Chapter 20: The Honest Question

I found him after practice in his office — the small, organized room off the main corridor that smelled like whiteboard marker and the wintergreen mints he kept in a glass bowl on the corner of the desk. The door was open. He was on a call, standing with his back to me, one hand on the back of his neck.

I waited.

He wrapped the call in two minutes, turned, and saw me in the doorway. His expression didn't change. He sat down behind the desk and gestured at the chair opposite him with the particular economy of motion that meant: if you have something to say, say it.

I sat. I looked at him.

"Why?" I asked.

"That's not specific."

"The report. The physical. The pill case." I kept my voice level. "You've been intercepting things for me. Managing things. Without telling me."

"Yes."

"That's an answer. It's not the answer I asked for."

He was quiet for a moment. He turned the glass bowl of mints a quarter rotation, a small, mechanical gesture. "Because exposed assets are liabilities. If your secret comes out badly, the fallout damages the team. Managing the risk is within my responsibilities as captain."

I waited.

He turned the bowl again. "And because—" He stopped.

"Because what?"

He looked up at me. His eyes were doing something I couldn't read, something that moved behind the surface of the usual carefully managed absence of expression. "Because the alternative was letting something happen to you that didn't need to happen. And I didn't want that."

The room was very quiet.

"That's not a captain answer," I said.

"No," he agreed. "It's not."

We looked at each other across the width of his desk, across eight weeks of an arrangement that had started as coercion and had become — something I didn't have the right word for yet. Something with more density than I'd accounted for.

"I don't know what to do with you either," he said. It was an echo of what I'd said to him after the film session, and the fact that he'd held it and returned it now meant something. "I've been trying to work it out."

"Come to any conclusions?"

"Not yet." He picked up a pen. He looked at it. "Give me time."

I stood up. I went to the door. I turned back once.

"The article," I said. "You meant it."

He didn't ask which part. "Yes."

I left. I walked down the corridor and out into the parking lot and sat in my car for five minutes before I could drive. Not because I was upset. Because I was the opposite of upset, which was in some ways more difficult to manage.

He was going to keep doing this. Protecting things he'd never consented to care about. Dropping muscle rub in my hand and pill cases on benches and burying medical flags, and saying it was the captain's responsibility, and meaning something else entirely.

I was going to keep letting him.

That was the thing I had to live with.

[THURSDAY NIGHT]

It was a Thursday. There was nothing that made Thursday significant except that on that particular Thursday, everything that had been building for weeks finally ran out of distance to travel.

We had won that night, a home game, a good one, the kind where the team moves like something practiced into fluency and the crowd is with you from the drop of the first puck. I had scored once and assisted twice and had the particular exhausted clarity that comes from spending yourself completely on something and having it be exactly enough.

The locker room cleared faster than usual. Plans, most of them. Friday was an off day.

I was still in the shower when I heard the room go quiet. I stood under the water for a minute longer than I needed to, the heat working the knot in my left shoulder, and I thought about nothing, which was a luxury I hadn't had in a while.

When I came out, he was the only one left.

He was dressed, sitting on the bench with his phone face-down on his knee, not looking at it. He wasn't doing anything. He was just, there. In the way that Jax was there, which was different from the way other people occupied space. More gravitational.

I toweled off without speaking. I started getting dressed. The silence had its own quality tonight, not the careful, managed silence of two people performing indifference, but something looser. Post-win looseness. The specific ease that comes after.

"Good game," he said.

"Good game," I agreed.

He didn't move. I finished dressing, and he was still there, and the room was still quiet, and I sat down on the bench across from him without making a decision to do so.

"You okay?" I asked.

Something crossed his face. Quick, and then gone. "Why do you ask?"

"Because you're sitting in an empty locker room for no apparent reason."

He was quiet for a moment. "I sometimes do that. After wins. Just, sit here." He looked around the room, the rows of lockers, the mess of tape and equipment, the cheap overhead lights. "It's the room, more than the ice. The ice is where it happens but this is where it means something. Where the team exists as a team rather than eleven people moving in the same direction."

I looked at him. He was talking about something real. Unprompted, un-managed, just real.

"I've been playing since I was five years old," he said, quieter. "And I'm thirty-one. That's, most of what I know how to do is in this room. Is this." He meant the game, the team, all of it. "And some nights, after a good one, I just want to sit with that for a minute. Before it goes back to being work."

I didn't say anything for a moment.

"I get that," I said, finally.

He looked at me.

"I've been doing this since I was fourteen," I said. "It's the only place I've ever felt—" I stopped. Found the word. "Legible. Like I make sense."

He held my gaze. The lights hummed above us. The room was ours in the specific way rooms become yours when everyone else has left.

He stood up. He crossed the space between us and he sat down next to me, close enough that our arms touched, and he was warm through the fabric of his jacket, and he didn't say anything, and I didn't say anything, and neither of us moved.

We sat like that for a long time. Side by side in the empty locker room after a win, and the night was quiet, and nothing happened, in one sense. In another sense, everything did.

Later, he walked me to my car. Neither of us said what we were doing. At the parking lot, in the cold air, he stopped at the door of my car and looked at me and opened his mouth, and closed it again.

"Jax," I said.

He kissed me.

Not like before. This was not the first kiss, no punishment in it, no ownership. This was the other thing, the thing underneath all of it, quiet and deliberate and entirely chosen. His hand came up to the side of my face and he kissed me once, softly, and then he stepped back.

"Drive safe," he said.

He walked away. I stood by my car door in the cold air with his warmth still against my mouth, and I watched him go, and I thought: *we are in so much trouble.*