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“I’m six feet tall,” she says, but it sounds like a question, the cadence of her voice lifting at the end of the phrase. Like maybe she wants to know how tall I am but doesn’t want to ask.
“My brother and I are six five,” I say.
“That’s it?” She raises one copper brow and for a moment I consider protesting that I am significantly taller than average, but it feels too damn good to smile with her.
“Can I have your number?” The words fall from my mouth before I mean them to. I wanted to ease into the request, ask when I knew she wouldn’t mind. Or at least wouldn’t be stuck sitting next to me for the next two periods if I made her uncomfortable.
She blinks her big green eyes as she studies me. Someday I will go to my grave convinced I can feel her gaze like a physical touch. She starts at my forehead and traces the lines of my nose, my mouth, my chin, my throat. I swallow reflexively, feeling the familiar weight of arousal sink into my groin. I like her, genuinely like her, and I’m attracted to her. Wildly so. Enough that I want to press my lips to hers, camera or no camera. Enough to want her naked, which means there’s something else I have to tell her.
“You can give me yours.” She pulls out her phone. “I’ll decide if you can have mine after the game.”
She is a goddess.
Fucking magnificent.
I rattle off my phone number and watched her type it in. She has long slender fingers tipped with short, rounded nails. Each one painted a different color, with tiny black lines along the top. I lean closer for a better look. Crayons. Each of her nails looks like a different crayon. A little rainbow as she taps the numbers on her phone’s screen. I bet everything she wears is bright and colorful. I bet her whole life is rainbow hued. I want to see her outside of the arena. In clothes that suit her personality, chosen from her own wardrobe. Not a borrowed jersey that fifteen thousand people are also wearing tonight.
Quinn slides her phone back into her pocket and my phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out and swallow hard at the little green bubble on the screen.
776-555-2368
Quinn Cooper, seat mate extraordinaire.
I bite the inside of my lower lip to stop from shouting in triumph.
“The game isn’t over,” I say. In fact, the second period is just about to start.
The clock on the Jumbotron hits zero, and the buzzer sounds as fans shuffle back to their seats. Vic skates onto the ice and takes his place for the face-off and the Center skates into the circle to wait for the ref to drop the puck. Ahlstrom is a solid player and I know Vic enjoys playing with the Swede, but sometimes seeing them work so cohesively rankles. It was always supposed to be us. Me and him and Robbie Oakes.
“Prove me right,” Quinn says, drawing my attention back to her, and I barely notice when The Arctic loses the face-off and the game gets back underway.
The teams trade the puck back and forth like a game of hot potato. Wayne Gretzky, hockey legend, once said “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Unfortunately for both teams on the ice, they seem completely confused about the puck’s travel plans. It’s as if they’re piling off the plane in Paris, Florida instead of Paris, France and wondering why they can’t find the Eiffel Tower. It’s painful to watch. One of the Arctic players dumps the puck down the ice and as both lines hurry after it, the linesman raises his arm and blows the whistle.
“Why’d the play stop?” Quinn asks and for the first time in a long time, I’m excited to share what I know. Happy to talk about the sport that dominated so much of my past that I vowed I’d keep it out of my future. Or at least a minimal part of my future. I can feel myself smiling, my shoulders pulling back as my chest puffs out. I try to squash both, sure that any amount of smugness will have her regretting the gift of her phone number.
“Both teams are playing sloppy. Johannes shot the puck towards the opposite goal as a stall tactic so the team could get their skates under them, but you aren’t allowed to do that—delay the game like that. Any time a team passes the puck from one side of the center line over the opposite goal line, and no one touches the puck, the linesman blows the whistle, and the offending team has to take a face-off in their defending zone.”
Both centers skate into position and the linesman drops the puck near the Arctic’s goal.
“So why do it?” Quinn asks as Ahlstrom wins the face-off and tips the puck to my brother.
Vic sends the puck to Johannes, their passes connecting with precision as the line swaps at the bench. Even from the second row, I can see the sweat pouring down the back of Vic’s neck. Stamina, I want to tell him. Sometimes those forty-five second shifts turn into a full minute or more and Vic never worked on his long game. Even years later, I remember the screaming agony in my muscles after too many long shifts on the ice. Agony only made better with conditioning. Then again, Vic has trainers and coaches now. It’s their job to prep him. Not mine.
“They needed a minute to reboot, and since the Arctic has won approximately eighty percent of the face-offs tonight, they deemed it a necessary risk.” I point to the crowd of players circling the opposition’s goal. There’s a scramble for possession and then the buzzer sounds as the Arctic increases their lead. It isn’t a pretty goal, but points are points.
Quinn doesn’t jump up when the rest of the fans do, but she claps and smiles as the announcer names Tyler Gage as the goal scorer.
“I probably should have paid more attention to all the games when my dad had them on.” She wraps her arms around her front and cups her elbows. Her shoulders curve in too, and I want to tease out why she’s caving inward, hiding herself. I want to understand. She seems to feel guilty, although I can’t figure out why. Does it have to do with her dad? If that’s the case, what are the odds that we’d end up sitting together? Two reluctant viewers with complicated families? Probably higher than I think. A lot of people have family guilt nipping at their heels.
“I bet he just enjoyed having you with him,” I say because it’s something most people have heard over and over and over again, but there’s also at least a morsel of truth to it.
“Maybe,” Quinn shrugs. “Is this therapist Erik coming out to play?”
I hadn’t meant to channel my professional side, more like my own personal experiences. I hadn’t even considered my background with Quinn. Most of my daily work isn’t with support systems, but with the patients themselves. With the teenagers I see, we work on worrying less about other people, since they’re outside their control, so they can focus on their own healing and fight.
Empathy is a wonderful thing to have, but putting yourself first is necessary. That’s something a lot of oncology patients forget. Especially kids. They forget they aren’t fighting for their mom, or dad, or grandma, or siblings. They aren’t surviving to spare the people in their lives some type of heartache. They’re fighting and healing and doing what they can for themselves.
“I’d prefer not to think of you as my client,” I say instead.
