Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
MATT
“Right,” Reid said. “A display area. I can absolutely get them that. A decent one, even, not hidden behind a dying plant on the way to the bathroom. No problem.”
I looked at him sipping coffee in my kitchen like he paid rent here. “But?”
He tugged down the sleeve of an expensive navy sweater. “But tell me what the fuck you think you’re doing.”
Right. Reid in full Reid mode.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He arched one sardonic brow he claimed he didn’t pluck. Debatable. “You know what I mean.”
I unwrapped a protein bar and glanced away.
Outside, rain dragged slow silver lines down the window, late afternoon already gone dim.
I’d only just returned from practice, still half in it—legs heavy, body humming, the ghost of cold air and damp gear still clinging to my skin.
Didn’t stop the donor event, Stellan, and Suit Up Wednesdays all knocking around my head.
“I told you,” I said. “What they’re doing is good. It fits.”
Reid gave a little laugh. “Yeah, no shit. I’ve met Stellan, remember?
Naomi, too. She leaves scorch marks. They’re smart, the project is good, and if the team foundation wants to pretend they give a fuck about nurturing disadvantaged youth, then yep, this is the sort of project it should actually support.
” He set his coffee down with a calculated clink of porcelain. “That wasn’t my question.”
“Then ask better.” I bit off a chalky piece of the bar.
He smiled, all sharp incisors and fond gleam in his eyes. “Fine. Are you doing this to boost your karma, or because you want him in the room?”
Damn it.
“That’s not—”
“Please don’t insult me.” He sliced straight through my sentence, just like he could cut through three layers of bullshit and arrive at bone.
I looked away. “What they built matters. They deserve a shot at more than scraping by on donor meetings and storage bins.”
“That’s not actually an answer.”
I exhaled through my teeth. “No. I guess it isn’t.”
“Excellent,” Reid said. “Progress. Let’s try another one, then.”
Jesus Christ.
“He’ll be there,” Reid said. “In public. Not your bedroom, not your kitchen, not somewhere with the lights off. Nope, it’ll be a room full of sponsors and board people and players’ wives and rich assholes. There’ll be drinks, and there’ll be gossip. Are you ready for that?”
I pushed off the counter and went to get some sparkling water from the fridge. “It’s a donor event,” I said. “Not a trial.”
“It’s exactly the kind of place where people ask pointed questions with Botoxed smiles.”
I twisted the cap off my bottle. “What’s your point?”
“My point, Matt.” He made it sound like I was particularly slow today and he was a saint among mere mortals.
“When someone asks why you’re so invested in this one tiny local initiative, when they clock that Stellan and Naomi are the two people you brought in and assume that she’s the reason you’re into it, because they will—are you going to let them while Stellan’s standing right there? ”
Fuck.
I stared at the rain as my mind flashed to Stellan waking up in my bed that morning, words slow and cranky until I’d mentioned cappuccino. Then him wandering out in one of my T-shirts, hanging a little too big on him in a way he’d normally scoff at. Not here, though. Not when it was mine.
“You’re taking this a little too seriously,” I told Reid.
“No.” His voice went flat. “This is me being your manager and your friend in the same fucking conversation. Two for the price of one, because I’m feeling generous today.”
I snorted despite myself, then sobered.
Reid wasn’t wrong, was the thing. Because, yeah—I wanted to see Stellan in that room. Wanted to watch him in his element, all quick mouth and easy charm, an idea that deserved to be heard. But people would look at me, would look at Naomi, and draw the usual straight line.
I stayed silent.
After a moment, Reid heaved a put-upon sigh. “I’ll help,” he said. “Obviously. I’ll make sure they’re prepared. I’ll sit them down beforehand and play donor from hell until they can answer all the hard questions in their sleep. That’s not the problem.”
“What is, then?”
He set down his coffee. “You.”
I shot him a wide, showy grin. “Thanks so much, man.”
“Just calling it like I see it.” He slid off the bar stool and patted down his sweater, then fixed me with a hard look. “I’m not saying don’t do it, okay? But don’t act like pulling him closer to your life doesn’t change anything.”
I took a mouthful of water and still felt overheated. “It’s no big deal.”
Yeah. Once more, with feeling.
Reid’s mouth curved without humor. “Sure. Just a game, a whole bunch of texts on your phone, a donor event. Until somebody asks a question that you aren’t ready for.”
“It’s not like that,” I said, my tone much firmer than I felt. “Stellan and I, we’re not a thing.”
