And I wasn’t entirely sure I could do that, even knowing I should.
CHAPTER TEN
Wesley
The door clicked shut behind Griffin, and I sat heavily in my desk chair, staring at the space where he’d been standing moments ago. The four walls of my office felt too constricting, too normal for a conversation that had fundamentally shifted something between us.
Griffin was gay.
Griffin Lapierre—NHL captain, the face of an expansion team, the embodiment of traditional masculine hockey culture—had just trusted me with a secret that could destroy everything he’d built.
My hands shook. I pressed them flat against my desk and tried to process the weight of what had just happened.
He’d chosen to tell me. Not because he was forced to, not because someone had discovered him, but because he trusted me enough to be vulnerable. After sixteen years of hiding, after a career built on carefully maintained performance, he’d looked at me and decided I was worth the risk.
The honor of that trust settled deep in my chest, making it hard to breathe properly.
I thought about the way Griffin’s voice had dropped to a whisper when he’d sharedI’m gay, like the words themselves had physical weight. The relief that had flashed across his face when I’d promised to keep his secret. The exhaustion in his expression when he’d talked about living in the closet.
How alone must he be? Carrying this for sixteen years with only his mother and Michael knowing. No friends who really knew him. No relationships that could be acknowledged publicly. No understanding person to talk to when the weight of hiding became unbearable.
I understood that loneliness intimately. I’d lived it myself before coming out after college, felt the peculiar isolation of being surrounded by people while still feeling completely alone. But I’d eventually found freedom—imperfect and complicated, but real. Griffin was still trapped in that isolation with no clear path out.
My immediate instinct was to help. To strategize how we could manage a coming-out narrative, to plan contingencies, to use every PR skill I had to protect him if and when he decided to be public. That’s what I did—I fixed problems, I spun narratives. I turned potential disasters into opportunities.
But this wasn’t a PR problem to solve. This was Griffin’s life, his choice, his timeline. And my role—if I had one at all—was to be someone he could trust, not another person trying to manage him.
The other reality settled over me more slowly, more uncomfortably.
Griffin was gay. And attracted to me. He’d admitted that also, his honesty almost painful in its directness.
Which meant the connection I’d been feeling, the chemistry I’d tried to dismiss as a one-sided attraction—it wasn’t just me. Griffin felt it too.
My mind immediately started spinning possibilities theway it always did, my brain jumping ahead to imagine different scenarios. We could be careful. Discreet. No one had to know. We could have something private, something real, built on the foundation of trust we’d already established.
But even as my optimism sketched out hopeful futures, reality crashed back in.
I’d been there before. With Charles in Nashville.
Charles, who’d said he loved me but wouldn’t be seen with me in public. Who’d kept me carefully compartmentalized, never introducing me to colleagues or friends, always worried about who might see us together. Who’d chosen his closet over our relationship every single time it mattered. He’d been afraid his father, a preacher, would have disowned him at best and forced conversion therapy upon him at worst.
The painful lesson I’d learned—slowly, over three years of disappointment—was that dating someone who wouldn’t acknowledge me publicly meant accepting that I’d always be secondary. Hidden. A dirty secret rather than a partner to be proud of.
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do that again. Wouldn’t settle for scraps of affection offered in private while being erased in public. Wouldn’t build a relationship on the foundation of shame and secrecy.
Griffin wasn’t Charles. I knew that intellectually. Griffin’s situation was different—he had legitimate career concerns, real professional consequences to consider. His closet wasn’t born from internalized homophobia but from a calculated risk assessment about what coming out might cost him.
But the result would be the same. If something developed between us, I’d be his secret. We’d have to hide every interaction, maintain perfect professional distance in public, live in constant fear of discovery. I’d be back in that samesuffocating dynamic that had nearly destroyed me in Nashville.
I wouldn’t do that again. Couldn’t do that again, not without losing essential parts of myself I’d fought too hard to reclaim.
A knock on my door interrupted my spiral of thoughts.
“Come in,” I called, straightening in my chair and trying to compose my expression into something professionally neutral.
Eric Holloway stuck his head in, his expression serious. “Got a minute?”
“Of course.”
