He nods and rolls off to deal with the condom. I lie there staring at his ceiling, taking stock. Sore, but not bad. Sticky. Definitely need to pee.
I follow him to the bathroom door. “Can I get a minute?”
“Yeah, of course.” He kisses my forehead on the way out. “I’ll be in bed.”
I close the door, sit on the toilet, and try to process the fact that I just lost my virginity to my father’s teammate in his apartment in February. Cool. Great. This is fine. I clean up, splash water on my face, and stare at myself in the mirror.
Same green eyes. Same messy hair. Different everything else.
When I come back, he’s under the covers, propped against the headboard. He’s watching the door like he was worried I might climb out the bathroom window. He lifts the edge of the covers. I crawl in, and he pulls me into his side like I belong there—like there’s a specific shape against him that I’m supposed to fill.
“Was that good for you?” He sounds genuinely worried. “Like, actually good? Be honest.”
“It was good. Different than I expected. But good.”
“We can do it again,” he says fast, then catches himself. “I mean, when you’re ready. Whenever. No rush. But if you wanted to, I would be... available. For that.”
“Available?”
“Shut up, I’m trying to be respectful.”
“You’re trying to get laid again.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” He’s grinning now. Relaxed and happy and younger somehow. The tension is gone, replaced by a quiet, dopey contentedness I’ve never seen on him before. “Did it hurt? I tried to go slow but?—”
“Only a little,” I admit. “Is that gross to you?”
“What?” He looks at me like I’ve said something insane. “No. Why would that be gross?”
“I don’t know. Some guys might be weird about it.”
“You could never be gross to me.” He says it simply, pulling me tighter against his chest. His fingers start tracing an absent shape on my shoulder blade and I’m almost asleep when he speaks again.
“I think I’m falling in love with you,” he says into the dark.
My throat closes up.
“I think I’m falling in love with you too.”
I listen to his heartbeat and think about a boy on a porch waiting for street hockey. A boy who learned to be quiet in a house where nobody taught him how. Who ended up here, in this bed, saying he loves me like he’s not sure he’s allowed to.
He’s allowed. He’s so allowed.
19
ZACH
I wake with a jerk.
I’ve always been this way, since the earliest days of juniors when the anxiety of missing morning skate was a constant reminder in my brain all night, alarm set and checked then checked again. For a second I’m disoriented. There’s hair in my mouth and my left arm is completely numb and both of those things are because of Mackie, who is asleep on my chest, because she stayed.
She stayed.
And the thing my brain won't let go of isn't the guilt or the math or the ticking clock on this lie. It's that out of everyone she could have done this with she chose me. Me. She could have had anyone and she showed up here and gave me something she's never given anyone and I still don't know what I did to deserve it but I need to figure it out and never stop doing it.
She’s in my shirt—the one she pulled out of my dresser at 2AM after sitting straight up in bed, scaring the hell out of me, and declaring “I’m cold” while climbing into something three sizes too big for her. My arm is dead from the shoulder down and I don’tmove it because moving it means this changes and I’m not ready for this to change.
Her dad is going to find out. That’s not a question anymore, it’s math—the probability of maintaining a lie decreases every single day you maintain it and we’re at what, four months now, and Kara can only cover so many late nights before someone checks, and every time I sit across from Anderson in the locker room I’m counting how many lies I’ve told him and the number is somewhere north of three hundred and climbing. I think about Christmas dinner. His hand on my shoulder at the ceremony. The way he saidI believe in youand meant it so completely that I wanted to hand every word back and sayhere’s why you shouldn’t.
