Hating The Captain Who Broke Me

Chapter Three

"Yeah," I said, too fast, my voice coming out flatter than I meant it to. "I used to play. Past tense. A long time ago."

"How long?" Rhys asked, and there was nothing arrogant left in his voice at all. Just quiet, careful curiosity, like he was afraid the wrong word would make me stop talking.

"Long enough that it doesn't matter anymore."

Micah, to his credit, finally read the room. "Okay," he said, standing up so fast his chair scraped loud against the tile. "I'm going to go somewhere that isn't here. Great catching up, Calloway. Sorry about…" He gestured vaguely at the whole conversation, wincing. "Yeah."

He grabbed his coffee and left, and then it was just the two of us and a table full of papers neither of us was looking at.

"You don't have to talk about it," Rhys said.

"I wasn't going to."

"Right." A beat. "Was it bad? The way you stopped?"

"Define bad."

He studied me for a second too long, like he was trying to solve something that didn't add up yet. "Career-ending injury bad?"

"Something like that."

I watched him carefully as I said it, waiting for anything, a flinch, a flicker, some ghost of recognition crossing his face but there was nothing. Whatever memory he had of that night, whatever weight I knew he carried around a game he probably still thought about sometimes, it wasn't connecting to me. Not yet. He was just a guy feeling sorry for a stranger, and something about that made my chest ache.

"That sucks," he said finally, quiet and plain, none of his usual polish on it. "For what it's worth."

"It was three years ago. I'm fine."

"You don't have to be fine. You just have to not talk about it if you don't want to." He leaned back in his chair, watching me with an expression I couldn't quite name. "I get it, a little. People deciding they know your whole story because of one thing that happened to you. Everyone on this campus thinks they've got me figured out because I score goals and show up late to class."

"Don't they?"

"No." He said it simply, without heat, like it was just a fact he made peace with a long time ago. "There's a version of me that only exists on the ice, and then there's whatever this is."

He gestured at himself, at the table, at the two of us stuck here together. "Nobody sees that version. Mostly because I don't let them."

I didn't have a smart response to that. It landed somewhere I wasn't prepared for it to land, and for a second the two of us just sat there in a silence that wasn't hostile anymore. It was something else.

"We should pick a topic," I said, because if I didn't change the subject I was going to say something I couldn't take back.

"Right. Yeah." He straightened up, grateful for the exit, and I understood that better than I wanted to. "What've you got?"

I had three ideas ranked by strength, like I told him. Team cohesion under pressure. Performance anxiety in elite athletes. Burnout in year-round training programs. Solid, safe, forgettable topics that would get us both an easy A and let me disappear back into my normal, structured, hockey-free life when the second finals ended.

That wasn't what came out of my mouth.

"Long-term psychological effects of career-ending injuries in competitive athletes," I said instead, the words arriving before I fully decided to let them. "Identity loss. Trauma processing. How people rebuild a sense of self when the thing that defined them gets taken away in a single moment they didn't see coming."

The room went very quiet.

"That's oddly specific," Rhys said slowly.

"It's a real area of research," I said, keeping my voice level professional, nothing in it that would give me away. "Professor Wallace will love it. It's rigorous, it's got tons of existing literature to build from, and it plays to both our strengths." I made myself look at him. "You know pressure. I know the psych side. It works."

He didn't answer right away. He was looking at me the way he'd looked at me right before Micah walked out, like something wasn't adding up, like a piece of a puzzle had just shifted somewhere in the back of his mind and he couldn't tell yet whether it mattered.

"Yeah," he said finally, quieter than I expected. "Okay. That works."

"Good." I started gathering my things, needing suddenly, badly, to be anywhere else. "We can start pulling sources Monday."

"Josie.”

I froze halfway into standing, my name in his mouth landing somewhere it had no right to land.

"Yeah?"

He was still looking at me like that,careful, unsettled, like he was standing at the edge of a memory he couldn't quite reach.

"Have we met before?”