“No.”
Neither of us moves, and the room goes very quiet. The whisper-fight that’s been carrying us collapses into a silence that’s so much worse, because now there’s nothing to fill the space between us.
I can smell him again — cucumber and beer — and he’s not grinning now. My stomach turns over because I have years of hating the grin, so without him wearing it, I have none. He’s looking at me like I’m something he’s reading, eyes moving over my face, slow, unhurried, taking his time. I stare straight back, not dropping my eyes, or giving him one inch of defeat. Even as my chest pulls tight and some traitor part of me wants very badly to know what’s going on behind that face.
His gaze travels down, and I think, distinctly, I would give anything to throat-punch you right now.
His lips part. He blinks, slow. His eyes come back up to mine, and the strain is right there in them, the same strain I can feel in my own jaw, and for one unbearable second, I have no idea what he’s going to do.
He doesn’t push to open the closet. He could. He’s twice my size and full of drink, and he’s spent the whole night doing exactly what he wants. I’m braced for it, expecting it, because he barged into my house without permission. He takes one step back instead and gives me the closet. Relief and confusion land in me at exactly the same time.
“Fine.” He smirks, but it’s slower than his usual. “Keep it for tonight. We’ll come back to it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He watches me for a second. “Okay. Stubborn as always, princess.”
“Stop calling me that.”
My phone lights up on the desk.
We both look. The screen’s facing up, and the name on it is enormous in the dark room.
Dad.
“Daddy checking in?” Stanley says, and there’s something underneath the tease this time I can’t quite catch.
I get to it before he can read the preview, flip it face down, and I feel my face go hot — not because he saw the name, but because I know exactly what that text is going to say, I know it’s going to be about him, about the game, about the report.
“You need to leave,” I say. “Now.”
And that’s when Bree appears in the hall.
She’s in pajamas, hair flat on one side, squinting, drawn down by the noise. “Aspen? You okay, what’s going—”
She sees Stanley Ermington standing in the middle of my bedroom at midnight, and her eyebrows climb all the way up. She looks at me, and it is a long look, a we are absolutely talking about this in the morning look, and I will be answering for it over coffee whether I want to or not.
“I’m fine,” I tell her, too fast. “He’s leaving.”
Bree’s eyes flick once more between us, and she retreats back down the hall.
In those two seconds when I was distracted by Bree, he drifted to my desk that sits right under the window, where I work, where I do my homework. He’s looking at the photo frame of my dad.
He doesn’t ask. He just lifts it and looks.
My father. Twenty-five years old, soaked, mid-roar, the Stanley Cup hoisted over his head in both fists, the best night of his entire life caught and framed and sitting on his daughter’s desk all these years later.
Stanley goes still as he stares at it. The room is dead quiet. I’m watching the side of his face, and I genuinely cannot read what’s moving through it. That frightens me more than anything else has all night, because I can always read people, it’s the only thing I’m good at.
Then he sets the frame back the way it was. And he doesn’t say one word about it.
He doesn’t make a joke about my dad. He doesn’t make a joke about his dad. He doesn’t say I’m named after that, you know, or my old man’s got one too, or any of the dozen easy things sitting right there for the taking. He just sets it down and walks past me, out of my room, down the hall. It’s dead silent now, all the noise gone out of him.
I hear the side door open. I hear it close.
I stand frozen in my own bedroom with my heart slamming against my ribs, staring at the photo of my father on my desk, and I have absolutely no idea what just happened in this room.
I make myself walk over to the desk. I tilt my head and look out the window at the angle where you can just catch the road. Stanley’s out there. Hood up, hands in his pockets, walking the sidewalk back toward his house.
