“I live three doors down, princess. Technically, we’re neighbors. This is a neighborly visit.”
“Don’t call me that.” She keeps the same face on. “Go home.”
“Did you have a productive evening, Linwood?”
Her face does the smallest thing in the world — a flicker, a freeze, a recalculation — does he know, he can’t know, there’s no way he knows — and then I watch her decide that there’s no way I could possibly know and lock it all back down behind the thermostat.
She steps back inside and shuts the door without another word.
I stand in her yard and grin at the closed door, because at the end of the day, grinning at things is the only sport I’ve never lost at.
She thinks she got away with it.
She thinks the stick is hers now.
I walk up to the side door and knock.
Chapter 6
Aspen
I lock the side door, and I exhale. He saw the stick.
I bolt down the hall in my socks, into my room, and his hockey stick is leaning right where I left it by the window — his,Ermington, the gamer, the trophy of my one good decision all night. I grab it, and I run. Back down the hall. Through the kitchen. Through the laundry. Through the inside door into the cold of the garage, where I pop the back of the SUV and slide the stick flat across the cargo floor, under the parcel shelf, gone. I close the hatch softly. I close the garage door. I come back inside, and I lock that too.
A soft knock at the side door catches my attention.
No.
I stand in my own kitchen with my heart going, and I think about not answering. For exactly one second, I think about it. Then I open the door, because some stubborn part of me will not let him think I’m afraid of him.
He’s there with a glint in his eyes. His hood down now, cheeks pink from the cold, grinning like he knows.
“I told you to go home.”
He smiles wider, and he walks straight past me into my house.
Did this man just walk into my home — at eleven thirty at night — like it’s an amenity he’s entitled to — while my roommates are asleep upstairs?
I’m after him in a second, hand on his arm, trying to physically turn him around and steer him back out the door I’m holding open.
He doesn’t turn.
It’s like shoving a parked truck. He’s six-foot-four, and entirely unbothered by my hand on his sleeve. As I get in close enough to put real weight into it, I catch the smell of him, and that’s the thing that stops me dead.
He reeks of a party I wasn’t invited to. He reeks of confidence I wasn’t issued at birth. He reeks of a man who has never, not once, been told no. But underneath it, I smell the beer, and the cold air carried on his skin. I smell his soap, and underneath the soap, something clean and green, like pine.No, cucumbers. I have known of Stanley Ermington my entire life, and I have never once been close enough to smell him. I yank my hand off his arm like it burned me.
This is too close.
I understand with total clarity that my problem with Stanley Ermington isn’t just the airplane, or the stick, or the glass. It’s everything. It’s the whole of him. It’s that he gets to be like this.
“Get the hell out, Ermington,” I hiss, low as I can. “My roommates are sleeping.”
“Why are they asleep?” He doesn’t bother to lower his voice. If anything, he nudges it up, just to watch me wince. “It’s barely midnight. What kind of house is this?”
“Lower your voice.”
“Make me.”
