Below, in the parking lot, Evan walked to his car at his usual pace, unhurried, coat pulled on, bag over his shoulder. Evan reached the car and stopped. His head turned, a scan of the lot: the other vehicles, the building entrance, the sidewalk. Automatic. The kind of check that had been trained into his body so long ago it didn’t register as a choice anymore.
Nobody was watching. Just Finn, from a third-floor window, with coffee going cold in his hand.
Evan got in and drove away.
Finn stayed at the window a moment longer. The parking lot check. The coat pulled on before leaving the building. The shirt buttoned wrong, which Evan hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared about. Finn had come out to the whole program, done the media training, become the face they put in front of cameras when the athletic department wanted to talk about inclusivity. And the person he wanted most wouldn’t walk to his car without scanning first.
Finn went and poured himself another cup and sat with that thought until it stopped burning and became something he could carry.
Days passed as they did during the season: practice, film, the hallway nods, the choreographed distance. Finn let them. He was good at waiting when waiting was the right play, and he’d learned enough about Evan by now to know that pushing too hard after a night like that would send him further into the walls he’d spent fifteen years building. So Finn played his hockey and aced his classes and nodded at Evan in the hallway like a professional, and if his gaze lingered a half-second longer than it should have, that was between him and Evan and nobody else.
The bruise on his throat had faded to yellow by the time Finn found his way to the equipment room.
He’d known about Evan’s standing inventory nights since early in the season. Finn paid attention to everything that had Evan’s name attached to it: his schedule, his routes through the facility, the times his office light was on versus off, the nights he stayed late enough that the parking lot was empty when he finally left.
Finn stayed late after practice. Hayes caught him at the locker room entrance.
“Film review?” Hayes read him with the accuracy of someone who’d been playing alongside Finn for four years and had stopped buying his excuses around year two.
“Something like that.”
Hayes studied him for a beat, his expression shifting from curious to knowing in a way that suggested he had questions he wasn’t going to ask. “Don’t stay too late, Cap.” He headed out, his stick over his shoulder, and Finn watched him go and felt a brief, stupid pang of gratitude for a guy who knew when not to push.
The athletic complex was empty by the time the last fluorescents clicked off in the main corridor. The hallwayssmelled like industrial cleaner and the faint ghost of rubber, the back corridors dim in the after-hours setting. Finn walked through the familiar space with his fists in his hoodie pocket, his pulse in his throat, too fast for a man who was supposedly just walking down a hallway.
The equipment room was propped open with a rubber wedge. Light spilled out into the corridor.
Finn stopped in the frame.
Evan was at the far end of the room, his spine to the entrance, clipboard in hand, working through a row of hanging jerseys. His sleeves were rolled up and his collar loose, how he looked when he’d been at it a while and had stopped performing for anyone. The room was dense with the smell of hockey gear, rubber and old sweat and the industrial odor of the cleaner they used on the pads, and underneath all of it, cedar. Faint but there.
Evan turned and saw him.
One half-second where Evan’s hand stalled mid-air over the next jersey, his lips parting around nothing. Then the clipboard came to his chest, squared like a shield.
“Holloway.”
“I know about the inventory nights. I’ve known for a while.”
Evan’s knuckles whitened at the top edge of the clipboard. “You should leave.”
Finn stepped inside and let the entrance swing shut behind him. He reached past Evan and turned the lock, then lifted the clipboard out of Evan’s grip and set it on the nearest shelf.
Evan watched him do it. His chest rose and fell in the measured rhythm Finn had learned to read as effort, the kind of breathing that looked calm from the outside and cost everything to maintain.
“I’m not going to keep doing this.”
“Which part?”
“Any of it.” Evan gestured between them. “This. Whatever this is.”
“Okay.” Finn stepped in close. “Tell me to leave.”
Evan’s lips pressed into a line.
“Tell me you don’t want me here, and I’ll go. I’ll walk out, and we’ll go back to the hallway nod, and you can pretend you don’t watch me during practice.”
“Finn—”
