Page 126 of Changing the Playbook
“Please. Let me finish.” I take a shuddering breath, tasting salt and fear. “I need this to be real. I need to know we’re building something that lasts longer than your NCAA eligibility. I need—” My voice drops to barely a whisper. “I need you to stay.”
The silence stretches between us like a held breath. Somewhere outside, a car door slams. Not far from here, students are waking or just going to bed after parties, faculty aregetting in their car to drive to the office, and baristas are serving lattes. The world goes on, while mine balances on a knife’s edge.
“You’re asking me to give up the NHL.”
It’s not a question.
Not an accusation.
Just an acknowledgment of the size of what I’m requesting.
“I’m asking you to choose us.” The words spill out desperate and raw. “To choose building a life here instead of chasing one that takes you away. Is that so wrong? Wanting the person I love to be here for Sunday dinners and random Tuesday catastrophes and all the mundane shit that makes up a life together?”
He doesn’t respond right away, and I don’t blame him, because I know I’m asking for a lot. But it’s what I need to ask for if he wants a future with me. There’s no other way I can protect myself, and protect us, and I hope like hell he sees that I’m asking him to choose something instead of lose something.
“OK,” he says after a long while, his voice is carefully neutral, like he’s reading terms and conditions. “If that’s what you need, then OK.”
Something cold slides down my spine. This should feel like a victory—I asked for everything and he’s giving it to me, security and certainty and stability—so why does it taste like ash?
“I should go.” He’s already moving, swinging his legs out of bed, reaching for his jeans crumpled on my floor. “Maine has a thing this morning.”
“It’s five-thirty in the morning.”
“Early thing.” He pulls his shirt over his head, and I lose the map of bruises I left on his skin. “He needs help with—something.”
I watch him dress with mechanical efficiency, this beautiful man who thirty seconds ago agreed to reshape his entire future for me. Who’s now moving like he can’t leave fast enough.
“Mike—”
“I love you,” he says from my bedroom doorway, not meeting my eyes.
Then he’s gone, and I’m alone in sheets that smell like him, in a bed that’s still warm from his body, trying to understand why getting everything I wanted feels exactly like losing everything that matters.
thirty-five
MIKE
I haven’t movedfrom this couch in seven hours.
Or maybe eight. Time stretches and compresses simultaneously now, each minute an hour, each hour a blink. The ESPN highlights play on mute—some team celebrating a shutout victory, players piling on their goalie in that familiar crush of joy I’ll never feel again.
The apartment reeks. Three days of takeout containers map my descent across the coffee table—pizza from yesterday that’s evolved into its own ecosystem, Chinese from whenever. The receipt’s probably time-stamped with the exact hour I stopped giving a shit.
Seventeen missed calls from my agent light up my phone screen. Twenty-three unread texts. I stopped checking it somewhere around call twelve, when his messages evolved from “checking in about the Calgary scout” to “Mike, what the fuck is going on?”
My laptop hibernates in the corner, but I’ve memorized what’s waiting: three overdue essays, a discussion post for my sports psychology class, and an inbox hemorrhaging professorial concern. “This isn’t like you, Mike.” “Just checking if everything’s alright.”
Dr. Morges even called the hockey office asking if I was injured.
The couch has molded to my body now, a Mike-shaped sarcophagus. I’m still wearing Thursday’s Pine Barren Hockey t-shirt. Or Wednesday’s. Hard to track when you don’t sleep, just drift between waking catatonia and horizontal staring contests with the ceiling.
The pounding starts—someone trying to break down the door with their forehead. Others have come, given up, and gone. But this is Andy’s signature knock. Like everyone else, I want her to go away, to let me pickle in peace. But then the pounding stops and a key scrapes in the lock.
“Mike?”
Her voice cuts through the darkness. I forgot she has a spare key.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
