By the time we finished and packed up our gear, my arms were shaking and my head was pounding. I helped load everything into June's van, waved off their offers to grab late-night food, and drove home in silence with the napkin sitting in my jacket pocket like a live wire.
The apartment was dark when I got home, everyone already asleep, and I stood in the kitchen for a long time staring at nothing. My phone was in my hand before I'd fully decided to pull it out, the napkin unfolded on the counter in front of me, Rook's number staring back at me in the dim light from the stove.
I could text him. Could call him. Could try to explain everything I hadn't been able to say at the bar. Could open a door to a conversation that terrified me more than anything else in my life.
Or I could put the napkin away and pretend tonight hadn't happened. Go back to the life I'd built without him and let him move on properly this time.
I touched the bracelet again.
You mattered. You still?—
I hadn't finished that sentence at the bar, but the truth of it sat heavy in my chest anyway. He still mattered. He'd always mattered. And maybe that was exactly why I should put the napkin away and let this go.
But I didn't. I just stood there in the dark kitchen with his number in front of me and the weight of years pressing down on my shoulders, and I let myself imagine what it would be like to reach out. To tell him the truth. To find out if the person I'd been back then was still worth remembering.
I picked up the napkin and folded it carefully, sliding it into my wallet where I wouldn't lose it. Tomorrow I'd figure out whatto do with it. Tomorrow I'd decide if I was brave enough to use it or if I was going to keep running from the one person who'd ever made me feel like I could stop.
CHAPTER SIX
bench minor for feelings
ROOK
Imissed an easy breakout pass during the power play drill, sending the puck directly to where Dmitri should have been except he'd shifted left two seconds earlier and I hadn't noticed. The puck skittered across the ice and out of the zone, and I heard Finn let out a low whistle from the bench.
“Captain's got jokes today,” Finn called out, grinning like this was the funniest thing he'd seen all week. “That's a new strategy, right? Pass it to ghosts?”
“Shut up, Finn.” I skated back to reset, irritation prickling under my skin because he was right and I hated it. That pass should have been automatic. I'd made that read a thousandtimes without thinking, and somehow today my brain had decided to just not show up.
Coach blew the whistle from the bench. “Reset. Run it again.”
We lined up and tried the drill a second time. I took the puck from Jace, scanned for the opening, and sent a pass toward Cole that was half a second too slow. Cole managed to adjust and catch it, but the play was already broken. I could see the frustration in the set of his shoulders as he cycled back around.
This was bad. This was the kind of sloppy I didn't do, the kind of distracted that got people benched or worse. We needed to be ready. And I was out here passing to empty ice like I'd forgotten how to read a play.
Coach blew the whistle again, and this time when I skated to the bench for a water break, I could feel his eyes on me. I grabbed my bottle and took a long drink, trying to clear my head and failing completely because the second I had a break from actively playing hockey, my brain went right back to where it had been stuck for the past eighteen hours.
I pulled my phone out of my gear bag sitting at the end of the bench and checked the screen even though I knew it was pointless. No missed calls. No texts from unknown numbers. Nothing.
I shoved it back into the bag and tried to focus on the drill happening in front of me, but my attention kept sliding sideways.
“Rook.”
I looked up to find Coach standing in front of me with his arms crossed and an expression that said he was not in the mood for whatever distraction I was carrying. “You're up next shift. Get your head out of wherever it went and get it back in this building.”
Coach wasn't being cruel. He was being a coach, and he was right. I was supposed to be the steady one, the guy everyone elselooked to when things got messy. And here I was falling apart over a reunion that had lasted maybe ten minutes and left me with more questions than I'd started with.
“Got it,” I said quietly, and Coach held my eyes for another second before nodding and turning back to the ice.
I finished out practice making fewer mistakes but still not playing the way I should have been. By the time Coach called it, I was wound tight with frustration aimed entirely at myself.
In the locker room,I sat at my stall and started pulling off my gear, working through it methodically the way I always did — helmet first, then gloves, then the rest of it piece by piece. Jace dropped down onto the bench next to me with a careful expression while I was unlacing my skates.
“You okay?” he asked, keeping his voice low enough that the rest of the team wouldn't hear.
“I'm fine.”
“You've said that three times today and it's been a lie every time. This is about last night, isn't it? Did it go badly?”
