"Depends.
His eyes narrowed. "On what?"
"On whether you'd be annoyed if I showed up."
For a second, he just stared at me. A few seconds later, he gave it to me. I committed it to memory immediately. The moment he finished speaking, I was already reaching for my keys.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
I stood. A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth.
"I'll tell you when I get there."
TWELVE
KIERAN
The second the video call ended, I stared at my phone like it had personally betrayed me.
A moment ago, Thane Hale had been sitting in his team's arena after a professional hockey game. Now he was apparently on his way to my apartment. The transition between those two facts felt alarmingly short.
"Well," I said to the empty room, "this seems like a terrible decision."
The apartment offered no opinion. Unfortunately, my brain had plenty.
Why had I given him my address?
Why was there a sweatshirt hanging over the arm of the couch like it paid rent?
Why had I spent the last two days checking hockey scores like I suddenly understood hockey?
I didn't understand hockey. Not really. I'd watched Seattle's game that night because Thane was playing, and most of the rules still made absolutely no sense to me. Men skated up and down the ice at alarming speeds. Whistles happened for reasonsnobody bothered to explain. Every so often, somebody got sent somewhere called the penalty box.
The only part I consistently understood was when Seattle scored.
And Thane.
I always knew where Thane was.
Every time he touched the puck, I found myself paying attention. Every time another player slammed into him along the boards, my stomach dropped. At one point, he'd ended up tangled with two Vancouver players near the net, and I'd actually stood up from the couch before realizing how ridiculous that was. He was a professional athlete. Getting hit by large men on skates was apparently part of the job description.
That hadn't stopped me from worrying anyway.
Most importantly, why had I somehow forgotten that professional athletes occasionally existed in physical spaces and could therefore show up when they said they would?
I pushed myself off the couch and turned slowly in a circle.
The apartment immediately looked different.
Five minutes ago, it had looked perfectly normal. It wasn't fancy, but it was clean. The furniture matched in the loose, optimistic way that came from buying things secondhand and hoping nobody noticed. The bookshelf was overloaded. The kitchen was small. The couch had seen better decades.
Now it looked like a crime scene.
Not an actual crime scene.
A student-housing crime scene.
The kind investigators might enter before concluding that the victim had been murdered by an aggressively limited budget.
