I drag my jersey over my head; fabric rasps across skin gone hypersensitive. The room smells like wet rubber and ammonia and victory—close enough to taste if we don’t screw it. Eyes on the game, I tell myself. Not on the bench. Not on her mouth when she said deep breath like she wasn’t remembering the last time she told me to do that.
“Maddox,” Coach barks from the doorway without looking at me, which is how he looks when he’s looking the hardest. “You good?”
“Good,” I say. Lie. Truth. Both.
He grunts, satisfied or pretending. Same difference. The door swings; PR suits ghost by the window like sharks tracking a wake. They smelled blood the second I stepped off the ice.
Collins chirps again, because he doesn’t value his teeth. “Careful with that hand later, Cap. Might need it.”
I bank the empty bottle off his shoulder. It drops square into the bin. “Work on your plus-minus before you borrow my material.” Oohs. Collins shuts up.
The wrist throbs with the crowd humming through the walls. I flex and the tape bites back. Good. I want it mean. I want it tosay: remember the rule. Training staff are Switzerland. No wars there. Not even the kind that end in a white flag and a bed we never should’ve been in.
I lace my skates for the second period like I can cinch down the part of me that opens when she says my name. It doesn’t work. Nothing has since she tilted her chin and pretended she didn’t know me. Since I handed her the match and begged her to strike it.
Coach claps once—time—and the room condenses into focus. I roll my shoulders, let the noise wash over me, and make a decision I’ve made a hundred times and mean to keep this time: the game first. The rest—Riley, the itch under my skin, the way the bench felt too small with her kneeling between my knees—gets locked behind my teeth.
The hallway outside is colder, concrete sweating under fluorescents. I tell the nearest trainer I’m grabbing more tape and step into the echo so I can breathe without the pack pressing at my ribs. The crowd hum filters through cinderblock like a hive.
A staff door at the end blinks its little red eye. I nudge it with my shoulder. It gives with that soft electronic beep that should mean nothing and instead detonates a reel I’ve nailed boards over and pretend not to own.
Citrus. Not the cheap stuff. Clean and warm, twisted over something expensive. Her hair smelled like that when I crowded her against this same kind of ugly hallway two years and a lifetime ago. Different city, same buzz in my veins. We ran from a charity gala, laughing—my tux crooked, her dress reckless. The keycard chirped green. The door swung and then there was only wall and mouth and the skid of my self-control going out from under me.
I blink and I’m back in this arena, not that hotel, but my palm still knows the map of her spine through silk. My mouthstill knows the made-for-me shape of her gasp when I told her to breathe. The part nobody saw—the part the tabloids couldn’t headline—was the end. The hallway outside her room at dawn, carpet burn on my knees from kneeling to find her zipper, cold against my back when she put her hand on the door and didn’t look at me.
“I can’t,” she’d said, voice hoarse, eyes bright like a dare I didn’t know how to meet.
“Can’t what?” I’d asked, stupid with wanting and the kind of happiness that makes you careless.
“Be your problem,” she said, and then the door hushed closed. A city woke up past the window like it wasn’t ripping anything important away.
The beep of this door now is the exact pitch of that one. I let it close and rest my forehead on metal until the sting in my wrist outweighs the one under my ribs. I flex. Tape bites. Good.
What I know: I’m very good at winning games I can see. What I don’t do anymore is chase ghosts.
Footsteps scrape. A PR suit rounds the corner, startled to find me not where he parked me. “Jason. Office.” He hefts a folder fat enough to choke a shredder. “Quick talk before you go back out.”
“Can’t it wait?” Habit, not hope. It never waits. Not for me. Not for her.
He gives me a look that says, You know better. I do. I straighten, roll my neck until it pops, and tell the memory to get back in its box and stay. New rule—an old one with sharper teeth: eyes on the game.
The office is a glass box with a ficus trying to die in one corner and a television on mute replaying my slash in slow motion. My forearm swings, the ref’s hand shoots up, loop. Julia’s already here, perched on the edge of a chair, phonefacedown for once. Her eyebrow asks a question. Mine answers: later.
“Jason,” the suit says in reasonable-adult voice. “Brief.” He lies. “League will probably fine you for the slash. We’ll appeal, but we need to talk about… the bench.” His gaze flicks to the screen, then me. “Optics.”
Julia slides a sheet across the desk—bullet points marching: Fines. Endorsement risk. Code of conduct.
“This is not new,” she says, tone dry as paper. “Training staff are strictly off-limits. Not because anyone thinks you’re a monster, but because headlines don’t care about nuance.” Tap. “You breathe near a staffer and the blogs write wedding vows.”
“Blogs don’t write,” I say, because if I don’t lean on the joke, I’ll lean on the wall.
The suit doesn’t smile. “We have sponsors expressing concern. They like you, Jason. They like control more. We need to keep you out of situations that look… intimate.”
“Sit me on the other end of the bench,” I say. “Problem solved.”
“Not if the problem is you,” he answers in the voice people use for toddlers and temperamental goalies. “We’re implementing guardrails.” He flips to a page titled like a self-help pamphlet:Professional Boundaries—Game Operations.
No off-hours contact with training staff. No unaccompanied time in medical rooms. No shared transport. No comments to media about personal relationships. Each line is a lock clicking into place. Each one reminds me the last time I wanted Riley in public, I learned how fast a door can shut.
