Chapter 85 CHAPTER 85

Chapter 85 CHAPTER 85
Julian’s Pov

The hallway leading to the home locker room of the Midwest Wolverines didn't have polished oak paneling or framed portraits of distinguished alumni. It was an unpainted cinder-block trench, painted a dull, industrial seafoam green that was peeling near the floorboards from decades of dampness.

The air was thick, heavy, and rank. It didn't carry the light, artificial scent of lavender or pine that the Northwood custodial staff sprayed after every home game; it smelled of stale, burnt diner coffee, damp horsehair padding, industrial-strength liniment oil, and the bitter, sharp tang of thirty men sweating out cheap lager from the night before.

I adjusted the strap of my black nylon duffel bag over my left shoulder, my third floating rib giving a tight, dull pull under my sweater as I took a deep breath. Beside me, Jax carried his heavy canvas kit bag effortlessly in one hand, his broad shoulders filling the narrow corridor.

"Not quite the varsity quad, is it?" Jax muttered, his gravelly voice echoing off the damp concrete.

"It smells real," I said softly, looking at the scuffed rubber matting beneath our boots. "That’s a start."

When I pushed open the double steel doors, the room fell into a sudden, awkward quiet.

There were no twenty-year-old kids in slate-gray Northwood blazers sitting on pristine pine benches. The stalls were occupied by grown men, twenty-eight, thirty, thirty-four-year-old veterans with thick, weathered necks, faded tattoos running up their forearms, and deep, jagged surgical scars crossing their knees. Half of them had missing front teeth; two of them were sitting on the low wooden benches in their undershirts, wrapping their ankles with thick black electrical tape while cold coffee steamed from paper cups between their feet.

Their eyes didn't hold the polite deference or academic curiosity I was used to from junior players. They looked up from their skates with cynical, unhurried, and razor-sharp appraisal.

They saw my clean, unscarred leather skate boots. They saw the neat, precise line of my dark hair, and the faint, pale pink line of surgical glue still visible on my left cheekbone. They knew exactly who I was before I even took off my coat. To them, I wasn't a national champion, I was a rich kid from a newspaper headline who had taken a shortcut into a room where men were fighting to pay their mortgages.

I walked to the two empty stalls at the far end of the room near the laundry bins, where our gear bags had been dumped on the concrete. My name, THORNE, was printed on a piece of white masking tape stuck to the wooden frame above stall thirty-two with a black permanent marker. Next to it was MILLER.

"Welcome to the show, kids," a voice called out from the center table.

An older winger with a thick graying beard and a heavy brace on his right wrist was sharpening a wooden stick with a pocket knife, letting the thin pine curls fall straight onto the floorboards. He didn't smile.

"Don't leave your phone on the bench," he added flatly, not looking up from his blade. "And if you bring any of those television cameras in here, I'll throw 'em straight into the whirlpool."

I set my duffel down on the wooden bench, my fingers cold as I unzipped the nylon cover. I didn't offer a polite speech, and I didn't try to introduce myself with my family name. I just sat down, pulled my skates out of the bag, and set them flat on the rubber matting, feeling the quiet, heavy weight of twenty-eight pairs of eyes watching my every move.

The heavy steel door at the front of the room swung open, and the team captain walked in.

He wasn't related to Jax, despite sharing the same last name. Big Vance "Mac" Miller was thirty-two years old, built like an iron safe, with a nose that had clearly been broken three or four times and healed sideways across his left cheek. He was wearing a grease-stained canvas jacket over a faded flannel shirt, carrying a stack of fresh white practice jerseys under his arm.

He didn't greet the room. He walked straight down the center aisle, his heavy work boots thudding against the rubber mat, and stopped right in front of stall thirty-two.

He looked down at me first, his small, dark eyes sweeping over my taped ribs, my posture, and my face. Then he shifted his gaze to Jax, taking in his split knuckles, his broad chest, and the quiet, immovable way he sat on the bench.

"You two the college boys?" Vance asked, his voice sounding like gravel churning in a cement mixer.

"Julian Thorne. Jaxom Miller," I replied, standing up to meet his eye level. I held out my hand.

Vance looked at my extended hand for two long seconds. He didn't shake it. Instead, he tossed the two practice jerseys onto my wooden bench with a heavy thud.

"Save the alumni manners for the press box, Thorne," Vance said flatly, his arms folding across his broad chest. "Out here, nobody gives a shit about your national championship ring. Nobody gives a shit about your father's company, and nobody gives a shit about the TV drama on center ice."

The locker room was completely silent now. The sound of tape being torn off rolls stopped. The pocket knife stopped scraping the wood.

"This isn't a four-year scholarship program," Vance continued, his voice dropping into a hard, cold line that cut straight through the room. "Every guy sitting in these stalls has a wife, a kid, or a mortgage waiting for 'em at home. We get paid twelve hundred dollars a month to win hockey games. If you play soft, if you dodge a check because your ribs hurt, or if you bring your high-society media circus into our locker room and cost us a win, you're taking food off my table."

He stepped six inches closer to me, his heavy chest nearly touching mine, his breath smelling of dark tobacco and peppermint.

"You want respect in this barn?" Vance growled. "You don't get it by signing autographs. You get it by taking a puck to the teeth on a Tuesday night in front of eight hundred people and getting back on the sheet for your next shift. You clear?"

I didn't flinch. I looked straight into his dark, bloodshot eyes, my jaw set into that same iron line that had carried me through the third period against Central State.

"We're here to play hockey, Vance," I said, my voice steady, low, and quiet. "Nothing else."

