Claimed By My Hockey Captain

Chapter 4

Mason

The sticky note was still on my mirror.

Six months later, it was still there.

The edges had curled, the yellow gone a little pale, but I hadn't moved it. I shaved around it every morning, my blade stopping a fraction of an inch from the adhesive, like cutting too close might lose the only piece of that night I had left.

Thank you for the cake.

Five words and no name, no number, nothing else to go on. But I didn't need a name. I knew exactly whose handwriting it was, just like I'd known exactly who she was the second I caught her eye across that crowded, suffocating living room six months ago.

Grace Bennett.

I'd seen her on a screen long before I ever saw her in person. A year ago, during the late-night loops on the sports channels in the team lounge, I'd watched her skate. She was beautiful on the ice—not the fragile, soft kind of beautiful people usually associated with figure skaters, but something sharper, full of a quiet, lethal precision that made it impossible to look away.

She didn't just glide; she commanded the ice, every rotation and landing executed with a fierce, bone-deep discipline that I recognized instantly. She was a weapon.

So when she showed up at that party, dream-shattered and bleeding from her mother's cold words, I didn't need an introduction. I just stepped in.

I didn't try to find her after she left. That was the part I kept running through my head during the early morning skates when the ice was still clean and empty. I knew her name, and in a town like this, a hockey captain could have tracked down a figure skater within forty-eight hours if he really wanted to.

But I hadn't. Because a girl who leaves while the shower is still running, a girl who leaves a five-word note instead of a number, is a girl who wants the door closed.

I figured she was back on the ice. I figured she had a Nationals title to salvage, a training schedule that didn't have room for a hockey player, and a dream she needed to chase without the distraction of a one-night mistake. I didn't want to be the guy who messed up her rotation. So I kept the memory clean, kept my mouth shut, and left her alone.

I was on the couch on the second floor, half watching a game with the volume down, scrolling through i********: without really seeing any of it, when her story came up.

I almost swiped past it. Then I didn't.

It was just a plain background and a text box—no face, no indicators of where she was. But the username was hers, and the second I read the words, that familiar, dry half-joke energy hit me straight in the chest.

Anyone know of cheap rentals near Stormont?

I read it four times.

I liked the quiet. When my dad bought me this townhouse, I'd been relieved that I wouldn't have to deal with roommates. I liked having my own walls, my own routines, and a space where nobody expected anything from me. Living alone was supposed to be the plan for the rest of my time at Stormont. It was perfect.

But looking at those seven words on my screen, the calculation shifted without a single second of hesitation. If she needed somewhere to go, I'd give up the quiet. I'd carve out half of my space and hand it to her before the ink on her post even dried.

The only problem was how to do it without scaring her off.

I ran the numbers in my head. That house party six months ago—the one where I'd first run into her—was at a house three of my teammates rented. I remembered one of them complaining that their individual cut for the place was a thousand bucks a month.

If I offered my room for free, she'd think it was a scam or a trap. Five hundred was exactly half of what the guys were paying for that place—a price she could actually swallow without losing her pride.

Now I just had to figure out how to text it to her. I wasn't good at messages. Never had been. Allison, my ex, used to say I made everything sound like a cold business transaction.

Maybe she wasn't wrong. But looking at the blank text box, I realized a business transaction was exactly what Grace needed tonight. No pity, no strings attached.

So I typed the only sentence I had that wasn't trying to be anything, keeping it as brief and functional as possible.

Got a spare room. Townhouse in Stormont University District. $500, utilities included.

I read it back once. No hello. No It's Mason, in case you forgot. No reminder of the cake, the candle, none of it. Just the thing that was actually true and actually useful, which was apparently the only kind of sentence I knew how to write when it mattered.

I hit send before I could take it apart any further.

For about three seconds, I stared at the screen, my thumb hovering near the unsend option. Then the small text appeared beneath my blue bubble. Delivered.

Too late now. Which was somehow the hardest part.

I set the phone down on my knee and stared at the muted TV without seeing it, my pulse doing something I didn't have a name for either.

If she answered. If she actually showed up at my door with a duffel bag and that same careful, guarded look she'd had at the bakery—I wasn't going to let her slip out before sunrise again without a word. That part I was sure of.

Doing things, I was good at. Saying them out loud was a different problem entirely. I still hadn't figured that one out.

Grace

Two hours later, I was sitting in the corner booth of a twenty-four-hour diner two blocks from campus, the air smelling of old grease and cheap dish soap.

My duffel bag and an overstuffed backpack holding everything I owned sat on the vinyl seat across from me. My future currently depended on whatever I could solve before my phone's remaining eighteen percent battery died.

I'd spent the last thirty minutes scrolling through off-campus listings with a deteriorating kind of optimism. The rental market didn't care that I'd just blown up my life on principle. A studio near Stormont wanted two thousand a month. A room in a house shared with four strangers was a thousand.

I pulled up my banking app, looking at the savings balance. Three months. Maybe three and a half if I stopped eating. I felt the specific, hollow kind of tired that came from being simultaneously furious and completely out of options.

I thought about Olivia, but asking to crash with her wasn't even an option. Olivia already shared a shoebox-sized room with three other students. There wasn't space for another body, let alone another life falling apart.

My phone buzzed against the laminated table.

Instagram.

A message request.

I almost ignored it, assuming it was another spam bot responding to the story I'd posted.

Then I opened it.

Got a spare room. Townhouse in Stormont University District. $500, utilities included.

I stared at the numbers until they blurred. Five hundred dollars. Right in the university district. All in.

Stormont University District was a massive, sprawling network of neighborhoods that cut across several city blocks, dense with student rentals and fraternity houses.

It was the same endless grid of brick and sidewalks where that house party had been held six months ago.

I looked from the screen to the heavy canvas of my duffel bag. That price didn't exist in this city, let alone a district that close to campus. Nothing in Vancouver was ever this kind, not unless there was something seriously wrong with the foundation, the landlord, or both.

I sat there with my thumb hovering over the screen, frowning at the message, trying to figure out exactly what kind of catch I was about to walk into.