“How was it?”
I lean against the doorway. She’s looking at me from the couch with her face bare and her eyes bright, and she’s drowning in my sweatshirt, and I want to sit down next to her and not move for the rest of the night. I want to put my head on hershoulder and close my eyes and let the sound of her breathing be the last thing I hear before I fall asleep.
I sit in the chair across the room instead. “She was nice,” I say.
“Nice?” Sydney tilts her head. “Just nice?”
“She was smart. Funny. She, uh—she does dermatology.”
“You said that already.”
“Right.”
Sydney mutes the TV. She’s watching me now with her full attention, which is worse than the date. “Are you going to see her again?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
Because she’s not you. I shove the thought away. I would never want to ruin what we have by rebounding through Syd. Never. I couldn’t live with myself.
“It just wasn’t—” I wave my hand. “It wasn’t there.”
“What wasn’t?”
The cooking show plays on mute—the soufflé has collapsed and the chef is standing over it with his hands on his head—and the silence between us is louder than anything on that screen.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m going to bed. Goodnight, Syd.”
“Night, Arch.”
I go upstairs, brush my teeth, and get into bed.
Ollie finds me at the water cooler before Monday practice, and I already know what’s coming from the look on his face.
“So how was the date?”
“It was fine. She was great.”
“Apparently Keri thought you were distant.” He fills his water bottle without looking at me. “She said you checked your phone under the table four times.”
“It was three times, and I wasn’t being distant. I was just—it wasn’t there, Ollie. She’s a nice person, and it wasn’t there. The spark or whatever.”
He sets the bottle down and turns to face me. “I set you up with a beautiful, smart, funny woman with her own career, and you came home at nine-thirty and said she was nice. That doesn’t concern you?”
“What do you want me to say?”
I pick up my stick and head for the ice, but he calls after me: “You gotta move on sometime, bud.”
I skate hard, stop every shot, and play the way I always play when my head is a mess—locked in, channeling everything into the crease because that’s the one place where I know exactly who I am and what I’m supposed to do.
After practice, I sit in my stall and check my phone. Sydney’s sent a photo of Luke at the kitchen table with his shark book open and a glittery star sticker on the center of his forehead that he clearly doesn’t know about. Lily is in the background with her hands over her mouth, vibrating with silent laughter.
Sydney:Lily put a sticker on Luke’s forehead while he was reading. He hasn’t noticed yet. Do I tell him?
I stare at the photo for a while, at my son’s serious face and the ridiculous sticker and my daughter’s glee, and I type back:Don’t you dare tell him.
She sends three laughing emojis, and I feel more from those three emojis than I felt during two hours of candlelit dinner with a woman who did absolutely nothing wrong.
