Beau’s gaze snaps to mine. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Something,” Cole says. “Definitely something.”
I drag both hands over my face, pressing my palms to my eyes until the pressure sparks behind my eyelids. “She ended it.”
Cole straightens slowly. “Ended… what?”
I drop my hands, staring at the floor as if the cracked rubber mats can give me an explanation I don’t have for myself. “Everything, whatever it almost was, that is.”
“You two weren’t even…” Beau shifts closer.
“No,” I say, the word falling out of me like it’s weighted. “Nothing happened. At least not the way you’re thinking.”
“Then why are you walking around acting like someone ripped your chest open?” Cole asks, tone surprisingly gentle.
I let out a breath that trembles despite everything I do to steady it. “Because it wasn’t about what happened. It was about… everything between the lines. And she just—” My voice breaks for a moment, a small fracture I can’t catch in time. “She shut it down.”
Beau lowers himself onto the bench across from me, hands laced loosely between his knees. “Why?”
Because she’s scared and thinks choosing me means ruining her career. She thinks that being with me means she has to give up everything she’s built because we live in a world where we’ve been told loving anyone in the spotlight is dangerous, but being loved by one is worse. She’s running away from me because she thinks she needs to sacrifice her heart long before anyone else gets the chance to break it.
“She said it couldn’t be real,” I say instead, voice quiet enough that it almost disappears. “That she’d lose everything she’s built, and it wasn’t worth the risk.”
Cole curses under his breath as Cooper finally enters. His footsteps echo across the tile in a slow, measured rhythm. It’s ridiculous how something as simple as his presence still hits me with a force I can feel in my chest.
He doesn’t speak at first. He just stands there, assessing the chaos I’ve been trying to keep contained inside my ribs. He takes in the scene in a single sweeping glance—my posture collapsed, Cole’s worry, Beau’s quiet—before walking over and lowering himself onto the bench beside me. He doesn’t crowd me, justgives me the quiet space he knows I’ve never been able to ask for.
“Look at me, Kyle.”
It’s not a command, but it lands like one. Cooper isn’t just the oldest. He is the one who held us together when our father’s shadow hung too long in the room. He is the one who taught me how to tape my stick, how to keep my head up when I felt small, and how to absorb a hit without letting it define me. He is also the one I never want to disappoint, and that’s what makes this moment so fucking hard.
I lift my eyes slowly, reluctantly, because facing Cooper when I’m hurt has never been easy. He sees too much. With most people, I can hide behind charm or humor, but he reaches into the quiet parts of me I spend half my life burying and holds them up to the light.
His gaze finds mine, steady and impossibly patient, and my throat closes around the words I’ve been avoiding for two days. I feel the burn of something like shame rising from my chest because the version of me he believes in is miles away from the one sitting in front of him right now.
When he finally speaks, his voice is quiet, stripped of all the sharp edges he uses on the ice. “You’re not yourself, and this team needs you grounded. Your brothers need you grounded.Youneed you grounded.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know you are,” Cooper says softly. “But you don’t have to do it alone.”
The words crack straight through the part of me I’ve tried hardest to hold together. He’s not talking about my skating or the scrimmage. He’s talking about me. The version of myself I’m supposed to be, the one I’ve been chasing and clinging to because I know I’m not steady.
I feel it in the way the last forty-eight hours have sat like a stone behind my ribs. Wanting her and losing her at the same time feels like being pulled in opposite directions with nowhere to brace. All the things I never learned how to handle are landing at once, and I don’t know how to stop any of it long enough to breathe.
My fingers curl into the bench until my knuckles go white. I can’t hold on to her, so I hold on to this. “I don’t know how to fix this.”
“Maybe it’s not about fixing it,” Cole says, dropping an arm over my shoulder.
“Maybe it’s about understanding it,” Beau adds.
Cooper studies me, caught between coach, captain, and brother. “Maybe it’s about giving her the space she thinks she needs, without sitting in the dark, convincing yourself she doesn’t care.”
“She acted like I was nothing out there,” I whisper, my heart hammering.
“No,” Beau says gently. “She acted like she’s protecting herself.”
