All Chapters of WHY CHOOSE?: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

COLEI woke up on game day already calm.That was the first thing I noticed — the absence of the noise. Three weeks of static in my head, that constant low-frequency interference of wanting something and fighting it and wanting it anyway, and I woke up at seven-fifteen on a Friday morning and the static was just — gone.I lay there for a moment taking inventory.The decision was still there, solid and settled in my chest, exactly where I'd left it the night before. I hadn't talked myself out of it in my sleep. Hadn't woken up with the familiar cold water of second thoughts. It was just there, quiet and immovable, the way decisions feel when they're the right ones.I got up. Made coffee. Did my pregame routine in the particular focused silence I'd developed over a decade of professional hockey — the tape job, the specific breakfast, the forty minutes of stillness before the noise started. I did all of it the same way I always did and underneath all of it, the decision sat.Tonight, I t

NADIAWe ended up at mine.No discussion about it, no suggestion made out loud. Cole just fell into step with us when we walked out of the arena and nobody said anything and somewhere between the parking lot and my front door it became simply understood. His car following ours. His footsteps on my stairs behind Luke and Finn.I unlocked my door and held it open and watched all three of them walk through it.Four jackets on my hooks. The sight of it hit me somewhere low in the sternum — something that wasn't quite surprise and wasn't quite relief but lived in the neighborhood of both.I closed the door.The four of us in my living room. The air was doing the thing — that particular pressurization that happened when too much want was occupying too small a space, like the atmosphere before a storm when everything goes very still and you can feel what's coming in the roof of your mouth.Cole stood in the middle of the room.He was different. I'd been cataloguing the changes in him for wee

"No I'm not," I said."A little bit you are.""I'm not."He kissed my temple. "It's a lot," he said simply. "It's okay that it's a lot."Later on, my bed was not built for four people. Someone's leg was definitively on top of someone else's leg and the sheet situation was a complete loss and Finn had both pillows again somehow — he did this every time, I still didn't know how — and Luke was hanging off the edge of the mattress at an angle that looked structurally questionable.Nobody moved.Cole was on his back beside me, one arm behind his head, staring at the ceiling. The lamp was still on, throwing the room in warm low light. I could see his profile, the line of his jaw, the slight rise and fall of his chest as his breathing slowed.His face was open. Completely, entirely open — no arrangement to it, no management, just Cole. Just his actual face in the actual light without anything held back.I watched him and waited."So," Finn said into the silence."So," Cole said."How was tha

This was nothing like last night — last night had been first times, feeling the shape of something new, tentative in the way new things are tentative even when they're wanted. This was Cole having made a decision and arriving at it completely. His mouth on mine was slow and deep and overwhelming in the specific way that certainty is overwhelming — not urgent, not desperate, just total. His lips moved against mine like he had nowhere else to be and nothing else to want, one hand sliding deeper into my hair and angling my head exactly where he wanted it.I made a sound I hadn't planned on.His other hand left my face and found my waist. Pulled me in — not roughly, just inevitably, the way gravity works, the way things fall toward each other when there's nothing left holding them apart. I felt the full solid warmth of his body against mine and something in my chest went loose and warm.He walked me backward. I went. My back met the counter and he pressed into the space between my hips an

COLEThe ice was empty when I got there.Good. That was what I needed — the cold and the quiet and the particular clarity that came from having nothing between me and the thing I was trying to think through. I'd been in my apartment for two hours trying to do the same thing and my apartment had walls and a ceiling and all it had done was make everything louder.I laced up and stepped out onto the rink and the cold hit me the way it always did — immediate, clarifying, like a reset button for everything above the neck.I started skating.No drills. No structure. Just movement, the repetitive carve of blades on ice, the familiar burn starting in my thighs and spreading outward. I did three laps before I registered the other figure at the far end of the rink.I stopped.Luke.He was at the opposite goal running shot drills alone, the puck moving from stick to net in that same deliberate sequence he repeated until it was automatic, until his body could do it without his brain involved. I'd