The foam spilled cold over my fingers.
Bliss saw it. She always saw too much, which was a charming trait until it aimed itself directly at my chest with a flashlight and a clipboard. She passed me a towel without comment, but the pity in her brown eyes was loud enough to qualify as workplace harassment.
I wiped my hand. “Good for him.”
“That was painfully casual.”
“It’s good for him.”
“It is. He earned it.”
“I know he did.” The words came out sharper than I meant, and I hated that too because Bliss did not deserve my teeth just because Easton had left me with nowhere safe to put them. I forced my grip to loosen around the towel and looked down at the drinks instead of at her face. “I’m not a monster. I can be happy for someone who currently hates me.”
“He doesn’t hate you.”
I laughed under my breath and slid the pitcher onto the tray. “That is adorable. Incorrect, but adorable.”
“He’s hurt.”
“He is hurt and hateful. Men can multitask when spite is involved.”
Bliss crossed her arms, which would have been more intimidating if she didn’t have pink lip gloss in the pocket of herreferee shirt and grenadine near her wrist. “Cade says he’s been better since camp started.”
“Cade is in love with you and legally required to make hockey boys sound emotionally stable.”
“Cade doesn’t care that Easton got captain, if you were wondering.”
“I was going to ask.”
“You were thinking it, then?”
“I was thinking table twelve is about to die of thirst and somehow make that my fault.”
“Cade is proud of him,” she continued, ignoring me with the confidence of someone who had been raised around six men and had polished her tactics. “And honestly, I don’t think he has any room left in him to be weird about it. He almost died and fought his way back through scans, rehab, and everyone whispering about whether he’d ever be the same, and now he’s stronger than he was before. He’s still starting center Friday night. He’s still Cade. A letter on Easton’s jersey isn’t taking anything from him.”
The noise of the bar thinned around the edges for one breath, but I heard her. I knew this game was a big one, not just for Easton but for Cade.
Luke Dempsey was not a name we used lightly anymore. He was dead now, but he had left scars across Bliss’s adolescence long before the rest of us understood how deep the rot had gone. He had been her childhood abuser and her oldest brother Ryker’s former best friend, the man who tried to take her from our world because he couldn’t stand that she had survived him and chosen someone better. Cade killed him and nearly died doing it. That was the short version, and the short version still made the air in my chest evaporate.
Bliss swallowed, then gave me a smile that tried to be fine and missed by a mile.
I reached over and squeezed her wrist, one quick press that told her I was there without forcing her to stand inside it longer than she wanted. “Cade is annoyingly resilient.”
“He is,” she said, her voice softening in a way that made her look younger for half a second. “And he’s happy Easton got it.”
Easton deserved captain. He deserved the C stitched over his heart and the way a room turned toward him when things got tense. He deserved the weight because he had spent his whole life carrying things heavier than hockey and making it look like posture.
He deserved a lot of things, and I just wasn’t one of them anymore.
“That’s good,” I said, hating how small my voice sounded beneath the music.
Bliss stepped closer and lowered hers while the bartender at the other end called for another bottle of tequila. “Come on Friday.”
I looked at her. “Absolutely not.”
“You didn’t let me finish.”
“You were going to say come to the first game of the season, sit with you, Charm, your family, and Ryan, clap politely while Cade makes his grand return and Easton skates around wearing the C like a damn celebration.”
