Chapter 13
thirteen
MORGAN
We won.
One to zero, a defensive grind that proved every single thing I've been drilling into my team since day one. My players executed perfectly, Princeton couldn't crack us, and the small crowd that showed up went wild when Mills buried that garbage goal with two minutes left.
And it doesn't matter.
Not when I just spent the last forty minutes listening to some junior administrator with a polyester tie and a condescending smile explain "fiscal realities" to me.
It had been Coach Walsh's idea—hit them hard with a request for more resources right after a stirring win—and it hadn't achieved anything.
The suit had given us the kind of explanation you'd give a toddler about why they can't have ice cream for breakfast. He kept calling Coach Walsh "sweetheart" and referring to our program as "the girls.
" And his final suggestion was that we should be "grateful for the opportunity to play at this level. "
Grateful.
The word sits in my gut like spoiled milk, curdling into something toxic. My temples throb with each heartbeat, and my hands hurt from being fisted in my pockets while he droned on about how the men's team "drives revenue" and we're "still finding our footing."
Coach Walsh had shot me a warning look—the kind that said not now, not here—and I'd bitten my tongue so hard I could taste copper. She was right, of course. Making enemies wouldn't help. But God, the restraint it took not to shove his laptop down his throat…
We just shut out Princeton.
We just proved we belong.
But apparently that's irrelevant when you're "the girls."
I push through the heavy door leading from the administrative wing, guilty that I couldn't get what my team needed when they gave me everything they had. While the men's team gets custom-fitted everything down to their goddamn socks, my players have to beg, borrow, and make do.
Hell, Mills had to tape her skate blade back together at intermission because we can't afford backup equipment, and—
Movement catches my eye at the far end of the hall, interrupting my fury.
James Fitzgerald.
Alone for once, not surrounded by his usual circus of clowns.
He's leaning against the wall outside the men's team study room, head tilted back against the cinderblock, eyes closed. For a second I can just look at him without the performance, without the audience, and without his eyes boring into me.
Three years have filled him out. He's broader through the shoulders and chest in a way that makes his team hoodie strain when he shifts. The lankiness I remember has been replaced by something more solid. Even exhausted, even with those shoulders slumped forward, he takes up space differently now.
He looks like someone with the world on his shoulders.
But then his eyes open, and our eyes meet across the distance.
There's still a warmth in his eyes, but there are lines around them now that weren't there before, the kind you get from three years of being everyone's favorite clown. The exhaustion makes him look real instead of the walking energy drink commercial he usually plays.
I see the exact moment he registers my presence—his whole body straightens, spine snapping taut. For a second, I think he's going to turn and walk the other way, which would be classic him, running from anything that might require an actual feeling.
But he doesn't.
He pushes off the wall with visible effort and starts walking toward me. No swagger. No bounce. No arms spread wide for his adoring public. Just… walking. He's got his hands shoved deep in his pockets and his shoulders hunched slightly forward.
He looks tired and human.
He looks… vulnerable.
I hate that I notice. I hate that some treacherous part of my brain catalogs the faint bruise on his neck from a stray puck, and the way his lower lip is bitten raw in places. I hate that I remember exactly how those lips felt between my teeth, and between my legs—
Stop!
We meet in the middle of the hallway under the harsh overhead lights.
He stops about three feet away, outside my personal space but close enough that I can smell that particular warm-spicy scent that's just him.
And then I realize with horror that after years my brain still has his pheromone signature on file.
Christ! What a spectacular waste of neural storage!
"Good game tonight, captain." His voice is quiet, rough around the edges, with none of the usual boom and bluster.
After coming straight out of the disastrous resources meeting, the casual validation coming from him lands like a slapshot to the chest. As if his opinion is the gold standard I've been waiting for, the acknowledgment from on high.
As if I need James fucking Fitzgerald to tell me what my team has accomplished.
A sound escapes me, a half-laugh that crawls up from that place where I keep all the lessons I learned that summer.
It makes him flinch, shoulders drawing up defensively, and the confusion flooding his face would be hilarious if I weren't so far past humor I can't even see it in the rearview mirror.
"Follow me," I hear myself say, the words clipped and cold.
Because the last thing my team needs is me making a scene.
I turn on my heel and head for the service corridor that runs behind the locker rooms. It's where they keep the maintenance equipment, the spare mats, and all the unglamorous infrastructure that keeps this place running. More importantly, it's private.
No cameras and no one to witness what I'm about to do.
