Page 29

CHAPTER 28

A procession of limousines, luxury sedans, and gleaming SUVs crept slowly toward a red carpet flanked by trees decorated in blue and gold tinsel. The arena was lit up with red, green, and white spotlights just ahead.

In the driver’s seat, Bell looked annoyingly at ease in his midnight blue velvet tuxedo that looked like something out of an old Hollywood movie. He was Paul Newman, Cary Grant, and James Dean all rolled into one mouth-watering package.

Meanwhile, my dress shirt was stuck to my back with sweat, my palms were clammy, and my stomach was gurgling with nerves. I was sure my hair was standing on end from how many times I’d tunneled my fingers through it.

Tonight was the first time I was seeing my teammates since my altercation with Chet, and I was freaking the fuck out over what they might say about what went down.

I already knew Viggy was pissed at me for getting myself suspended, though he’d indicated in a roundabout way he thought Doyle had it coming. He was surprised, though, that it’d been me who’d put the homophobic asshole in his place. Murdock had been much more supportive, texting to say he wished I would have knocked the fucker out.

Everyone else, though? I had absolutely no idea, and Bell had been somewhat evasive when I asked him last night after our win against Washington.

A muttered, “No one said a word,” as he stuck his head in the fridge did not inspire confidence, and now I was seriously considering asking him to pull a u-ey and drive us straight home.

But then what? Hide out for the rest of the season? Pretend I hadn’t promised to stop denying what he was to me?

Yeah, that wasn’t an option, either.

My stomach twisted as we rolled to a stop behind a black Escalade. The valet, a slight kid with a shaved head and some questionable neck tattoos, approached the SUV.

Bell shifted his BMW into park while we waited for our turn, his gaze assessing. Probably trying to gauge how long we had before leaving the safety of his car and stepping out into a potential shitstorm.

“You okay?” He angled himself slightly toward me, his profile soft in the glow from the dash.

I nodded. “Yeah. Fine.”

Bell knew I was a long way from fine, but wouldn’t call me on my bullshit. Not now, at least. He just sat there watching me, his eyes calm and steady, like he was giving me space to tell myself whatever lies I needed to in order to get through tonight.

“We didn’t really get a chance to talk about how this was going to go down.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, my voice scratchy. I swallowed, trying to force moisture into the desert my mouth had become.

“Like, are we going to pretend the shit with Chet never happened? Just act like we always do—me being my charming self and you scowling at anyone who comes near?”

I swiveled in the too-small seat to look at him directly. His tie was perfectly knotted, his skin youthful and dewy from a facial he’d had done earlier this morning, his blond hair slicked back in a way that made him look polished, but still like himself.

This was the man who made me laugh when I didn’t want to. Who kissed me kissed me with intention and meaning. Who held me back when I was moments away from ruining my career because someone had said something awful about him. About us.

And I loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone or anything in my whole miserable life.

“You think that’ll work?” I asked.

He shrugged, his casualness masking the tension of the evening. “I have no fucking clue, but I’ll take your lead. Just tell me what you need.”

That got me, the loyalty. The fact that he wasn’t asking for reassurance—just a signal. Something he could follow without stepping where I wasn’t ready to go.

I exhaled, trying to loosen the tightness in my jaw. “I need that fucker to be gone from the team,” I muttered. “But more than that, I need to know, however this goes down tonight, you’re with me. That if I fuck this up somehow, say the wrong thing, you’ll still be mine.”

“Always, E,” he answered with a faint, understanding smile, as he reached for my hand. He squeezed it, quick and reassuring, as his head swung back to look out his window, where the valet was approaching.

“Show time,” Bell said, pushing open his door and sliding his long legs out of the car, his movements fluid and graceful, just like they were on the ice. He handed his keys to the valet who was looking up at him with stars in his eyes.

Bell was beautiful and charismatic and so fucking authentically himself, so proudly who he was, that people had no choice but to fawn over him. Admire him.

Was it any wonder that someone with a blue, pink, and white flag emblazoned on their skin, just above their collar, was entranced by him?

My fingers fumbled with the handle. The door stuck. I pushed it harder, misjudged my force, and nearly spilled out onto the pavement like a goddamn cartoon. Real smooth.

Bell met me around the front of his car, buttoning his jacket with a teasing grin on his face. His gaze swept over me before he reached out and smoothed his palm over my shoulder. A tiny touch, fleeting, but I felt it everywhere. “There you go,” he murmured, dragging his hand away.

