I got up from my chair and crossed the room, settling next to him on the couch, close enough to touch and to see the vulnerability he was trying to hide.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Always.” He struggled to meet my gaze.
“What’s the worst-case scenario here? In your mind, if we go public, what’s the absolute worst thing that could happen?”
He stared at the empty coffee table for a long moment, his thumbs spinning over each other again and again.
“I guess the media circus. That’s scary. They’ll ask a million invasive questions about our personal lives. Then there’s the potential negative fan reaction. I mean, we’ll get both, good and bad. But if sponsors start dropping, that affects the team, maybe the other guys.” He drew in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Other teams might target me on the ice because they know it’ll get more attention now.”
“Are those your worst fears here?”
His head lifted and looked at me. Slowly, he began shaking his head.
“No, they’re not.” He reached over and took my hand. “I can’t . . . The idea of . . . Shit, Jacks, I don’t want you getting harassed or followed orhaving your privacy destroyed because you’re with me.”
I had to fight the urge to scoot back or fall over or do whatever a completely shocked person might do while sitting on a couch with his hand held by the most incredible man to ever live. Instead, I gulped back my own fears and asked another question.
“And your best-case scenario?”
“We get to be ourselves. Publicly. You get to go to games and we get to attend team events together, and we don’t have to worry about who sees us. We get to be an example for other athletes who might be struggling with the same things; but mostly, we get to stop hiding.”
“Which scenario do you think is most likely?”
His brows furrowed.
“Somewhere in between, probably. There’ll be some negativity, but I’d expect mostly acceptance. We’ll gin up some media attention, but they have the attention span of a gnat, so that’ll die down after the initial story. There might be some changes to our lives, but they’re nothing we can’t handle together.”
“Together,” I repeated.
“Yeah, together.”
I squeezed his hand, then laced our fingers. “Sky, I’ve been thinking about this since the moment I put on your jersey tonight—definitely since Tyler blew me that kiss and Erik did his stick salute and youmade eye contact with me during warmups.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been thinking that maybe hiding isn’t as safe as we thought it was. Maybe trying to control the narrative by keeping everything secret was always going to be temporary.” I squeezed again. “And . . . maybe I don’t want to hide anymore either.”
The relief that flooded his expression was everything. It was like watching a kidnap victim realize the person entering the room was a rescuer, not his captor. Every ounce of pent-up angst drained from his body, evaporating into the ether, and a tentative smile threatened to form on his lips.
“Really?”
“Sky, I’m falling for you so hard it hurts. I don’t want to hide that, not from you or anyone else.”
The words came out before I could stop them.
They were honest and raw and true.
I’d been dancing around my own feelings for weeks, trying to protect myself from getting in too deep too fast; but sitting there, watching Skyler worry about my reaction while he was facing the biggest decision of his professional life, I couldn’t pretend anymore.
“I’m so fucking falling for you, Sky,” I said again, needing him to hear it. “I mean hard. Really hard. And I don’t want to fall for you in secret. I want todo it out loud and proud.”
His face went through about six billion different emotions before landing on something that looked like wonder.
“So if your front office thinks we should make a statement, then let’s consider it. Let’s figure out how to do this right, together, on our timeline and our terms.”
He leaned forward and kissed me, hard and grateful and full of everything neither of us had been brave enough to say until now.
