Page 96 of Cross Ice

He paled. “They dropped you?”

“Morality clause. It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine⁠—”

“Evan.” I kept my voice level. “It’s one deal. There will be others. I’m not falling apart over this.”

He stared at me like he was trying to figure out if I was acting calm or actually felt it.

Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure myself.

“I need to call André,” I said. “Then I’ve got morning skate. I’ll be back after the meeting with Rachel.”

“Do you want me to come to the meeting?”

“It’s team PR. You don’t need to sit through that.”

“But it’s about us⁠—”

“It’s about me making a statement.” I softened my tone. “You’re not part of the statement. That’s deliberate—it protects you. Stay here. Rest. I’ll tell you everything when I get back.”

He nodded but didn’t look convinced.

I called André while I dressed.

“You good?” he asked without preamble.

“Getting there.” I pulled on my jeans. “I called my family yesterday. That was… it was a lot. But they’re okay. We’re okay.”

“Good.” Relief in his voice. “What else do you need?”

“Just wanted to check in before skate.”

Background noise—Naomi’s voice, one of the kids laughing. Normal Sunday morning chaos. The kind of thing I wanted someday.

“The team’s got you,” André said. “I want you to know that.”

Something in my chest loosened. “Thanks, Cap.”

Morning skate was exactly what I needed.

The locker room was actively normal. Thompson had his earbuds in. Fortin was arguing about last night’s scores. The playlist was the same. The routines were the same. Nobody made a big deal of it, which was the point. The reaction wasn’t silence or awkwardness. It was sameness, and sameness was the thing I’d been afraid I’d lose.

Ross, our nineteen-year-old rookie, stopped by my stall on his way out. Didn’t look at me directly. Just said, “Good for you, Briggs,” and kept walking.

Four words.

I sat there for a moment, feeling something I couldn’t name. Gratitude, yeah. But also, an awareness that the thing I’d been most afraid of, the locker room, had turned out to be fine. The thing I should have been more afraid of was losing Evan.

I geared up and hit the ice, and for two hours I didn’t think about anything except hockey. The ice was the one place that still made complete sense.

An hour after practice finished, I was sitting across from Rachel in the PR office.

The meeting with Rachel was efficient.

She had the statement drafted: two sentences, clean and direct. I’m proud to be a gay man and a professional hockey player. My private life is my own, and I ask that the media and public respect that boundary.

“It goes out tomorrow morning,” Rachel said. “We let the Sunday news cycle run without feeding it. Monday we own the story.”