Chapter 5 Regret.

Cole's POV

Damn.

What the hell did I just agree to?

Everyone had filed out of the office…Coach, Miss Patterson, Tom…and somehow I was still standing there like an idiot, my phone buzzing nonstop in my pocket, my arm still warm where it had been around Grant's shoulders five minutes ago.

She sat across the room, her back straight and her eyes fixed on her phone screen like I'd ceased to exist the moment Coach walked out the door.

I watched her for a second longer than I should have. She was still angry, obviously. The girl looked like she wanted to set the building on fire and watch it burn from a safe distance, with me inside it.

I almost laughed, almost.

Then my brain, unhelpfully, dragged me back two weeks.

It had been a terrible day for me. You know, the kind where everything stacks up at once and then you stop being able to tell which thing is actually wrong because all of it is wrong.

That morning I'd gotten off the phone with a scout from the Wild. It had been a torturous fifteen minutes of him asking careful, polite questions that all boiled down to are you going to be a problem? Then Victor, my best friend, sent me some breakup stories about me and Jana, written by a very sick demented wannabe journalist girl, which meant I found out my own relationship was over from a caption with a crying emoji.

How this bitch, got to know that Jana and I were having a rocky relationship, I don't know but the next thing was Jana hurling insults at me and ending our two years relationship without so much as giving me a chance to explain myself.

Then my dad called. He never called during the day. He called to tell me Grandpa wasn't doing well and then hung up before I could ask anything else.

I was not thinking about where I was walking. I was thinking about all three of those things stacked on top of each other, crushing the air out of my chest, and I came around that stairwell corner at a dead run because running was the only thing that made the noise in my head go quiet for a few seconds.

I hit her before I even saw her. It wasn't intentional at all. I didn't even know it was the journalist girl. If not I'd have tried my damnedest to stay away from her.

I heard the camera before I felt the impact, that specific crunch of something expensive breaking against concrete, and for half a second… For half a second, I actually felt sick about it. Then I looked up and my guys were already laughing from the top of the stairs, already making it a joke, and something in me just…shut the door. I didn't apologize because the second I opened my mouth I was going to have to feel something, and I didn't have room for one more thing that day.

So I said something stupid about glasses instead, and she threw her bag at me.

I deserved it. I knew I deserved it even then, standing there with my teammates howling behind me, and I still didn't say sorry. My pride wouldn't let me say it in front of them. It was easier to walk away and let her think I was just another arrogant hockey guy who didn't care.

Looking back now, sitting in this office two weeks later because of that exact moment, I probably should've just said sorry and gotten this person out of my life.

But that didn't change what I knew about her. Grant was exactly the kind of person I'd spent years learning to avoid. Ambitious, ruthless, the type who could smile while digging through someone's life for a headline. Whether she meant to or not, her name kept showing up beside every disaster currently wrecking mine.

Maybe the article really was an editorial mistake. Maybe it wasn't.

Right now I wasn't sure I cared.

People like that didn't care who they stepped on. She'd probably go home tonight and write all of this down somewhere, turn my worst week into her best byline.

Could she?

Could she do that? Or is that what she's doing now? Scheming what to write down to get her name ahead?

That girl had better not try me. God knows I don't give a fuck what the coach or Tom or that peace loving Miss Patterson said, I would….

Something hit the side of my head.

"What the…"

A hardcover textbook hit the floor next to my chair and bounced once before settling.

I turned but Grant didn't even look up from her bag, slinging it over her shoulder like she hadn't just attempted assault with a copy of Intro to Media Law.

"Are you insane?"

"Locking up the office."

She nodded at the desk lamp, still on, like that explained throwing a four-pound book at my skull.

"Lights go off in two minutes whether you're standing in the doorway or not."

"You could've fucking used words."

"I considered it."

"And went with blunt force trauma instead."

"Worked, didn't it." She zipped her bag and headed for the door without looking at me once.

I should've let her go. I had every reason to let her go but I didn't.

"Hold on."

I caught up to her in two strides.

"How exactly am I supposed to find you before the press conference? Coach said together. As in, we arrive together. As in I can't show up alone and you can't show up alone."

She stopped in the doorway just long enough to look at me like I'd asked her to donate a kidney.

"That's not my problem."

"It's literally your problem. It's both our problem. That's the whole point of this nightmare."

"Then I guess you'd better figure it out, Rayner."

And she was gone, locs swinging, already three strides down the hallway before I'd finished the sentence. I stood there for exactly one second and then I went after her. Not because I wanted to, God knows if there was anything I wanted more in this life, it was to stay away from this trouble. But Coach Tucker's voice was still in my head… one bad narrative and you're not first-round material anymore, and somewhere underneath the part of me that wanted to let her walk straight off campus and never see her again, there was a part of me that was genuinely, quietly terrified of what happened if this fell apart in the next two hours.

"Grant." I caught up to her by the stairwell, the same stairwell, which felt like a joke the universe was playing specifically on me. "Grant, wait. We have to actually do this."

"I know what we have to do." She didn't slow down. "I was in the room."

"Then walk slower."

"Don't tell me what to do. You walk faster."

I matched her pace down two flights of stairs, through the lobby, out into the cold, neither of us saying anything else because there wasn't anything else to say that wouldn't turn into another fight, and we'd already used up our fighting budget for the day.

The media building came into view at the end of the quad, and my stomach dropped the way it used to before a game I knew I wasn't ready for.

"Two hours felt like a lot less two hours ago," I muttered.

"Welcome to my entire morning."

We didn't talk after that. We just walked, side by side, not touching, both of us staring straight ahead like the building might disappear if we looked at it directly.

The doors opened and the room hit me like a wall of light. Reporters turned. A dozen heads at once, then more. Cameras came up in a wave, shutters going off so fast they blurred into one continuous sound. Every single person in that room looked at us like we were the only two people who existed.

And before I could say a single word, before I could even fully process that this was happening, Grant's fingers closed around mine. Not soft or gentle, but a grip, so tight and deliberate, the kind you use when you're holding onto something so it doesn't fall.

She wasn't doing it because she wanted to. She was doing it because she understood exactly what was riding on the next ten seconds, same as I did.

The cameras went off like gunfire.

"Smile," she muttered through her teeth, lips barely moving. "I hate you."

I smiled anyway.

"The feeling's mutual.”