Page 32 of Cross Ice

“Yeah. It’s me.”

“Come up.”

I stood outside his door and took a breath.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Nico

I stood outside his door and took a breath.

Tell him. He deserves to know. You’ve known that since Washington.

I raised my hand. The door opened before I could knock, and Evan stood there with a smile that kicked up my pulse. He pulled me to him by the front of my jacket and kissed me, his lips soft and welcoming. I kissed him back, and for a moment all my rehearsed sentences went somewhere I couldn’t reach.

When he pulled back, his gaze traveled to my jaw and stopped.

“What happened?” His hand came up, fingers gentle against the bruise. The touch was careful, worried, and I felt it everywhere.

“That’s part of what I need to tell you.”

He went still. Then he stepped back and let me in.

We sat on the couch, not touching, which felt strange after a week apart. He turned to face me and waited. No questions, no prompting, just those steady eyes on mine, giving me the room to say it however I needed to. That was very Evan.

“My name is Nicolás Briggs,” I said. “I’m a professional hockey player. I play left wing for the San Jose Lasers. Number seventeen.”

A heavy silence followed.

He didn’t move. There was no surprise on his face, none at all. He looked like a guy who’d suspected something for a while and had just been waiting for me to say it out loud, except what I’d said was bigger than whatever he’d guessed. His jaw tightened. His eyes stayed locked on mine, and my chest went tight watching him.

“The bruise,” he said finally.

“Fight with an opposing player in Florida. Svoboda. He cross-checked me from behind and we dropped gloves.” I met his eyes. “It’s part of the game. I’ve had worse.”

“You’ve had worse,” he repeated, his voice flat, not quite a question.

“Yes.”

He absorbed that. “Tell me why you didn’t tell me.”

I’d rehearsed this in the car. In hotel rooms across four cities. In the parking lot sixty seconds ago. I still didn’t have the perfect words, but I had honest ones.

“The first night, at the club, I went there because I wanted to be nobody. Not Nicolás Briggs the hockey player. Not the guy with his face on buses and three-quarters of a million people following him online. Just Nico.” I paused. “But that’s not the whole truth.”

He waited.

“Two other players I know had just come out. Marco Morelli and Étienne Savard. They posted a photo together—just the two of them, smiling, not hiding anything—and I couldn’t stop looking at it. My tattoo… One life to live. One life to love. I’d been telling myself for years it was about hockey, about playing without regrets. But that night I looked at that photo and understood I’d been using the hockey half as an excuse to ignore the other half entirely.” I met his eyes. “I didn’t want a press conference. I didn’t want to make a statement or become a story. I just wanted to walk into a room and be a person who wasn’t hiding. For one night.

“And then you were there.”

I held his gaze.

“When you didn’t recognize me… I can’t describe what that felt like. It had been so long since anyone had looked at me like I was just some guy.

“When people find out,” I continued. “Everything shifts. The way they listen, what they want from the conversation, what they want from me. I’ve watched it happen—someone I’m talking to will get that look, like they’re suddenly recalibrating, like the person they were talking to a second ago has been replaced by something more useful.” I paused. “You never looked at me like that. I wasn’t ready to give that up.”

He was listening, hands in his lap, giving me nothing yet.