Chapter 15 #3
No. Stellan’s voice in my head, sad and quiet in a shadowed room. “I’m not asking you to drag me in front of cameras and tell the world you’re gay.” My whole body pulled tight with the memory, head too full all of a sudden.
“Not like that,” I said. “Once it’s out in hockey, it’s out. Locker rooms, road trips, media—everybody gets a say, and suddenly it’d be… not really ours anymore.” It sounded clumsy. True, though. “But he’d need space, I guess. Where we didn’t have to hide.”
Mom reached for my hand once more, and this time, she didn’t let go. I held on in a way I hadn’t allowed myself in a long time, not since I’d been a kid after a bad scrape.
“He and his brother…” I took a breath, kept going.
“They mostly grew up in the foster system. Spent years making themselves fit into other people’s lives.
Be easy. Be useful. All that.” Blue paint ringed my fingernails, paler than the shifting blue-green shades of Stellan’s eyes.
“I can’t ask him to do that for me. It wouldn’t be fair.
Anything that makes him feel small—I wouldn’t even want that. ”
Mom’s mouth tightened, sadness tucked into its corners. Dad was watching me over the rim of his glass, expression steady and familiar. “So,” he said. “You’re just giving up?”
A hard flash to years ago—same tone. Same question.
I’d been fourteen, running on five hours of sleep, cramming history under the dome light of his truck.
We’d been on the way to an early slot on the ice, him driving, me half-asleep and cold in the passenger seat.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I’d said, and for a long moment, he’d gone quiet.
“So you’re just giving up?”
Not angry, not particularly sympathetic. Just clear.
Same as now.
“What?” I asked, knocked strangely off-kilter.
“You heard me.” His voice was even, eyes steady.
Mom, too. Her face was softer, concern more obvious, but underneath, I read the same expectation my dad carried.
They didn’t ask me to be perfect, never had, and certainly not now.
But they looked at me and waited for the moment when I realized I couldn’t curl up around my fear and call it a life.
And… God.
Yeah. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to.
It hit like a check I hadn’t seen coming, punched the air out of my lungs. Clarity. No plan yet. But clarity.
“No,” I said. “I’m not doing that. I’m not just giving up.”
Dad nodded. Mom let out a slow breath and smiled. “Okay,” she said.
It wasn’t—Stellan was gone, and I still didn’t know how to get him back without forcing him into a shape that wasn’t fair to him.
But I wasn’t done. Not yet.
“Yeah?” Naomi’s voice crackled through the intercom.
Right. Here we go.
“Hi,” I said, cold air damp on the back of my neck. I glanced at Capitol Hill behind me—streetlights, wet pavement, a beginner playing piano somewhere down the block. “It’s Matt.”
A long pause that thrummed in my blood. Then: “Fourth floor.”
The door buzzed open.
I took the stairs two at a time. Naomi waited in gray joggers and an oversized floral sweatshirt that might be cashmere—hair in a messy bun, face scrubbed free of makeup, no lipstick. Somehow, she appeared no softer for it.
She took one look at me and said, “You look like shit.”
“Thanks.” I shifted my weight on the landing, two steps from her, my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my jacket. “Feel like shit, too. So.”
Her mouth twitched, just barely. “Actually, that’s a good thing. You hurt my friend.” Simple, just a fact. My breath caught anyway. “If you’d waltzed in here looking all cheerful, I’d have kicked your ass out the door so fast there’d be skid marks.”
Ouch.
Fair, too.
“I didn’t mean to hurt him.” I made sure to keep it quiet and factual. A statement, not an excuse.
“I know.” She leaned one shoulder against the frame, eyes alert. “That’s why we’re even talking.”
“Good. Okay.”
How fucking eloquent. But I’d driven here with both hands locked on the wheel, Stellan’s words in my head, my dad’s voice echoing in my chest. The look on my mom’s face as she’d repeated Stellan’s name, like it already meant something to her because he mattered to me.
He did. So fucking much.
Naomi crossed her arms. “Now, why are we talking?”
I’d rehearsed this on the way over—the right words, the right tone, something that would make her listen long enough to decide I meant it.
“Because I want to make it work. Stellan and me.” I inhaled and held her eyes. “But in a way that’s true to both of us. Not only what’s easiest for me.”
Her attention sharpened. “Go on.”
“I don’t want to rope him back into something that makes him feel small. I’m not…” Pull yourself together. “I’m not asking how to get him back for just a night. That’s not the point.”
She watched me, eyes unreadable. “Then what is?”
“I want to get it right.” My heart thudded high in my throat. “Will you help me do that?”
She weighed me as if deciding whether I’d earned the next five minutes of her life, all ridiculously expensive loungewear and an expression sharp enough to peel paint.
Then one side of her mouth quirked up.
“Love a man who knows when he’s in over his head.” She swung the door open. “Come in.”