“Stop smirking,” I said, feeling my face fall into that old, familiar scowl.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He pushed his hands down into his pockets and strolled toward the top of the red carpet, where a gaggle of photographers and Austin society reporters were waiting to harass us as we entered the arena.

“So fucking smug,” I muttered as I followed him to the waiting gauntlet.

“You know you love me,” he teased back over his shoulder.

“Unfortunately.” I huffed a laugh and forced a smile on my face as a photographer I recognized from the Statesman shouted our names.

Bell and I stood a couple of feet apart on the red carpet as he flashed the throng of reporters his thousand-watt smile, the one that had landed him a major modeling contract.

“You’re scowling, E,” he said out the side of his mouth as he winked at a fan leaning over the gold rope screaming his name.

“I’m smiling ,” I said from between clenched teeth.

“If you say so.”

We’d just stepped off the red carpet and into the arena when a voice called out behind us, “Hey! Wait up.”

Silas Johannsen, dressed in a crisp maroon tuxedo, his shirt open at the neck sans tie, fell into step beside us. His hands were tucked in his pockets, his energy more suited to walking into a bar and not a black-tie gala.

He glanced between Bell and me. “Just wanted to say real quick that Chet’s a fucker. Always has been. If I were you, I’d have knocked his teeth out. Don’t know how you kept it together as well as you did.” He nodded at me, a flicker of respect in his gaze.

That tracked. Hanny would drop his gloves at the barest provocation. He took absolutely zero shit from anyone, including his own teammates.

I scratched the side of my beard, my heart hammering a little faster. The thing was, I hadn’t held it together. Bell had held me together.

My mind flashed to the moment when he had kept me from going nuclear on that fucker—his hand on my chest, grounding me, his lips at my ear, soothing me—and then to everything that had followed. The silence. The whispers. The knowing looks.

“Hanny, I?—”

Silas glanced over his shoulder as Keats shouted his name, lifting a finger in the universal sign for “one second,” before turning back to Bell and me.

He moved in fractionally closer. “And don’t even sweat the other thing, E.” He spoke quietly, his words for Bell and my ears alone. “None of the guys care one way or the other if what Chet insinuated is true or not. Who you fuck on your own time is none of our business. Just don’t let it affect your game, and we’re all good.”

My skin prickled, but not from the cold radiating off the ice covered with wooden boards and industrial carpet or the industrial sized air conditioning system needed to keep it frozen.

I couldn’t believe how casually Hanny had dropped that bomb. Like me fucking Bell was no big deal. Like us being together didn’t matter. Not as long as we kept playing good hockey.

Before I could respond, he clapped his hand to my shoulder and squeezed, gave Bell a subtle nod of acknowledgment that left me wondering what unspoken understanding they shared, and then peeled off toward where Keats was waiting like he hadn’t just ripped the floor out from under me in the most bizarrely supportive way imaginable.

I stood there blinking, stunned.

Bell snorted, the sound low and amused, his shoulders visibly relaxing for the first time since we arrived. “Did that just happen?”

I stared after Silas, still trying to process the bizarre exchange. “I genuinely don’t know,” I said, feeling oddly weightless, like some invisible pressure had suddenly lifted.

A teammate, one I respected, had supported me—quietly, and without fanfare. But acceptance nonetheless.

Bell bumped my shoulder gently with his own. “Ready?”

I looked at the open doors ahead, the soft sounds of jazzy Christmas music and the murmur of conversation spilling out.

“No,” I said honestly.

Bell nodded once and smiled. “Let’s just take it one step at a time.”

I blew out a breath, adjusted the lapels of my tux, and followed him inside. I still wasn’t sure what we were walking into. But Bell was with me, and Silas had voiced his support. Maybe that was enough for now. It was certainly more than I had ever hoped for or thought I deserved.

* * *

“No one cared,” I said, still in disbelief as I unfastened the last button of my tuxedo shirt and let it hang open. “Not one weird look. Not one comment. Nothing.”

Bell leaned against the bedroom doorway, barefoot, his tux jacket abandoned in the living room the second we walked through the door. His shirt was wrinkled and half-untucked, his bowtie hanging loose around his neck. Even rumpled after schmoozing team sponsors for hours on end, he looked effortlessly hot.

“I’m starting to wonder if holding you back the way I did maybe looked worse in our heads.” He pushed off the jamb and sauntered into the room with that loose-limbed grace he was known for, both on and off the ice. “Maybe the guys were in too much shock over what Chet said to even notice what I did or how I did it.”

