Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
MATT
The apartment had never been this silent.
Not true.
Felt true, though.
I sat down hard on the edge of the bed, the room squeezing in around me, walls skittering closer. Sheets kicked into a mess, city night bleeding in through the windows. Stellan’s heat still lingered on the pillow. Or maybe not. Maybe it was all just in my head.
Christ.
Funny, wasn’t it? I’d known. I’d known he wouldn’t hang around forever, not with what I could actually offer him. He was too bright, too sharp and alive to shrink his world to fit into mine. I’d known.
And somehow, I still hadn’t expected it. At least not yet. Certainly not tonight.
Fuck.
Okay, just… stop. Breathe.
Get up. Shower. Strip the bed because… because his scent still hung in the sheets—the subtler cologne he wore to work, not the lighter one he used on days off. I remembered my mouth on his throat, breathing him in, the way he’d moved with me.
“I was stupid enough to fall for you.”
My pulse thudded hard behind my sternum, as if to outrun the mess inside my mind, the echo of his words snagging on thoughts I didn’t even want to grasp. I’d expected him to leave.
So why the fuck did it feel like all the air had gone missing from my body?
My blood ran hot before the puck even hit the ice.
Too much jagged energy under my skin, twitching like a restless animal.
Warmup only wound me tighter, everything too bright, the noise of the crowd thrumming hard inside my chest. Every pass came a little too hard off my stick, every turn a fraction harsher than it needed to be.
Ice under me, lights glinting off it. Body, movement, muscle memory.
My mind kept spinning off in three directions at once.
Stellan. The game. Stellan. My parents.
They’d made it in time for warmup and were up in the seats, Mom already waving before I’d even had a chance to look for them, Dad beside her with both hands shoved into his jacket pockets. I’d felt a brief tug of joy before my mood dropped right back into something just a hint too sharp.
Less than twenty-four hours ago, Stellan had walked out of my life. It felt like minutes. It felt like a lifetime.
Puck drop.
First shift, I finished a check hard enough to drive the guy’s shoulder into the glass.
A thud, sharp and satisfying, that echoed somewhere in my gut.
Technically legal. Our bench banged their sticks, the crowd a rush in my ears even as I skated away with static in my head, my body running hot and cold at once. Raw charge.
Next shift, I stole the puck from them and drove it in, cut wide around their defense. My hard shot aimed high and missed by a fucking inch. I chased the rebound, fast, and slammed shoulder-first into another body. Fuck.
Whistle. Bodies closed in, sticks up.
“The fuck was that?” the other guy snapped, shoving at me.
I shoved back harder. “Play’s fast. Keep up.”
“Easy,” Wes muttered somewhere at my side, but the officials were already on us, a linesman moving in to drive us apart.
Roughing. Two minutes each.
Fuck that.
I sat in the box, pulse pounding hard behind my eyes. Seconds crawled. My muscles quivered with the effort it took not to vault the boards. Across the glass, Coach shot me a flat glance, and yeah, right. Didn’t need the speech. Captain sets the tone.
Back on the ice. I kept moving. Fell into a rhythm, read gaps and chances, broke up a rush by getting my stick right in.
Scored one. Then a second that went in off a clean release from the left circle, and the building came up hard around me.
Teammates slammed into my shoulders, helmets knocking mine.
I lifted my stick, went through the required motions, and felt none of the usual joy actually connect.
Between shifts, I leaned over the boards and snapped one quick correction at Wes—shorter changes, keep their top line outside, and he nodded before I’d even finished talking.
Captain duty that came like muscle memory.
But my body kept running a couple degrees too hot, a little too close to the edge, like I was skating on pure, mean pressure.
“You trying to kill somebody?” Cole asked between shifts, breathing hard, crooked grin tilting worried.
“No.” I adjusted my mouthguard. “Just trying to win this fucking thing.”
“Sure.” He snorted. “And I’m playing a nice, calm game myself.”
I shot him a hard smile. “Got a point?”
“Dial it back a notch, captain.” He bumped my shoulder. “I want you on the scoresheet, not serving time for murder.”
“Why not both?”
“Funny.”
We won by two. The horn felt strangely distant, like something that reached me through a layer of fog.
Wonder if he’s watching.
Handshake line. Helmet off. My undershirt clung cold under the gear, music and the noise of the crowd rolling over me like a wave, abruptly too much. Breathe. I raised my stick when the camera found me. Smiled and skated off while something in my chest tore loose.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
Fine. I was fine. Still breathing, anyway.
When I made it home, face clean and slightly damp from the November chill, my parents were waiting in the lobby of my building.
