I want to go in there. Touch him. Talk him through it. But something about the way he stood up stops me. He didn’t look at me. So I stay on the couch hating myself for not realizing sooner that he didn’t know, for letting this go on, for every time I walked through that building and waved at Hank and hugged my dad and never once thought to mention any of it because I assumed everybody knew.
He comes back and sits heavily on the couch next to me. Not close like before. There’s a full cushion of space between us and I can feel the distance like a physical thing.
“He’s beenniceto me, Mackie. He’s been nice to me this entire time and I’ve been—” He gestures between us. “With his DAUGHTER!”
“To be fair, you didn’t know that.”
“OH GOOD. Great. That’ll be a fantastic defense. ‘Hey Anderson, I know I’ve been doing things to your daughter that I can never describe to another human being, but in my defense I’m also a moron.’”
I would laugh at that if my chest wasn’t caving in.
“You’re not a moron?—”
“I amliterallythe stupidest person alive. Everyone on that team knows who you are. You just called our head coach ‘uncle’. I bet the equipment guys know. The Zamboni driver probably knows. I am the one singular human in that entire building who didn’t put it together.” He turns and looks at me. “How is that possible? How did I not know?”
“I don’t know.” The words catch in my throat because I can feel what’s coming next. And it’s definitely going to be him breaking up with me, followed by me crying. Or maybe it’s the other way around, my nose is already prickling and yep, I’m definitely going to cry first.
“Your dad told me I had good instincts and he says ‘good work, kid’ to me at every practice.”
“He really likes you, if that helps. He talks about you a lot at home.” My eyes are burning now and I reach for my bubble tea just to have something to hold because my hands are shaking. I can hear what he’s actually saying underneath the panic. ‘Good work, kid’ means something. And he just found out he’s been putting it at risk every time he touches me.
“And what am I supposed to say to him, Mackie? Oh, yourdaughterhas been hanging out at my apartment watching game film with me. Just fucking around.”
“Well we haven’t actually fucked yet.”
“Don’t.” He says it sharply. “Don’t cheapen what we have, Mackie.”
“So we have something?”
And for one horrible second I think maybe he likes me enough to fight for this, to disregard every bro-code and unwritten rule of hockey. But he drops his head into his hands and scrapes his fingers against his scalp. I can feel the answer before he says it.
“I don’t know what we have, Mackie. I don’t know what this is anymore.”
I swipe at my cheek with the back of my hand. No one has ever actually broken up with me before. I haven’t liked anyone enough to get to a point where we’re sharing dinners on couches or co-owning a pet together, even if the pet is a pretty self-sufficient betta fish. The bubble tea is sweating in my hand and I set it on the coffee table next to the laptop that still has the paused game on it and something about that makes the whole thing feel unbearable.
“Do you want me to go?” I hear myself ask and I hate the way my voice trembles on the last word.
He sighs and the only thing that makes this worse is that he looks like he’s about to cry too.
“Yeah. I think that’s probably for the best.”
I stand up and walk toward the front door, grabbing my shoes and purse from where I dropped them on the floor.Everything in me is screaming to turn around and try one last time to get him to talk through this, that maybe we can figure it out, hockey-code be damned. But I risk a glance back at him sitting on the couch with the cushion of space where I used to be and I know that if I push right now I’ll lose him completely.
“Take care of Shredder, okay?” I say to the door because I can’t look at him. Then I slip into the hallway and make it to the elevator before I let out the first sob.
11
ZACH
Jack Anderson is sittingacross the aisle from me on the plane. Which is fine. He always sits there. I’ve been on dozens of these flights and I’ve never once thought about it. He sits there, I sit here, Rodriguez passes out before we’re off the ground. Normal.
Except now I’m looking at him and all I can see is her face. He’s her dad. The girl who I was definitely falling for is the daughter of the man sitting six feet from me right now.
My brain keeps taking every conversation I’ve had with Mackie and replaying them with subtitles I didn’t have before. Especially one of the first conversations we had where she told me her dad has a no-hockey-players rule and I said, “I’m not really a hockey player, I’m a backup” and she replied, “you’re a hockey player, Zach, trust me.”
I keep getting stuck on that.Trust me. Like she was trying to warn me and I was too busy being charmed by her to hear it.
“You good, kid?” Jack looks up from his book. “You look tense.”