No one to stop me from finally saying what I should have said three years ago.
I hear his footsteps behind me, and the door swings shut behind us with a metallic clang that echoes in the confined space. When I'm sure we're alone, I whirl around so fast he almost runs into me. He stumbles back, and now he's trapped between me and the door.
Good.
Let him feel unsteady for once.
"Good game?" The words come out like a poison. "Is that what you think this shit between us is about? Hockey?"
I step closer, close enough that he has to look down to meet my eyes. Close enough that I can see his pupils dilate in the dim light. Close enough that there's nowhere for him to hide behind jokes or grins or that manic energy he uses as armor.
"You're a joke, Fitzgerald." My voice is low.
"You're a court jester dancing for a predator who looks at my players like they're items on a menu.
You lead a pack of entitled assholes who treat our space like their personal playground, and you have the audacity to tell me 'good game'? You think that makes any of this OK?"
His face cycles through shock, then hurt, then something darker. His jaw tightens, a muscle pulsing beneath the skin, and color floods his cheeks. Then the words explode out of him, his voice bouncing off the concrete walls. "What the hell do you want from me, Morgan?"
It's the first time I've heard him genuinely angry—no performance, no audience, just raw frustration that makes his voice crack on my name.
Good. Because, for once, it's him feeling some of the confusion and hurt and anger that I felt three years ago, and I now feel every day as my team gets shafted.
"I saved your player! I pulled that bar off Mills! And I can't control what Galloway does! I'm trying here, OK?" His hands come out of his pockets, gesturing wildly, and I can see they're shaking. "I'm trying to keep my team in line, trying to share the space, trying to—"
He breaks off, running both hands through his hair in pure exasperation.
His chest heaves, and there's something wild in his eyes.
But those two words hang in the air—I'm trying—and something inside me goes very still.
The rage doesn't dissipate, it crystallizes, becoming something colder and more dangerous.
He's trying.
Now.
Three years too late, when it costs him nothing, when there's no risk, when he's the king of his world with all the resources he wants, and I'm the ice queen who has to beg for scraps and accept being leered at to get them. Now he wants a participation trophy for not being a complete asshole.
But not then.
Not when it mattered.
Not when I stood there with my heart cracked open, showing him everything inside, and he decided it was all a joke.
"From you?" My voice drops to barely a whisper, but in the narrow corridor, it might as well be a scream. "I don't want anything from you."
I take one more step forward, close enough that I have to tilt my head back to maintain eye contact. Close enough to see each individual eyelash. Close enough that if I were a different person, if I hadn't learned my lesson, I could rise on my toes and—
No.
"I learned that lesson three summers ago." The words come out, precise and surgical, and I watch his forehead crease in confusion for just a moment before I deliver the killing blow. "The last time we were alone together, James. The first time I heard the joke masquerading as emotion."
The silence that follows is absolute.
I watch the blood drain from his face in real time. His mouth opens and closes.
His eyes go wide, wider, widest.
He knows.
And now, for once in his life, he has absolutely nothing to say.
No joke, no deflection, no charming grin to smooth over the awkward moment.
Just silence.
And in that silence, I can see it all playing out in his eyes—confusion, then recognition, then something that might be shame. Or maybe that's wishful thinking. Maybe I want him to feel even a fraction of what I felt that night when I handed him my heart and watched him juggle it for laughs.
Maybe I want him to understand what it's like to bleed out for three years from a wound someone else doesn't even care they inflicted.
I hold his gaze for one more heartbeat, letting him see what I think of him.
Then I turn and walk away.
My footsteps echo in the narrow space, steady and measured even though my legs feel unsteady. I don't run. I don't storm off. I just walk, each step deliberate, leaving him standing there in that flickering light with the weight of his cowardice for company.
The door closes behind me with a definitive click, and I'm back in the main hallway.
There are students passing by chattering about parties and papers, the distant sound of a basketball bouncing, and the real world continuing on while I've just detonated a three-year-old bomb in James Fitzgerald's face.
My hands are shaking.
I shove them deep in my pockets and keep walking.
My breath wants to come in gasps, but I force it steady.
The game from earlier feels like a lifetime ago, and the meeting with the administrator might as well have been a dream, because all I can think about is the look on his face when I mentioned that summer.
The look of a man who just realized the ground beneath his feet has been quicksand all along, and he's been sinking this whole time without knowing it. Good. Let him sink. Let him drown in it, like I've been drowning for three years and only just admitting it.
It's his turn.