You’re on my father’s team.Evan typed it with both thumbs, his jaw tight, the operations voice assembling itself even in text.
Your father’s team. Not yours. You don’t coach me. You don’t recruit me. You handle logistics. That’s not a conflict of interest. That’s barely adjacent.
Evan stared at the screen. The blue light of it caught the whiskey tumbler, threw a bright rectangle across the wood. Section 7.3 was open on his laptop at home. Any student enrolled at the University. Not barely adjacent. Prohibited, full stop.
He typedWhy me?and sent it before the guarded part of his brain could catch up to his thumbs.
The pause stretched. Evan looked up at the game, looked back down, and ran his thumbnail along the edge of the booth until the vinyl bit into skin. On the TV, a Tigers outfielder dropped an easy fly ball, and the bar groaned in unison, and Evan’s phone sat in his hand and said nothing.
Then:Because you see me. Not the captain, not the guy everyone wants a piece of. You look at me like I’m a problem you can’t solve, and I’ve never been that for anyone before.
A pause. Then:I’ve wanted you since sophomore year, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.
Evan set it face down. He reached for his whiskey, and his fingers closed around an empty tumbler. The booth pressed in around him, the yellow light and the bar noise and the smell of fryer oil, and Finn Holloway’s words glowed on a screen he couldn’t stop turning over.
He was in so much trouble.
Evan left a twenty on the wood and didn’t check his phone again until he was in his car, the engine running, the lot empty around him, his hands on the wheel in the exact position they’d been in that morning when he’d told himself today would be ordinary.
It had not been an ordinary day.
3
FINN
The film room smelled like stale coffee and the mustiness of a space that never got enough air circulation. Finn had been slouched in one of the front-row chairs long enough for his lower back to ache, the one with the cracked leather armrest that nobody ever bothered to replace. He watched St. Cloud’s penalty kill cycle on the projection screen without absorbing a single frame. The projector hummed behind him. The clock on the wall ticked, one of those industrial ones with the red second hand that jumped instead of swept. Someone had left a half-empty coffee cup on the table beside him, and Finn had been staring at it long enough to memorize the ring it was leaving on the wood.
Twenty-seven minutes. That was how long he’d been sitting here, which meant twenty-seven minutes of St. Cloud’s box formation collapsing on the same dump-and-chase entry, twenty-seven minutes of a forward whose name he couldn’tremember cycling the same play, and twenty-seven minutes of pretending he was here to review tape when he was actually here because Evan Tremblay’s office sat three doors down and Evan would have to walk past the film room to leave the building.
Finn had no patience left. He had a plan instead. Simple: stop letting Evan avoid him.
The silence since the texts had been thorough. Not the angry kind, not the confused kind. The kind that took effort.Why me?andbecause you see meand then nothing. No response. No acknowledgment. Evan catching Finn’s eye across the facility and looking away like he’d accidentally glanced at the sun. Finding reasons to leave whatever room Finn walked into: phone out, tablet open, suddenly fascinated by a conversation with whatever assistant coach happened to be standing closest. He’d perfected the exit so thoroughly it had become its own choreography, and Finn had catalogued every step of it. Evan’s posture changing when Finn entered a room. His hand going to his phone. A full week’s worth of manufactured logistics that apparently required him to be in the opposite wing of the building from wherever Finn was.
Senior year. Last season. The draft close enough that Finn could feel it in every practice, in every scout in the stands, in Coach Tremblay’s evaluative focus during scrimmages that had nothing to do with being his father’s colleague and everything to do with draft stock. Finn was not going to spend what was left of it watching Evan Tremblay manufacture reasons to be somewhere else.
The door swung open behind him, hinges protesting, letting in a slice of fluorescent light from the hallway. Finn kept his eyes on the screen, on a St. Cloud forward doing something with the puck that was probably very interesting if you cared about St. Cloud’s penalty kill.
Finn’s shoulders oriented toward the entrance before his brain caught up. They always did when Evan was nearby, the same way a compass needle didn’t choose north but found it anyway.
“You’re here late.”
Flat. Clipped. The voice Evan used with equipment managers and athletic department assistants, stripped down to vowels and consonants and nothing else.
“Watching tape.” Finn gestured at the screen. “Coach wanted me to review their PK before the game.”
Evan stepped into the room. The entrance clicked shut behind him, the only way in or out, at the back of the space. His footsteps crossed the industrial carpet and stopped somewhere behind Finn’s left shoulder.
“Their box is aggressive.” A beat. “They collapse fast. Force turnovers in the neutral zone.”
“I know how they play.”
“Then you don’t need me to explain it.”
Finn swiveled the chair around, leather squeaking on the base, and took his time looking.
Evan stood about six feet away. Arms crossed over his chest, jaw set. Blue button-down with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, tie loosened at the collar. Shadows sat under his eyes, bruise-colored, and Finn’s tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth. Six feet. He could close that in two steps. Press his lips to the thin skin under Evan’s eyes until neither of them remembered why they were supposed to be keeping distance.
The slacks fit him too well. That wasn’t Finn’s problem, but it wasn’t helping.
