My hand still purple from Mason’s mouth, I’d laid it all out for him — the post, Murphy’s, the harm Mason was causing — and after Mason’s suspension was confirmed, I’d followed up by getting the guys to help clean up the gossip.
It was logical and clean.
Except I went to her door last.
Handled.That’s the word she used. Nothelped.
I can’t forget her face when I told her I’d gone to Franklin. Not angry. Still. The stillness of someone watching the thing she’d spent a year dreading hit her from an angle she didn’t expect. Then she’d told me she loved me but that loving me hurt too much.
And she closed the door in my face.
The hit comes clean. A Lakehurst State D-man reads my lane along the boards and closes hard and drops his shoulder into my chest, and I go into the glass. I’ve taken this hit five hundred times, but usually I’m paying attention, not engaged in self-loathing.
I hit the deck and I don’t get up.
Nothing’s broken. I know broken, and this isn’t it. My shoulder is fine. My ribs are fine. My head is fine. But I don’t get up, not right away, because my body has finally decided the thing my brain’s been talking over for months.
There’s nothing left — you poured all of it into everyone else and never once put anything back, and the tank is empty.
A ref glides over. “You alright, son?”
I think, very clearly, that I could just stay here, but then I nod and get up.
Because the captain gets up, and for now that will have to be enough. So I skate to the bench with my face neutral so the rest of them believe it’s nothing, but the guys can clearly feel it, because nobody chirps at me or tries to rev me up.
The TV timeout comes and the building does its thing — music up, everyone talking — although it’s hard to excite a building when the home team is down against a team it should mop the floor with.
Seb drops onto the bench beside me. “She’s here,” he says. “Did you know?”
My hand tightens on the boards. “Where?”
“Tunnel end. Against the glass.”
My eyes find her.
She isn’t hiding and she isn’t trying to catch my eye. She’s just at the glass, watching me, steady, her gaze not moving when mine lands on it. And as soon as I see her, the want comes back so damn fast.
And then the regret.
I don’t want to win this game. I want her.
And then she lifts a hand and puts it flat on the glass.
I make the quickest move I’ve made all night. I’m up off the bench and skating, not even thinking about how long before we’re back on the ice, and I can feel Franklin’s confusion at my actions. Players don’t do this — leave the bench during a dead timeout — but I do it anyway.
I pull up in front of her and put my hand on the glass opposite hers, fingers spread to her fingers, close enough to see the cold flush in her cheeks and the chip in the polish on her thumb, but not close enough to touch.
She isn’t crying, unlike last time. She’s smiling — small and real and tired at the edges — and I forget I’m supposed to be playing hockey. Her mouth makes all the right movements to sayI love you, but I can’t hear her through the glass.
I mouth it back, and my breath fogs the glass between our hands.
Her smile breaks wider through the fog.
Only then do I realize that the noise in the arena has changed. It’s that big collective sound a crowd makes when it’s found something to latch onto, and when I look up, we’re on the jumbotron.
My glove, her hand, my sweat-matted helmet hair, and her messy ponytail.
All of it standing forty feet tall.
