I get out of the way exactly in time and smack my palm flat on the hood as it passes, because the psychopath was genuinely going to flatten me.
The SUV stops.
The door opens. She looks out at me, like she’s confirming a minor inconvenience.
“Oh.” A pause. “It’s just you.”
She pulls the door shut and keeps driving.
I stand in the road, gasping at the sky.
Where. Is. The human decency.
Where do these people learn this sort of behavior? I watch her glide three doors down from mine, slide into her garage, and drop the door before her taillights have even gone dark.
Oh, Aspen Linwood.
You have no idea what you just started.
Chapter 2
Aspen
“Dad, why do you care so much? You’re not even the one signing him.”
I say it with the phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder, because both my hands are full. I already know the answer, which is what irritates me. I don’t ask questions I don’t know the answers to, but I asked that one anyway, just to hear how thin it sounds out loud.
And the boy in question nearly went under my front bumper ninety seconds ago, in the middle of Hawthorne Street, barefoot, screaming. So I’d argue my point stands.
I step around the car door, push it shut with my hip, and let the garage door close behind me. The house is quiet and cold, the way I like it. Kirra’s at the kitchen island with a bowl of salad, and she opens her mouth the second I clear the doorway. I lift one finger. One minute. I smile so she knows I’m not being a bitch, and she goes back to her lettuce.
“You should know this, Aspen,” my father is saying, in the patient tone he uses when he’s about to explain hockey to melike I haven’t been breathing it since before I could walk. “Just because Stanley’s been drafted somewhere else doesn’t mean he stays there. Entry-level deal runs out. Free agency. A trade. Anything can happen, and I’m playing the long game. The investment comes back. And if you play your cards right, you could be the one representing him one day.”
The word represent lands in my stomach and curdles there.
Stanley Ermington. Across a table from me. On purpose. For years. There is no version of my life that includesthat. I don’t want anything to do with the Ermingtons, and I never have. His mother is always laughing, always — like nothing in her whole existence has ever been taken seriously. His father is arrogant in a tailored coat, old money with no filter and no shame about either. And Stanley is, as far as I can tell, a beautifully engineered delivery system for a slap shot and nothing else. There’s no prefrontal cortex in his head. There’s a rink, a puck, and an audience. The lights come on, and the boy turns into a god, and the second they switch off, there’s just a kid skating around with his arms open like he’s five years old doing the airplane for an empty building.
I know exactly what he looks like at practice. I’ve seen it more than I’d like.
“Okay, Dad. I just got home.” I set my flask down on the counter. “I have to get ready, I’m leaving in thirty. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Send me the report. And thank you for taking the time. It means a lot to me.”
I blink at the cabinet.
He doesn’t say that part often. It means a lot to me. It’s nothing — a courtesy, the kind of line he’d say to an assistant coach — but it makes me feel uneasy anyway.
“Yeah. No problem, Dad. I love you.”
“I love you too, Aspen. Have a good day.”
“You too.”
“Buh-bye.”
“Bye.”
I end the call and look up. Kirra is mid-bite with a piece of lettuce and a smear of dressing on her lip, staring at me.
