After the Cup. Win or lose. I’m telling him.
I close my eyes. I can still hear Zach’s voice—hoarse and happy and far away. I hold onto it until I fall asleep.
35
ZACH
I can’t tellmy girlfriend’s father about my girlfriend.
I know how it sounds. I spent six months begging Mackie to have this conversation. Now I’m the one holding the door shut. The hypocrisy is so bitter. But superstition doesn’t care about hypocrisy. It doesn’t care about fairness, or logic, or the fact that Mackie saidI’m done hidingand I saidnot yet. Superstition cares about one thing: the machine is working. Don’t touch the machine.
And the machine is working. I’m playing the best hockey of my life. The team is healthy. The defense is locked in. Rodriguez is scoring at a pace that’s making national headlines, while Barrett has the group dialed so tight that practices feel like a formality. Everything is clicking. Everything is right. Somewhere in the back of my goalie brain, in the place where rational thought goes to die, I genuinely believe that telling Jack Anderson about his daughter is the thing that will break it.
Mackie doesn’t push. But I can feel it. The thing she’s not saying. I’m the one who put it there this time.
The Cup is right there. It’s RIGHT THERE.
Game 1.Home ice. The building is full two hours before puck drop, and I can hear it from the locker room–the weight of the thousands people who paid to be in the same room as this. I sit in my stall taping my stick. My hands are steady. My mind is clear. The routine is holding.
I eat the last cookie from the pregame container and close my eyes. Visualize the first save. Glove side. High. Clean.
Rodriguez drops into the stall next to mine. “You good?”
“I’m good.”
“You look good. You look locked in.” He bumps my pad with his fist. “Let’s go steal a Cup, Z.”
The team files out for warmups. The noise from the crowd is a wall of sound that pushes against my chest. I skate to my crease, tap both posts, drop into my stance. The ice is perfect and this is it. This is what I told Mackie about during truth or dare, a lifetime ago. It’s here.
I scan the building during warmups because I can’t help it. The family suite is up and to the right. I can see figures behind the glass but can’t make out faces from this angle. Mackie’s up there somewhere. Or she’s not–she mentioned rinkside work, interviews with the media team, quick-hit player clips for the team’s social channels. She could be anywhere in the building.
Warmups end and we file back toward the locker room for the final twenty minutes. I’m heading down the corridor, fully locked in and running my visualization one last time, when I see her.
She’s walking fast, wearing black jeans and a team jersey with her media credential swinging around her neck. She spots me and her whole face breaks into a smile. Her eyes scan down my body,then back up to my face, taking inventory of me–pads, chest, shoulders, like she’s checking that all the parts of me are still accounted for.
She tilts her head toward a recessed doorway just off the main hallway. It’s barely an alcove, not visible unless you’re standing directly in front of it. The smart move is to keep walking toward the locker room.
Instead, my feet stop. Mackie could stand at the edge of a cliff and tilt her head like that, and I would gladly follow her over. It’s the only thing about myself I understand anymore.
She pulls me in by the front of my jersey. Her back hits the wall and my glove drops, thumping against the concrete as I cup her face in my hand. I’m kissing her in the corridor of the arena. In eight months we’ve never done anything this stupid. Eight months of my apartment and her car and three suburbs out, of not being in the same room as anyone we know, and here I am with my chest protector between us and my pads bumping her knees and her dad’s stall sixty feet that way and I don’t remember deciding to do any of it.
Her fingers fist in the fabric of my jersey, pulling me closer.
“For luck,” she whispers against my mouth.
I kiss her one more time, fast, because even the stupidest version of me knows we have seconds. I’m just pulling back to step out of the alcove when I hear it.
“Mackie, are you back here? Someone said your mom is looking for–”
I know before I turn my head.
Jack is standing there with his helmet in his hand. He came looking for his daughter, and he found her with my mouth on hers.
The corridor goes dead quiet.
Mackie’s hand drops from my chest. “Dad–”
“Don’t.” The word fills the space. Mackie presses backagainst the wall.
