behind the camera - fake dating sports romance (wlw)

Chapter Twenty-Six

HARPER

The hospital is chaos. A zoo of flashing cameras, murmured names, security badges, and clipped voices speaking too fast and too loud. It's a blur of suits and lanyards and people who've never even watched a game until Millie was carted off the ice unconscious. Reporters. Executives. Fans wearing her number like it gives them access to her pain.

It makes me feel sick.

The worst part is—none of them are here for her. Not really. They're here for the story, the headlines, the drama. The moment she opens her eyes, someone will already have the quote ready. Someone else will have a camera pointed at her face. Her team already released a statement—an update—before she even knew where she was. They're planning her recovery like she's a fucking machine. Like she doesn't get a say in her own body.

And not a single one of them mentioned the girl who hit her.

Not the fact that Millie's helmet flew off on impact. Not that she lay motionless on the ice, her head twisted at an angle that haunts me every time I close my eyes. Not that Toronto kept playing like nothing had happened. Not that she skated away without a penalty, without consequence, without looking back.

No.

Millie's the one under scrutiny. As if she asked for it. As if her being injured is somehow more disappointing than the brutal hit that caused it.

Jesus. She almost died. And people are mad because she won't finish the season.

I don't know how Luna managed to keep the room private, but somehow she did.
She stormed down this hospital like a hurricane in a jacket, and whatever fire she threw at the suits must've worked, because the room is finally—mercifully—quiet. Just a soft beeping from the monitors, the sterile hum of fluorescent lights.

Millie's sitting upright in the hospital bed, wrapped in pale blue blankets that don't match her skin tone at all. There's a thin bruise blooming along her temple, like spilled ink, and a gauze patch pressed to the back of her head. Her waves are flattened on one side, a little matted where they had to clean the blood. I try not to stare.

She's wearing headphones, the oversized kind that look like they were stolen from a studio. I think Mia brought them.
Her eyes are open, unfocused, staring somewhere over the window.

I stand just inside the door and feel like I'm trespassing.

She doesn't see me right away. And I'm not sure I want her to—not until I get my breathing under control, not until the pounding in my chest stops sounding like an alarm. I feel like I'm about to cry again, and I already used that card in the waiting room. I can't fall apart now.

Millie sighs softly—more breath than sound—and slowly peels her headphones off, letting them rest around her neck. Her eyes flick toward me, and even now, bruised and pale under hospital lights, she manages a half-smirk. "Taking a picture might last longer, Harps," she says, her voice low and rasped, like it's been dragged across gravel.

It's hoarser than usual, rough from the tube they must've put down her throat or whatever sedatives they gave her, but it's hers. That voice I know too well—sharp, teasing, edged with something soft she only ever shows me.

It cracks something open in me.

I haven't smiled in hours—not since she collapsed, not since I saw her body go limp on the ice like someone had stolen her bones right out of her. But now, my lips tug upward before I can stop them. It's small, and shaky, but it's real.

I walk toward her like I'm wading through knee-deep water—slow and uncertain, every step a question I don't know if I'm allowed to ask. She doesn't look away. She just watches me, letting me come to her on my own time, like she knows I need it.