Page 49 of Hooked On Them

“Easy? Are you fucking kidding me?” I tried to sidestep Miles, but he was too good at defense even off the ice. “You bought the team to what? Control her? To force her to be with you? That’s some next-level stalker shit, Campbell.”

Carter didn’t even flinch. “I bought in to protect her and to make sure she doesn’t lose her job over this situation.”

“How noble of you,” I spat. “A real fucking hero.”

“Look, I didn’t know about this whole...” He gestured between me and Miles. “Whatever this deception is that you two cooked up.”

Miles stepped forward again, positioning himself between us like a tired parent separating two bickering children. “Can we all just take a breath? We’re not getting anywhere like this.”

I ignored him, my focus tunneling until Carter’s smug face was all I could see. His carefully calculated expression of concern made my fingers twitch, and I clenched my fists. “And now what? You think buying into the team gives you the right to show up and judge what we’re doing?”

“I think it gives me the right to care.” Carter’s tone of voice was flat, like we were discussing the weather instead of my entire life imploding. “You might have bailed on her, but I didn’t.”

That was it. The match that lit the powder keg of everything I’d been suppressing, and my vision went red.

“You don’t get to throw that in my face.” My voice cracked under the pressure of what was happening. “You don’t get to pretend you’re some fucking savior because you didn’t run.” My hands were shaking, and I shoved them in my pockets before anyone could notice.

Carter’s perfect mask of composure wavered slightly, revealing something raw underneath. “Then why did you?”

Silence. That awful, heavy kind that made everything too loud.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. How could I explain what I barely understood myself?

Miles finally spoke, his voice quieter than before, gentle in a way that made me feel pathetically transparent. “Dom...”

“I ran because I was scared, okay? Because I’m a screwup. Because I already know what kind of father I’d be, and it’s not the good kind.”

I sat down in a chair and slumped forward, elbows on my knees, the admission hanging in the air like a bad smell. The silence that followed was almost worse than the angry voices.

My apartment suddenly felt too small for three grown men standing around like emotionally constipated toddlers, none of us knowing what the hell to say next.

Carter stood there, his perfect suit suddenly looking less like armor and more like a costume. His eyes darted to the window, his jaw working like he was chewing on words he couldn’t quite swallow. For once, the golden boy looked completely out of his element.

Miles leaned against my kitchen counter, arms crossed, watching us both like he was trying to decode some complex play on the ice.

I needed to break the silence before it suffocated me. “I fucked up, I know that. But showing up with your wallet and buying into the team? What the hell were you thinking?”

Carter didn’t immediately respond. His shoulders dropped a fraction, the smallest surrender I’d ever seen from him. “I don’t know. I wanted to help, and that’s how I’ve always solved problems.”

“By throwing money at them?”

“Yeah.” He looked at me directly. “It’s what I know how to do.”

The honesty caught me off guard. I’d expected him to double down, to come at me with some self-righteous speech about how much better he’d be for Nora. Instead, he looked lost.

“I’ve never done this before.” Carter gestured vaguely between us. “Any of it. I don’t know how to be with someone who doesn’t want me to fix everything. I don’t know how to be a potential father figure. I don’t even know if I belong here, but I know I can’t walk away either. Well, unless Nora asks me to.”

My chest tightened with a feeling I didn’t want to examine too closely. Something uncomfortably like recognition. “I don’t plan on walking away either.”

Carter sank down onto my couch, his usual grace abandoned. “She doesn’t need both of us making everything harder.”

I snorted. “Or all three of us.” I glanced toward Miles, who’d been quietly watching this whole exchange.

Miles shook his head. “Don’t look at me. I’m the fake boyfriend caught between you two emotional disasters.” The way his eyes darted away from me told a different story, but now wasn’t the time to ask him about it.

Under any other circumstance, I might have laughed. Instead, I stared at the floor, tracing the grain of the hardwood with my eyes.

“She’s the one who matters in all this,” Carter said after a moment. “Whatever happens... it has to be what’s best for her. And the baby.”

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