Reid looked at me for a moment that stretched too long and heavy. Then he shook his head. “Okay, fine. I hope you’re right. For both your sakes.”
I took another sip of water and let that stand in for an answer.
“God,” Stellan said. “That’s good.”
It cracked a laugh out of me. “Are you admiring me or your own genius?”
“Why choose?” He stepped in to straighten my tie—navy silk, matte finish, knot sharp under my throat—then nodded to himself. “Yep. That’s the look.”
“So you’ve told me,” I said.
He had. I’d gone back to the shop a week ago, mostly because I needed a suit for the donor event and a little because I’d wanted to see him slip back into full professional mode, talking fabrics and cuts and colors with that easy certainty of his.
He’d pulled navy after navy and dismissed most of them within seconds as too cold, too shiny, too funeral, too banker.
Then he’d found this one, and his face had changed.
“That’s the one,” he’d told me, utter confidence in a way that tilted slightly smug and extremely hot.
A power move with manners, he’d called it.
Okay. The point was that I felt like me, deliberate without trying too hard, rather than a hockey player playing dress-up.
People would see the suit, the captain, the polished version that photographed well and shook the right hands, not the years of bad coffee, six a.m. flights, interviews before I knew how to answer questions the right way.
They wouldn’t see how much of my life had bent around hockey before I was old enough to understand what that even meant.
Stellan had a gift for that. Clothes as armor.
“You done bragging?” I asked him now, both of us in my bedroom, curtains drawn against an early evening that dropped dark over the water.
He grinned, dimples out in full force. “Not even a little.”
“Cute.” I let myself look at him, just for a moment. Dark pants and a pale shirt that turned his eyes more blue than green, hair falling over his forehead in a gentle wave. He’d draw every eye in that room without even trying.
Tonight mattered.
For him, for what he and Naomi had built. Museum atrium, nice lighting, donors with deep pockets they’d open for a story that made them feel good.
And Stellan and Naomi had that story. They’d scraped it together over two painstaking years, built it on spreadsheets and donated blazers, in a coffee shop that called for a revolution.
Over the last week, between a four-day road trip, practice, and the usual bullshit, they’d met here twice with printed drafts and rough funding tiers, and Reid had been absolutely insufferable in a way that sharpened them into a better version of themselves.
“Sit there,” he’d told them from my kitchen island, “and pretend I’m a seventy-year-old widow with three grandkids, a suspicious mind, and money to burn.
” He’d coached them through impact numbers and the difference between “we need help” and “here’s exactly what your money does.
” By the third run-through, they’d been good enough to make him shut up for almost thirty seconds.
They’d be fine. That didn’t stop the nervous hum behind my sternum.
I watched Stellan pick up his cufflinks from where he’d left them on the bed earlier. Silver, simple, the kind of thing he might have found secondhand and turned into intent. Where his shirt still gaped open at the throat, I could see a mark I’d left just above his collarbone last night.
My parents would be here the day after tomorrow.
The thought flashed clear and immediate. I hadn’t told Stellan yet, not sure why. Simply hadn’t found the right moment, probably.
“Still with me?” he asked, like he’d noticed the way I’d gone a hint too still.
“Yeah.” I exhaled. “Just, you know. Social gatherings. Still don’t love them.”
His face changed into something softer. He reached for me again, unnecessarily flattening the tie against my shirtfront with his palm. “Well,” he said. “I, for one, am looking forward to seeing everyone fawn over you.”
“Fawn?” I repeated flatly.
“Oh captain, my captain.” He made his voice go high and breathless, and the strange tightness in my chest pulled loose. “Tell me to jump and I’ll ask you how high.”
I exhaled a laugh. “That’s not how the team treats me.”
“They should.”
“Try telling them that.”
“Maybe I will,” he said, and the thought snagged oddly in my mind because, fuck, he was about to mingle with a few of them while I stood by pretending I didn’t know the shape of his mouth.
If asked, I’d claim we’d met two months ago when he’d picked a suit for me, that we’d started talking, that that’s all it was.
That it wasn’t personal in a way that sat behind my ribs and came with his toothbrush in my bathroom.
Lies.
Because he already lived under my skin. Because he’d spent more nights here than at his own place over the last couple of weeks, enough so that Ronan had apparently started spreading out more than usual.
“At this rate,” Stellan had joked just yesterday over breakfast, standing in my kitchen in boxer briefs and nothing else, “he’s going to blast French hip-hop at ten p.m. in his underwear and turn my room into a gym. ”