Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Eight: Closure, Or Something Like It

Delaney

She chose a coffee shop two neighborhoods from her apartment, neutral ground, the kind of place with no history attached to either of them, and she got there fifteen minutes early because showing up rattled felt worse than showing up composed and having to fake the composure a little.

Beckett looked older than she remembered, which was a strange thing to notice first, two years and one shattered shoulder blade later. He'd let his hair grow out. He moved carefully, favoring the left side in a way that hadn't fully resolved even now, and something in Delaney's chest twisted at the sight of it, old guilt she'd thought she'd worked through finally, back for an encore.

"You look good," he said, sliding into the seat across from her, and it landed as an observation rather than a line, which she appreciated more than she expected to.

"You look tired."

"Rehab's been a whole thing." He said it without bitterness, which surprised her. "I'm coaching now, actually. Junior league, out near my parents' place. Turns out I'm better at explaining the game than I ever was at playing it in the years since the hit."

"Beckett, I'm sorry. About all of it. About how things ended, about the fact that I never really said the right thing at the time, because I was twenty four and grieving a relationship and pretending I wasn't also grieving your season, like the two things were separate."

"They weren't separate." He turned his coffee cup slowly, not quite looking at her. "I read the article this morning. About the books." A pause, careful, like he was choosing each word with real effort. "I want to ask you something and I need you to know there's no trap in it. Did you write those stories because you hated him, or because you didn't know what else to do with everything you felt after that game?"

Delaney sat with that question longer than she expected to need, because the honest answer required admitting something she'd never said out loud, not to Priya, not to Roman, not even fully to herself in the privacy of a document called Taxes 2019.

"Both," she finally said. "At first it was hatred. Clean, simple, easy to hold onto. I wrote him as a villain because it was easier than sitting with the fact that you and I had been over in every way that mattered months before the hit happened, and I needed somewhere to put the wreckage that wasn't just, my boyfriend stopped loving me slowly and I didn't notice until a man I'd never met ended his career and forced the ending into the open." She met his eyes, steady, done apologizing for things that weren't fully her fault. "The hatred didn't last, though. Somewhere around chapter nine I started writing him more honestly than I'd been writing anything else in my life, and I think that's the part that actually scares people, more than the blackmail framing the article danced around. Not that I wrote fiction about my boyfriend's rival. That I got closer to the truth of a stranger through fiction than I ever managed with you, in two real years, in person."

Beckett was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke, his voice had gone rough in a way she hadn't expected. "That's rough to hear. But it's also probably fair. I wasn't honest with you those last months either. I was scared my career was already sliding before the hit happened, and it was easier to blame the hit publicly than admit I'd been failing on my own terms for a year before Kade ever touched me." He looked up, something like relief crossing his face, the specific relief of a man finally setting down a weight he'd been carrying for two years without admitting its size. "I didn't come here to make you feel guilty, for what it's worth. I think I came here because I needed to see you happy with someone, actually happy, not performing happy for the cameras the article was talking about, to know I could finally stop being angry at a hit that ended my career and also, somehow, ended up saving both of us from a relationship that was already broken."

"Are we okay?" Delaney asked, quiet, needing to hear it plainly.

"We're okay." Beckett managed something close to a real smile. "Tell Kade, from the guy whose shoulder he ruined, that I hope he treats you like the version of him you apparently wrote. Softer than the hit reel." A beat, wry. "Also tell him I still think the penalty should've been a five minute major instead of two. I'm not that evolved."

She laughed, real and surprised, the first unguarded laugh she'd managed all day, and left the coffee shop twenty minutes later feeling lighter than she had in two years, the specific lightness of a door finally closing on something that had been left ajar far too long.

Roman

He was running a two on one drill when he saw her car pull into the players' lot early, before practice had even wrapped, and something in his chest unclenched all at once, watching her get out, watching the set of her shoulders, reading relief in the shape of her walk before she'd said a single word.

"How'd it go," he asked, meeting her at the tunnel, not bothering to pretend he hadn't been watching for her the entire second half of practice.

"He's coaching junior hockey now. He said to tell you he still thinks the penalty should've been a major." She was almost smiling, something loose and unguarded in her face that he hadn't seen since his grandmother's kitchen. "We're okay. Actually okay. I think I finally said the things I should've said two years ago, and it turns out they didn't need to wait for a stranger to blackmail me into a relationship first."

"I'll take the win regardless of the method." He reached for her hand, unbothered by the two rookies watching from the bench with open curiosity. "I was terrified the whole practice. Skated the worst drills I've run in a season."

"You scored twice. Petrov told me."

"I was terrified and also apparently functional. Both things happening at once. New skill I'm developing, mostly because of you." He pulled her closer, forehead briefly against hers, unguarded in the middle of a hallway full of teammates who'd absolutely clock it and say nothing, because that was the specific mercy locker rooms extended to things that mattered. "I kept thinking about what my grandmother said. About someone finally writing me softer. I think I've been trying to earn that sentence retroactively ever since she said it."

"You don't have to earn it," Delaney said, quiet, sure of herself in a way she hadn't managed since the hallway six weeks ago, since a blackmail deal that had somehow, against every reasonable expectation, turned into this. "I already wrote you that way before I even properly knew you. Turns out I was just early. Not wrong."

He kissed her then, in the tunnel, in front of two rookies and a very interested equipment manager, and for the first time since he'd found her old username buried in a cached email six weeks ago, he let himself believe, fully, without hedging, that the story she'd started writing a year before they'd ever really met wasn't fiction anymore. It was just, finally, catching up to itself.