Even if that was true, what that fucker had said was enough to set tongues wagging. The way Bell had held onto me and the way I’d melted against him for a brief, insane second would have only served as confirmation that his words were true.

I let out a breath that might’ve passed for a laugh if it hadn’t been soaked in disbelief. My brow pulled tight, my mouth curving into a flat, skeptical line as I met his gaze head-on. “Chet called us lovers. He flat-out said I was your boyfriend. Do you really believe no one picked up on that?”

Bell hesitated for half a second—just enough for me to catch the flicker of something behind his eyes. Guilt, maybe. He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he veered toward the walk-in closet, a slight stiffness appearing in his shoulders that hadn’t been there a second ago.

“What was that look?” I asked, stepping into the doorway.

I raised an expectant eyebrow when he glanced my way.

“What look?” He worked the rest of his shirt buttons free and shrugged out of it. He lifted the fabric to his nose, sniffed once, then shook his head and tossed it somewhere in the vicinity of my hamper.

“The one that said you suddenly remembered you had to hang up your tux right this second when you never hang anything up,” I answered, my tone saying, “Don’t you dare lie to me right now.”

Bell let out a slow breath, his head falling back to stare up at the ceiling for three long beats. When he dropped his face forward and turned to me, I realized he looked tired.

Not physically, but emotionally spent.

My feet moved of their own volition as I stepped into the closet to stand next to him. I twined my fingers with his and raised his hand up to my mouth. Pressing a kiss to his knuckles, I said, “Talk to me, Bell. What’s going on?”

He pulled a deep breath into his lungs and pushed the words out, fast, like he was rushing to head my impending panic off at the pass.

“Miller cornered me when I got to the arena last night. He wanted to know … he asked me what was going on with us. I didn’t tell him anything specific.”

Bell might have expected me to panic, but I wasn’t.

At least not like I would have been even a week ago.

Miller was a supremely decent guy, and I knew anything he learned—inadvertently or not—would be kept in the strictest confidence.

I’d promised Bell I’d explore coming out. This wasn’t that, but it might be a start.

“And what’d you say?”

I studied his expression, raw and off-balance in a way I wasn’t used to seeing. The ever-present knot of anxiety in my stomach twisted tighter.

“That I’m in love with you.” He met my eyes, his gaze pleading with me to understand as he rushed to continue. “I wasn’t trying to out us or pressure you. I just … I figured it explained my reaction. That he’d get it—why I reached for you like that.”

It explained his reaction, sure. But not mine .

And where this was when I would normally shut down, retreat behind my walls, I didn’t feel those old instincts rising to the fore.

Instead, something inside my chest loosened.

Like Silas’s assurance earlier tonight— None of the guys care one way or the other —had cracked open a door I’d kept locked so long, I’d forgotten there was even a key.

“How’d he respond?”

I didn’t know what I wanted Miller to have said. There wasn’t any one thing I could pinpoint as being the right thing. All I knew was that while I had Bell to lean on as we navigated our situation, he didn’t have anyone to lean on himself. Our relationship was a burden he couldn’t lay down for even a moment.

He gave a wobbly, uncertain smile that was nearly a grimace. “He asked if you felt the same.”

“And?”

In struck me in that moment that I wanted Bell to be able to tell his friend—our teammate—that I felt exactly the same way as he felt about me. That I loved him so fucking much it hurt, and the fact that he had to pretend like that wasn’t what we were to each other was a sharp stab between my ribs.

His voice was a little unsteady when he replied, “I said it was complicated.”

My chest ached at the raw honesty in his voice. I nodded, because yeah—it was complicated.

But it didn’t need to be.

Not forever.

I took a breath. A deep one. The kind you take when you’re standing at the edge of something vast and terrifying, knowing that the only way forward is down.

I didn’t know what waited for me at the bottom, only that, for the first time in my life, stepping into that great unknown didn’t feel like a fall.

It felt like flying.

Like maybe when I landed, I wouldn’t be shattered—I’d be free.

I stepped closer, untwining my fingers from his and lifting my hands to cradle his cheeks in my palms.

His breath caught as our eyes locked.

“You should’ve told him I do,” I said softly.

Bell’s lips parted, but no sound came out. His brows knit together, and for a second, I thought he might cry.

And then my words echoed back at me, heavy and bright.

I do.

Suddenly, I could picture it: standing across from him, saying those words again.

I knew I wasn’t ready. We weren’t ready.

But God, I wanted to be—someday.

I wanted a future that ended with me beside this man, growing old together.

I wanted it all.

And maybe that was the first step off the cliff.