Claimed By My Hockey Captain

Chapter 6

Grace

Mason. Same jaw, same quiet weight to the way he held a doorway, like he'd never once in his life felt the need to fill a silence with small talk.

Even if I'd been half-drunk six months ago, I would still recognize that sharp line of his jaw and the sheer silhouette of his frame anywhere. Six months had done nothing to him except maybe add a little more breadth to his shoulders, which felt deeply unfair.

"Hello, I'm Mason," he said, his low voice vibrating in the cool night air. "Which one of you is Grace Bennett?"

"I'm Grace." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "This is Olivia. She's coming with me to look at the room."

"Sure." He stepped back to let us in. "Garage is this way."

That was it. No flicker of recognition, no raised eyebrow, no do I know you from somewhere. He gave nothing away. If he recognized me, he wasn't showing it.

I followed him into the garage, half-listening as he pointed out where the second car would go if I had one, where the bins were, the code for the side door.

Olivia trailed behind us with her phone already out, thumbs moving, not even pretending to look at the garage.

"Kitchen's up here." Mason took the stairs two at a time, easy, like the house belonged to his body as much as it belonged to him on paper.

Something was simmering on the stove when we reached the second floor—chicken and something sharp, garlic maybe—and the whole space smelled warm in a way that made the back of my throat go tight for reasons I didn't examine too closely.

"You cook?" Olivia asked, finally looking up from her phone.

"Most nights." He turned the burner down without checking it, the kind of motion that came from doing it a thousand times. "Helps if you're not eating cereal for dinner during season."

"Nineteen," Olivia said, reading something off her screen, not quite to either of us. "That's your number, right?"

Something in Mason's face went very still and very deliberate, the kind of stillness that took effort. "Yeah."

I shot Olivia a look she didn't catch, too busy scrolling, and Mason just turned and started toward the stairs again, like he hadn't noticed, or like he'd decided not to notice, which felt like it was becoming a theme of the night.

"Bedrooms are up top," he said. "I'll show you the room that's open."

Stepping onto the third-floor landing, a sudden wave of tension hit me, tight and heavy in my chest. My heart did a nervous little stutter.

His room was up here somewhere—I knew that much—and every instinct I had was bracing for the collision of a memory I was desperately trying to ignore.

But Mason didn't pause. He didn't look back at me, and he didn't lead us toward whatever door hid his own space.

He went straight to the end of the hall, stopped in front of a door on the left, and pushed it open.

"This is it," he said, stepping aside.

It was a bright room, even at night, with a big window facing the quiet street. A queen bed was already neatly made up with plain white linens, looking crisp and perfectly tucked.

There was an empty closet, an empty desk, and a complete absence of personal clutter. The entire space was spotless, looking so entirely untouched that it felt as if nobody had ever lived a single day inside it.

"Bathroom's down the hall, you'd have it to yourself," he added. "Five hundred a month, utilities included. No deposit."

Olivia's hand found my elbow before I could answer, steering me back out into the hallway with a polite smile meant for Mason that vanished the second we were out of his line of sight.

She dragged me a few feet down the hall, out of earshot, and shoved her phone screen inches from my face.

It was a local sports news article from two months ago. The headline was blunt: Stormont Captain Suspended Following Postgame Altercation.

Below it was a blurry photo of Mason being pulled off someone by two teammates, his jaw set in that same absolute stillness I'd seen downstairs—except here, it looked terrifyingly violent.

"He put another player in the hospital," Olivia whispered. "Broke his orbital bone. And Grace, that's not even the weird part. I looked up this building—units in this row are going for two million, minimum. He's renting a room here for five hundred bucks with no deposit."

She locked her screen, her eyes drilling into mine. "Still want to stay? There's always an angle. Just stay with me instead. My lease has room, we'll figure out something better, slower. There's no rush."

I thought about her cramped, shoebox-sized room, the tiny patch of floor space she'd be giving up for my sleeping bag, the schedule she already ran herself into the ground keeping.

I thought about every other listing I'd scrolled tonight, all of them either outside my budget or an hour from campus by bus. And underneath all of it, quieter, harder to justify out loud, I thought about a stranger's bed six months ago, the quiet warmth of his room, and the particular kind of safe I'd felt waking up beside him in a house I didn't recognize—in a city that otherwise made me feel like I was failing at something every single day.

I didn't fully understand my own reasoning. I wasn't sure if it was the rent, or the room, or some half-formed instinct I couldn't put into words even for myself. But I knew which way I was leaning before I let myself admit it.

"I'm okay," I told her. "I think I'm going to take it."

Olivia didn't look convinced, but she also didn't argue, just exhaled through her nose like she was filing this under things to revisit later and followed me back down the hall.

Mason was leaning against the doorframe where we'd left him, arms crossed, patient in a way that made it impossible to read whether he cared either way.

"I'll take the room," I said.

The line of his jaw softened. "Welcome to move in."

I looked past him, down the hall, at the bright window and the bed with its too-clean sheets, and felt the words come out of me before I'd finished deciding I meant them.

"Can I move in tonight?"