“I want to not be brave all the time,” I say, and it feels like tearing something open. “I want to not calculate press angles every time you look at me. I want a world where the thing I feel for you isn’t a liability I have to document in triplicate.”
The silence after is thick. Rain hammers the glass. His throat works around a swallow. “Riley,” he says, voice low, “what do you feel for me?”
It’s unfair. He shouldn’t ask. But he’s never been fair to me or to himself where I’m concerned. He takes hits head-on and asks his ribs to figure it out later. I’m the opposite—always triage first, feeling later. Tonight, the order reverses.
The words collide in my mouth. Anger with fear. Memory with want. Career with heart. It’s a pileup on black ice and I can’t steer around it anymore.
“I—” My tongue is thick. The truth is a weight I’m suddenly done carrying alone. “Jason, I?—”
He steps closer, enough that I feel the heat of him. Not touching. Waiting. “Say it,” he whispers. “I’ll hold it.”
Something caves in. Not a collapse—an opening.
“I’m pregnant.”
The room inhales. The radiator. The lamp. My lungs. Even the rain sounds like it cuts off mid-drop.
Jason goes still the way a body goes still after a hit—stunned, upright, searching for footing. His eyes flick to my stomach like he can see through cotton and fear to the tiny yes inside me. Back to my face. Back to my stomach.
“Oh,” he says, a single syllable blown out on a breath that shakes. Then nothing. Just that blue gaze, stunned and shining, as the world tilts under our feet and refuses to tilt back.
He moves before I can process it—one heartbeat he’s a wall in front of me, the next he’s gravity itself, sinking to his knees like the floor asked politely. The motion knocks the air out of me harder than any argument. Jason Maddox, all edges and stubbornness, kneeling in my living room with rain still clinging to his lashes.
His hands hover until I nod, a small permission that feels enormous. Warm palms find my hips, not possessive, not pleading—steady. He looks up like he’s seeing the first morning he’s ever trusted. The shine in his eyes is not theatrics. He has no audience here but me.
“Okay,” he breathes, the word catching on a half laugh that sounds like a prayer. “Okay.” He swallows, steadies. “We can do this.”
The sentence lands and unfurls like a blanket around something fragile. My throat is a fist. I’ve carried ten thousand plans in my head—clinic schedules, rehab protocols, crisis flowcharts—and none of them prepared me for the way relief can hurt. It’s too big for my ribs. It presses behind my eyes until they burn.
“Don’t say it because it sounds good,” I whisper, fingers slipping into his damp hair before I can think better of it. He tipsinto the touch like it’s heat after a winter skate. “Say it because you mean it when the cameras aren’t blinking and the league is counting contract clauses.”
“I’m saying it because it’s the only thing that ever made sense.” His thumbs draw absent circles over the outer seams of my joggers, grounding me in a body I suddenly don’t trust to stand. “I don’t care about their angles. I care about you. About…” His gaze flicks to my midline again, wonder and terror braided tight. “About all three of us.”
I make a sound I don’t recognize. It might be a laugh. It might be a sob. I’m high on oxygen I didn’t know I was missing. “You realize ‘three of us’ is not a PR strategy.”
“Good,” he says, mouth tugging. “I’m retired from strategies I can’t live with.” He lifts one hand, lays it flat—so carefully—over my lower belly. Heat blooms under his palm like my skin remembers him before my brain does. “Hi,” he says softly, to the smallest part of our future. “I’m the idiot who took too long to grow up. I’m working on it.”
I choke on a laugh and swipe at my eyes with the heel of my hand. “You cannot introduce yourself to our possible-zucchini as an idiot.”
“Okay.” He nods solemnly, eyes shining. “Hi, I’m the man who loves your mom so much it makes him stupid.”
The wordlovesdetonates and then rains down in quiet pieces. It doesn’t scare me the way it used to. Maybe because tonight it isn’t dressed in grand gestures and sharp edges; it’s on its knees, soaking my rug, asking for the chance to be ordinary and lasting.
“I don’t know how to do any of this,” I confess, the room wavering like heat over ice. “I know anatomy and timing and how to keep a winger from blowing a groin his first game back. I don’t know how to be…this and still be me.”
He nods, like we’re building a plan between faceoffs. “Then we learn. We make a list. Doctors. Boundaries. A lawyer who doesn’t report to the owner. A crib that doesn’t look like a Scandinavian art installation unless you want it to.”
I huff. “Absolutely not the art installation.”
“Done.” His palm presses lightly, reverent. “We’ll get help where we need it and tell everyone else to stand down. You won’t be alone in any room you don’t want to be alone in. Not the clinic. Not a meeting. Not a grocery store aisle if you’re crying over oranges.”
“Why oranges?”
“Citrus seems emotional.”
Against all odds I smile, full and aching. He smiles back, like we’ve found a pocket of air under deep water.
“Say the word,” he says, quiet. “And I’ll call Julia. I’ll call Blackwood. I’ll call whoever you want. But I won’t move until you tell me where.”