Mom got to me first, hair shorter than it’d been in the summer, and wrapped both arms around me while the concierge was tactfully busy.
She squeezed hard enough to make a point.
“Matt, sweetheart.” Her cheek on my shoulder, perfume like a slice of home. “Honey, you look exhausted.”
“Thanks, Mom. Flatter me, why don’t you?”
She laughed softly. “It’s my job to worry about you.”
Dad pulled me in for a quick hug the moment she stepped away. “Good game,” he said. “You were pressing.”
Not you did good. Not hell of a goal. Nope—you came in hot and hard and wound up. That was how Dad did it: read the game, then read me through it.
Accurate.
“You were,” Mom jumped in, dark eyes skimming me from head to toe. “More than usual. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, a little too quickly. The concierge still looked busy. “Just a long week.”
“It’s Wednesday,” Dad said, shifting his duffel higher on one shoulder. He gave me a quiet, measuring look, the kind that used to make it impossible to lie when I was ten and claimed I didn’t know who’d eaten all the ice cream.
“Did a fancy charity event on Monday,” I said. “Suit, schmoozing.” Stellan, lit up like a star, too alive for me to hold. “You know how I hate those things.”
“Okay,” Mom said after a beat too long, clearly filing it away for later. “Well, we’re here now. You can pretend to be cheerful for at least a few minutes, right?”
It got a breath of laughter out of me. “No promises.”
We got the rest of their bags from the rental car before we went up, Mom filling my silence with easy chatter about the weather, neighbors, awful coffee on the flight.
Dad asked about tomorrow’s Thanksgiving menu that Mom had planned, whether I’d ordered all the groceries for it, and if my nutritionist would throw a fit.
I slotted into son mode with a weird, brittle sense of familiarity.
My parents had visited before. It didn’t stop them from pausing a few steps into my place to take it in again—the high ceilings, the glossy stone, the sprawling view of the city.
All of it a stark contrast to the cramped rooms and small windows of my childhood home.
When I’d signed my first big contract, I’d asked my parents if they wanted to move.
They’d said no without a second of hesitation, and I’d felt relieved.
That house, passed down by my dad’s mom, was home. Even now.
“Look at this place,” my mom said, pride in her voice.
“That’s what you say every time,” I told her.
“Bears repeating.”
“Still no normal snacks?” Dad asked with a glance at the kitchen.
I swallowed a comment about his blood pressure and how the doctor had told him to watch it, please. I shrugged. “There’s nuts.”
He made a face. “You live like this on purpose?”
“Sacrifices have to be made,” I said. How fucking true. Hilarious, really.
Only I wasn’t laughing.
Mom swatted his arm. “You’ll survive, Rob. Just for tonight.”
He grumbled something, but couldn’t entirely hide a smile.
I got them settled in the guest bedroom, pointed out towels and the empty shelf behind their bathroom mirror, stupidly flashing to Stellan’s toothbrush that still hid behind mine. I should probably throw it out, except the thought twisted thick and ugly through my chest. I wasn’t ready just yet.
When I turned to leave, Mom touched my wrist. “You okay?” she asked again, soft.
No.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just didn’t get much sleep last night.”
Sort of true. I’d drifted off eventually in a bed that felt too big with Stellan gone, then woke well before dawn crept in through the blinds, my body far too heavy. His words were still lodged sideways in my throat.
My mom fixed me with a long look before she nodded.
“Get some sleep,” Dad said. “You looked like you were trying to outskate your own head out there.”
Yeah, not wrong.
“I’m not that fast,” I said instead, and he grinned, mustache twitching with it.
“Shame. Could come in handy.”
Mom smiled, pulling me into another hug. “Good night, sweetheart. See you in the morning, all right?”
“Night.”
I left, closed the door behind me, and stood in the hallway for a second, my heart beating too heavy in my chest. Sleep. Right. No alarm for once, because tomorrow was a day off.
Each time I blinked, colors moved behind my eyes.
A wide drag of blue, so dark it veered almost black.
“Stellan’s into you.”
Emerald green, cutting down from the top all the way to the bottom.
“We’re not friends or anything.”
My brush dragged hard enough to leave a ragged edge.
“He’s not stupid enough to fall for me.”
Orange, then a harsher blue.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
Acrylic sting in the air. I cracked a window open, then my bedroom door for a draft.
Stellan. On my bed, flipping through Men’s Health with his mouth quirked up into a grin. In the coffee shop, voice serious as he talked a boy through blazer sizes and eye contact. At the donor event, pulling me in like a magnet.