Page 7 of The Longest Shot
But this woman?
She looks carved from permafrost. Her blazer is so severely tailored it could cut glass. That gorgeous red hair is scraped back tight enough to cause migraines. Her posture belongs in a military recruitment poster: shoulders squared, spine straight, ready to take a bullet or deliver one.
And those eyes—Christ, those eyes that, for a few weeks, looked at me like I meant something—are now slate gray and empty as a January sky. It's like looking at a stranger wearing Morgan's face, and the wrongness of it makes my stomach twist into knots I didn't know were possible.
Time fractures, and suddenly I'm not in this fluorescent purgatory anymore.
I'm eighteen and we're at a High School Senior hockey camp, with the best male and female players in the country all flown in for two weeks of lectures and training with professionals. It's basically a teenage hormone attack, and both Morgan and I were willing victims.
She's lying next to me on scratchy sand, both of us coming down from the high of our first time. Her head rests on my chest, her finger tracing patterns on my stomach. And, for the only time in my life, the silence doesn't feel like a bomb countdown but rather feels like floating.
"You're quiet," she says, her breath warm against my skin.
"Yeah," I say, surprising myself with honesty. "It's nice."
And it is. With her, the quiet doesn't mean someone's about to throw a plate after an insult or a punch after too many beers. It just means we're here, together, and that's enough. It makes me wonder if this is what life is like for most people, able to just… be.
Fast-forward to our last night. We're on my truck's hood, looking at stars that seem impossibly bright. She's wearing my hoodie—swimming in it, really—and I'm having dangerous thoughts about her keeping it forever. She turns to me with this look that makes my chest compress.
"So what happens when camp ends?" Her voice is barely there. "With us?"
The question hangs between us like a lit fuse, and suddenly, the silence that has felt comfortable with her for two weeks getsbusy. Panic floods my system—that familiar, desperate need to defuse, deflect, make this anything but real—because real means it can hurt… real means we might become my parents.
"Well," I hear myself say, my voice too loud, too bright, "I figure we'll always have these two weeks of amazing—" I make a crude gesture, pumping my hips, "—athletic performance to remember, right? We really stuck the landing. Ten out of ten, would recommend."
She flinches like I've slapped her.
"Or maybe we can be pen pals!" The verbal hemorrhage continues as my panic-level increases. "Do people still do that? Very romantic! We can send each other those little hearts with the candy messages. 'Be mine,' 'You're sweet,' 'Sorry I'm emotionally stunted!'"
Her face closes completely. Shutters before a hurricane. "Right," she says, flat and final. "Just fun."
She slides off the hood of my truck and walks away without even looking back. I sit there, drowning in the silence I created, knowing I just threw away something irreplaceable because I was too scared to say: "I think I'm falling in love with you, Morgan, and we'll figure out the details later…"
Galloway's voice hooks me back to the present. "Morgan comes to us from the University of Montana, where she built their program from nothing." He's using his 'look at what I acquired' voice, the one he used when he announced the new scoreboard last year, like Morgan's a toy for his collection.
My eyes lock on her as Galloway moves behind her chair. His hand lands on her shoulder, and something primal in my gut clenches hard enough to taste copper, because his touch is not professional. His thumb strokes the fabric of her blazer while his fingers curve possessively around her shoulder.
It's a gesture that says,mine, don't touch.
Rage floods my system, hot and violent. My hands curl into fists under the table, nails carving crescents into my palms. Every muscle coils with the need to launch across this polished surface and remove his hand, preferably at the wrist and with extreme prejudice.
The rational part of my brain—what's left of it—screams that starting a brawl with the Athletic Director would be career suicide. But the caveman part that remembers how Morgan's skin felt under my fingers is already calculating trajectories and impact points.
I can see it perfectly: me vaulting this table like some deranged action hero, tackling Galloway through the window behind him, the glass shattering dramatically. It would be glorious, but I'd definitely get expelled, although maybe it would be worth it?
But I hold back, because Morgan doesn't react.
She endures his touch with the stillness of someone who's practiced this. And when she speaks about building competitive programs and excellence, her voice is steel, each word calculated for maximum professional impact and minimum personal revelation.
When her gaze sweeps the room, it passes over me like I'm a piece of the furniture or one of the team photos adorning the walls. The dismissal is so complete I wonder if I imagined those two weeks or if I invented the girl who laughed at my terrible jokes and kissed me like I was oxygen.
The rest of the meeting blurs past. Galloway drones about budgets and travel plans while my brain loops on a single track:She's here and she hates you.The whole time, Morgan takes notes, and I sit there like someone replaced my brain with cotton candy—sticky, useless, dissolving.
When Galloway finally releases us with platitudes about "excellence" and "tradition," and one last backslap for me andme alone, my body moves on autopilot. My internal monologue—the emotional janitor who can't let silence or mess just be—starts screaming.
Fix this! Make a joke! Say something stupid! That's your specialty!
I intercept her in the hallway before she can escape. "Morgan! Hey, wait up!"
