another woman a mistake on a live microphone and still believed the story could be fixed—and then at Gabe, who had just refused to hit a man who absolutely deserved it.
"He doesn't need to prove he's stronger," Martina said. "Everyone already watched you prove you're weaker."
Paul's face crumpled. There were no tears. Paul didn't cry in front of audiences unless the cameras were rolling and the lighting was right. No, it crumpled into something smaller and meaner, something that had been hiding under the captain's mask too long.
The guards took his arms. They escorted him down the hallway with his cap slipping and his sunglasses crooked and his mouth still moving, making sounds that were either threats or pleas. Martina couldn't tell and, funnily enough, didn't care one damn bit.
She closed the door.
Gabe stood where she'd left him, close enough that she could smell the ice melt in his hair and the faint copper of his knuckles.
"The roof?" she suggested.
He nodded his approval.
They took the service stairs because the elevator had cameras and Martina was done being watched.
The rooftop was empty. It was nearly eleven with most in the bar downstairs preferring their views with cocktails.
The city spread beneath them in lights and water, the arena a distant glow to the north.
Gabe leaned against the railing beside her, present as always.
"Seventeen years," Martina said. "I used to think that meant something. Like time was a bank account and I'd deposited enough loyalty to earn interest. I was stupid."
"It meant something," Gabe said. "It just didn't mean what he told you."
Martina turned. The wind caught her hair, still missing the chunk Cassidy had pulled out. Gabe's face was bruised along the jaw where Paul had connected in the tunnel, purple blooming under the skin. She reached up and touched it, her fingertips barely grazing the edge. Gabe froze.
"Does it hurt?" she asked.
"Not anymore."
She kissed him.
It wasn't gentle. It was the accumulated voltage of nearly two weeks of proximity and restraint and watching him stand between her and damage without once asking her to step behind him. His mouth was warm, his hands found her waist.
She felt it everywhere. In her spine. In her fingertips. In the hollow behind her ribs where she'd stored so many years of wanting something she couldn't name.
She broke it.
Not because she didn't want more. Because she did, and she wanted the wanting to belong to her, not to the wreckage of the week or the adrenaline of the arena or the loneliness of a woman reaching for the nearest solid thing to brace against.
Gabe let her go the moment she pulled back. He didn't chase. He didn't ask. He just stood there with his hands at his sides and his breathing slightly uneven and his eyes steady, patient, absolutely unwilling to make this about his needs instead of hers.
"I want you," Martina said. "And I want you to know that."
"I know."
"I don't want our first night to be because of him. Because of all of this."
"I know that too."
She waited for the negotiation. For the pressure and the subtle shift she'd learned to recognize in Paul, the way he'd turn a request into an obligation, but it wasn’t there.
Gabe just nodded. "I'm not going anywhere, Martina. When you're ready. If you're ready. I'm here."
The wind blew between them, warm and salt-scented. Martina looked at the man in front of her—at the bruise, at the split knuckles, at the patience that had cost him more than Paul would ever understand—and realized that for the first time in seventeen years, the choice was hers and hers alone.
She could walk away, or step forward. She could stand exactly where she was and simply breathe, and neither the world nor the man in front of her would punish her for it.