Then the reality of what we’re doing has real teeth. He isn’t mine. This was all built on a lie. And now we’re just confused.
I step back, and my hands are still shaking, but it’s not anger anymore.
It’s fear.
Because the anger had somewhere to live — anger I could aim, anger I could walk off — and this has nowhere to go at all. Because I just lost the last argument I had left, the deniability’s in pieces on the sidewalk, and there is not one single thing left in the entire world for me to hide behind, and the man standing in front of me in the cold with his mask gone knows every bit of it.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
He doesn’t move. “Can’t what.”
And that’s the whole problem, standing right there in three words, because I don’t have an answer for him.
I can’t say can’t want you, because that ship has visibly, humiliatingly sailed. I can’t say can’t do this, because I just did, twice, and the second time I did it with no pressure at all. And I can’t say the real one because the real one is I can’t survive being wrong about you, and I am not going to stand on a dark street and explain to Stanley Ermington that the last time I let a hockey player all the way in, I spent a week alone in my bedroom with a question I couldn’t ask out loud, learning in real time exactly how disposable I was to a man who’d promised me I wasn’t. I am not going to tell him that the thing I’m actually afraid of isn’t wanting him. It’s wanting him and being right back in thatbedroom a year from now, learning the same lesson a second time, except this one I wouldn’t survive, because this one I’d have chosen with my eyes open.
So I just look at him one more second, standing there in the cold with no coat and no mask and the truth still hanging in the air between us where neither of us can pretend it isn’t, and then I turn and walk the three doors home with my heart going like a snare drum and absolutely nowhere left to put a single piece of any of it.
I don’t look back.
I can feel him still standing there the whole way home.
Chapter 27
Stanley
She walks towards her house, and this time, I let her.
That’s the whole act of heroism I’ve got in me tonight, standing on my own front walk in no coat, the cold I stopped feeling ten minutes ago crawling back into me, the party a dull thud behind the door. I let her go.
I have spent my entire life able to see a play before it develops. I read the gap two seconds before it opens; I know where the puck’s going before the guy holding it does. It’s the one thing I have never once had to work at. And I’m standing on this sidewalk completely unable to read the simplest sequence anyone has ever handed me, because the two facts I’ve got refuse to live in the same sentence. She kissed me back. Both hands on me, no camera, no chant, nobody for a hundred feet. She kissed me back like she meant it down to the foundations. And then she said I can’t and left like I’d hurt her. Both of those are true. They cannot both be true. I run it again and they’re still both true. There’s no gap to skate into, no read to make — just twofacts grinding against each other and a girl getting smaller down a dark street.
Everything in me says go. Go after her, fix it, fill the silence, that’s the move, that’s always the move — forward, toward, talk. I take half a step off the walk.
And I stop.
Because I already chased her once tonight. Out the door, into the cold, and I told her the truth and got a real kiss back for it, and it still wasn’t enough. And a guy doesn’t get to do that twice in one night. Going again wouldn’t be for her. Going again would be for me. It’d be me needing her to take the I can’t back so I can feel all right walking back into my own house, and she does not owe me that. So I do the single hardest thing a man built like me has ever been asked to do, which is stand completely still and let a thing I want walk away without chasing it.
It costs more than the kiss did. By a distance.
I watch her door open and step inside.
Then it’s just me out here in the cold and a party I have to walk back into.
When I finally walk back in, the party is still going. Mara and Gianna are dancing. I don’t know how to deal with what just happened, so I fall into a two-step with the girls and sing the lyrics to the song.
Gianna leans over and asks, “Where did your girlfriend go?”
Gianna’s the only one in this house I still have to sell it to, so I give her the easy answer. “She went home.”
She pulls out her phone and taps a few buttons. Aspen and I pop up on the screen, lip-locked. “You guys are so cute! Look at you two.” She shoves her phone back in her pocket. “You need to bring her around more.”
Mara leans in and says, “She’s the biggest hockey nerd. She was naming every move you guys were doing at the game tonight. It was like watching it on TV.”
I smile at that. The girls return to dancing, and I need some air.
Benson is in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water.
“I don’t know, Stan,” he says, watching me. “That looked real from where I was standing.”
