By the time I reached my car in the parking lot, my hands were cold and my entire body felt wrong.
I threw my bag into the back seat, got behind the wheel, shut the door, and sat there breathing like I had just finished a shift.
Then I looked down.
Still hard.
Not a little. Not a leftover twitch of adrenaline. Hard enough that there was no pretending, no convenient explanation, no blaming the fight or the drill or the way my head sometimes mixed signals until everything felt like too much.
This was not stress.
It was not hockey.
It was not ADHD.
It was not confusion.
It was Declan.
The realization landed with brutal clarity, and underneath the fear, underneath the guilt, underneath the part of me already trying to outrun the consequences, there was something worse.
Relief.
Because I knew.
I knew exactly what I wanted.
The problem was that what I wanted was my coach.
Chapter 12
Chapter 12
DECLAN
I watched Jace leave the video room and did not follow him.
That was the first lie I told myself about control.
The second was that I had let him go because it was the right professional choice. In truth, I stayed where I was because if I took one step after him, I did not trust what my hand would do when it reached him.
Coach.
Player.
Those words should have been enough. They had held weight my entire adult life. I understood hierarchy, responsibility, restraint. I had built a second career out of being the man in the room who did not react first.
Then Jace Holloway looked at my mouth like he wanted to fight it or put his teeth on it, and every rule I had ever respected went thin.
I went back to my office. Tiny was sprawled across the rug with a tennis ball tucked under one heavy paw, offended that I had been gone longer than his patience allowed. He lifted his head when I walked in, jowls drooping, eyes soft with accusation.
“Don’t start,” I said.
His tail thumped once.
I sat behind my desk and opened the practice notes.
Neutral zone regroup. Second power-play unit timing. Lowell’s release under pressure.