Vance stared at me for three long seconds. A subtle, almost imperceptible shift occurred in his expression, not approval, but a recognition that the boy standing in front of him wasn't going to break under a verbal dressing-down.

He turned his eyes to Jax. Jax met his stare with an unblinking, dark intensity that made Vance's jaw tighten slightly.

"Good," Vance muttered, stepping back toward the center table. "Practice is in twenty minutes. Equipment manager's got your socks. Don't be late."

He walked away without another word. Jax looked at me from his stall, a tiny, knowing smirk touching the corner of his lips.

"Warm welcome," Jax whispered.

"I prefer it," I replied, grabbing the practice jersey off the bench. "At least he's honest."

By six o'clock that evening, the tension of the locker room had given way to the quiet, absurd domesticity of our new apartment.

We had spent seventy-five dollars at a local discount warehouse near the river docks, coming away with a flat-packed wooden bed frame, a foam mattress tied down to the U-Haul bumper with orange straps, and two cheap paper lamps.

Now, the living room floor was covered in cardboard boxes, plastic bags of wooden dowels, long steel screws, and a single, horribly translated instruction sheet printed on thin yellow paper.

"It says 'Insert Bolt A into Bracket 4 before tightening Nut C,'" I said, sitting cross-legged on the bare oak floorboards with the instruction sheet in my lap. I was wearing an old t-shirt and sweatpants, my dark hair falling over my forehead. "Except there is no Bracket 4. There's a Bracket B, a Bracket D, and a small metal square with three holes."

Jax was kneeling on the floor beside the headboard, his bare, muscle-bound shoulders glistening with a light sheen of sweat as he held an Allen wrench between his thick, calloused fingers.

"Forget the paper, Jules," Jax grunted, turning a long screw into the pine frame with a sharp, rhythmic squeak-squeak-squeak. "It’s four corner posts and a center beam. It ain't rocket science."

"Jaxom, if we assemble this incorrectly, the entire frame is going to collapse the moment we lie down," I argued, though a small, involuntary laugh slipped out of my throat. "Look at this diagram. The picture of the bed appears to be upside down."

Jax stopped turning his wrench. He looked at the yellow paper in my hand, then looked at me, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners with that rare, brilliant warmth that always made my chest feel light.

"Give me that," he chuckled, reaching out to snatch the paper.

I pulled it back, dodging his hand, but my third rib gave a sudden, sharp pinch that made me wince, dropping the paper onto the floorboards.

Jax was on his feet in a second. He dropped the tool, stepped over the pine beams, and sank down onto his knees right beside me. His large, warm hands caught my waist, steadying me against his chest before I could slide back.

"Take it easy," Jax murmured, his voice soft, close to my ear. "You spent two hours taking heavy body checks from Vance’s defensive line today. You don't need to fight cheap furniture."

"I'm fine," I whispered, turning my face into the crook of his shoulder, inhaling the familiar scent of soap, clean sweat, and iron that belonged entirely to him. "It just caught me off guard."

"Sit still," Jax commanded softly, his thumb gently rubbing through the cotton of my sweater right over my ribs, sending a soothing, heavy warmth straight into the ache. "I'll finish the frame. You just tell me if it looks crooked."

I leaned my head against his neck, closing my eyes, listening to the quiet sound of his steady breathing echoing in the empty room.

An hour later, the bed was built. It sat against the far wall of the main bedroom, simple, clean, covered in a thick dark blue quilt we’d pulled out of my trunk.

I walked into the small closet off the hallway, holding a wooden hanger in my hand.

On it hung my new professional jersey.

It wasn't the pristine, heavy navy-and-gold wool of Northwood University, with its embroidered crest and silver-threaded trim. It was a simple, durable royal-blue polyester jersey with a thick white gear-wheel stitched across the chest, smelling faintly of synthetic dye and clean factory plastic.

I turned the hanger around to look at the back.

Stitched across the shoulders in plain, bold white block lettering was my name: THORNE. Below it was the white number 12.

There was no family legacy attached to this shirt. No trust fund had paid for the fabric; no alumni board had authorized my roster spot; and no corporate PR firm had vetted the press release. This jersey was mine. It was bought with thirty miles of morning sprints, a shattered plastic visor, a bloody cheek, and the brutal, unyielding decision to stand on center ice and choose my own life.

I ran my fingers over the raised, stitched edges of the white letters.

"Looks good on the wood," a low voice said behind me.

Jax walked into the narrow doorway of the closet. He had taken off his shirt, wearing only his dark athletic shorts, his broad chest showing the faint yellowing bruises from our postseason run.

He stepped up behind me, his chest pressing warm and solid against my back. His heavy arms came around my waist, wrapping gently over my stomach, his chin resting right in the curve where my shoulder met my neck.

I leaned back into him, resting my head against his shoulder, letting his weight hold me steady against the doorframe.

"No crest," I whispered, looking at the blue jersey hanging under the small closet bulb. "Just the name."

"Just you, Jules," Jax growled softly, his mouth pressing a quiet, lingering kiss against the side of my neck, right below my ear. "Just you and me."

I reached down, my long fingers weaving through his bare, calloused hands where they rested over my waist, holding his palms tight against my stomach.

Outside the apartment window, the dark waters of the river moved quietly past the industrial docks under the pale Midwest stars. In the distance, the low, mechanical hum of the city went on, unconcerned with the past, unbothered by high society, and wide open for whatever we were going to build next.

I closed my eyes, took a deep, clean breath that filled my lungs without pain, and smiled in the dark.

_______________________________________________________________________

A/N: Let me know all your thoughts in the comments! Like, subscribe and add to your library so you never miss an update!

See you in the next one!