He let go. “But Puck, I still reserve the right to beat his ass for hurting you.”
The thought of my dad and Nils battling it out made me smile. “He used to play center for Rideau, Dad. Pretty sure he’d beat you.”
“We’ll see about that.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Dad, can you not tell anyone?”
“I’m not keeping secrets from your mother.”
“No, I meant Coach Brennan. I know Nils is my coach and technically, this isn’t allowed.”
My dad snorted. “There’s nothing technically about it. It’s against the rules.”
“Yes, but…”
He squeezed my hand. “But I won’t say anything. I understand that love can’t always follow the rules.”
There was that word again.Love.I’d never pegged him for a romantic, but maybe I’d been wrong.
I drove back to campus. Wednesday’s private coaching session loomed ahead—two more nights to figure out what I wanted to say, what I could live with, what mattered most. I thought about what Dad had said, about understanding why someone might be afraid to show everything. About accepting people as they were, not as we wanted them to be.
Could I accept all of Nils? The coach who’d changed my game and the prince who’d lied to protect himself? The man I’d fallen for and the royal he’d always been? I honestly didn’t know.
But Wednesday was coming, whether I was ready or not. And somehow, between now and then, I had to figure out if what we’d built was worth saving, or if some betrayals cut too deep to heal.
The answer felt as distant as the stars Nils had shown me, beautiful and impossible to reach.
21
NILS
The apartment felt like a tomb at two in the morning. Every sound echoed in the emptiness: the hum of the refrigerator, the tick of the clock, the scratch of my pen against paper as I tried again to find the right words.
Three days. Three days since I’d destroyed everything in that cabin, since I’d watched Adan’s face transform from desire to devastation, since he’d told me not to contact him. I’d respected his wishes, deleted a dozen unsent texts, swallowed the urge to show up at his dorm and beg forgiveness.
But Wednesday morning loomed in five hours. Our individual training session, the one he hadn’t canceled. And I couldn’t bow out either, not without questions, without damaging his development. Would he even show up? He’d been at the team training, but that wasn’t the same. There would be no avoiding each other in a private practice. And if he did show, how was I supposed to coach someone whose trust I’d shattered?
I crumpled another piece of paper and threw it at the growing pile beside my desk. How did you explain a lifetime of hiding in one letter? How did you make someone understand choices you’d made before you’d even met them?
My laptop sat open, cursor blinking on a blank document. But typing felt wrong somehow. Too impersonal. Too easy to delete and pretend I’d never tried. Instead, I picked up my pen again and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper. If I was going to do this, I’d do it properly.
Dear Adan,
You asked me to give you space, and I’m trying to respect that. But there are things I need you to know, things I should have told you months ago. I don’t expect this letter to fix anything. I don’t even know if you’ll read it. But I need to try to explain, even if it’s too late.
You asked when I was planning to tell you the truth. The honest answer is I don’t know. An even more honest answer is that I tried very hard to not think about it, to avoid it. But to understand why, I need to tell you about growing up as someone who never got to be himself.
I paused, memory pulling me back decades.
I was six years old the first time I understood I was different. We’d gone to a local rink because my father loved hockey and wanted me to learn. I was just another kid in oversized pads until someone recognized my father trying to blend in with the other parents. Within minutes, photographers appeared. One of them actually came onto the ice to get a better angle. My father’s security people had to intervene, and practice was canceled.
That night, my mother explained that some people would always see the prince before they saw the boy. I didn’t understand then. All I knew was that I’d ruined hockey practice for everyone.
The words flowed easier now, memories I’d never shared with anyone spilling onto paper.
We tried again: different rink, better security. But children talk. Parents whisper. Soon I wasn’t Nils who was pretty good at skating backwards. I was Prince Nils who had to be included, had to be passed to, had to be treated differently. When I scored, was it because I’d earned it or because nobody wanted to be the kid who checked a prince too hard?
School was the same. I attended public school, but no matter how hard my parents tried to make me the same as everyone else, I wasn’t. How could I be when I was a prince?
