Gianna beams. “You’re coming to Hawthorne after, right?”
I look at Lucy. Lucy appears just as nervous as I am with these questions.
“Yeah,” I say automatically. “Of course.”
“Let’s go together,” Gianna says.
I smile. “Yeah, okay. I’ll see you guys tonight.”
After, I drive home with the lunch sitting warm in my chest and a crack running clean through the middle of the warmth.
I went in braced for a courtesy, and I came out with the worst possible result, which is that I loved it, and I loved them. And now I’m going to have to play the role of Stanley’s girlfriend in front of another crowd tonight.
When I get home, I look three doors down and wonder if I just made another mistake.
Chapter 25
Stanley
I’m having the kind of night where the puck keeps finding me like a magnet. The arena’s full and loud and on its feet half the period. I’m down on the bench between whistles with a captive audience of men who legally cannot leave, which is, for the record, my single favorite set of circumstances on this earth.
So naturally, I start in on Blue.
There’s a TV timeout — the refs are standing around, the whole building has nothing to do for ninety seconds — and ninety seconds of dead air on a bench next to me is not a thing I’m capable of letting pass.
“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” I say, to nobody, to everybody, leaning both arms on the boards.
“No.” Blue, two spots down, already bracing. “No, I don’t, and I don’t want to.”
“The puck.”
“Sterm.”
“The puck. Blue’s puck. The most romantic play in the recorded history of Blue’s career.”
“I will climb over Rowan and end you.”
“Gather round, gentlemen.” I’m doing the nature-documentary voice, the one that makes Rowan put his head down because he knows it’s over for all of us. “Here we observe the lesser-spotted Blue, in mating season, having determined that the surest path to the heart of one Melly — a woman of taste, a woman frankly out of his weight class — is to take a puck and flip it over the glass into the stands, like she’s a sea lion at the eleven o’clock show.”
“It worked,” Blue says, clipped.
“It worked,” I agree, “which is the most upsetting part. We’re going to have to study that. Scientists will want that data.” I turn to the real culprit. “And who scripted it? Who stood in our kitchen and drew the play up on the whiteboard like it was a power-play breakout? Who told this man, with a straight face, give her the puck, Blue, girls love a puck?”
Down the bench, Benson doesn’t even look over. “I stand by the puck.”
“He stands by the puck!” I throw a glove hand at the heavens. “Reeve, you’re not a captain, you’re a matchmaker. You should have a little cart. You should wear a sash.”
“You done?”
“I’m never done. I’m going to be doing the puck at your wedding. I’m going to stand up, glass of champagne, it started, as these things do, with a puck and a man with no shame—”
“Who’s that,” Blue says, “sitting next to my girlfriend?”
Whatever he’s getting at –– he’s just trying to get back at me. I know Blue. He hates when I roust him.
I, happily, follow his eyeline up. The family section. Where the girlfriends sit, and the assorted people who belong to us.
Melly. Then Gianna, Benson’s sister, mid-story, hands going. Then Lucy on the end.
