Page 75 of Gave Proof Through the Night

“It’s okay,” he says. “Nobody’s here. Just us.” He tips his head toward the booth. “And Martín. But he’s not paying attention to us.”

I glance up at the glass. Martín has his own headphones clamped over his ears now, head bobbing to something entirely different, eyes on some panel of switches, completely checked out of whatever two idiots are doing on the ice below him.

Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s listening. For the first time since I was nineteen years old, I’m not looking over my shoulder in fear.

The chorus hits again, and I open my mouth and let it all the way out.

It comes out cracked and off-key and too loud, my voice bouncing off the boards and the empty seats and coming back at me from six directions at once, and Jeremiah whoops beside me, wildly and gloriously off-key in his own right.

We’re spinning now, center ice, faster than either of us has any business going, and screaming the same four lines over and over. We scream, and scream, and scream, and it’s so cringe and the best kind of cathartic.

I don’t know when the laughing starts. I don’t know when it stops being singing and starts being just noise, pure and unfiltered. Jeremiah’s laughing too hard to finish a lyric, and I’m laughing too hard to breathe, and we’re still spinning, hands locked, and every single thing I’ve kept locked down comes pouring straight out of me.

It is, without exaggeration, one of the best moments of my entire life.

We slow down eventually, dizzy, gasping, still holding both hands. The song fades out on a last ragged chord, and Jeremiah pulls me in against his chest to stop the spin, both of us laughing too hard to stand up straight, and presses his mouth to my temple.

“Happy twenty-five years, America.”

For a second the rink goes quiet except for our own breathing, loud and uneven. Then the next track clicks on. Slower and mellow. More of a looping, melancholy, weeping sound.

Jeremiah’s head comes up. “Oop. That’s not on the playlist.”

“What?”

“That’s not right.” He cranes his neck toward the booth. “Hang on. Let me get Martín to fix it. Probably some shuffle glitch, I told him upbeat the whole night. It’s a party.”

I look up at the booth. Martín isn’t there.

“I got this,” Jeremiah says, already skating for the exit gate. “Let me just cut it…”

“No. Leave it.”

He stops. “You sure? It’s kind of a mood killer.”

“I like this one.”

He studies me for a second, head tilted, then returns back to me slowly, skates scraping a lazy arc across the ice, and something in his expression shifts. Softer. Unguarded.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Then he closes the distance between us and folds me in against him, one hand flat against my spine, the other wrapped around mine and tucked against his chest, and we barely move, just a slow rock side to side, blades hissing soft against the ice.

“You have a game tomorrow,” I say into his shirt, half a question.

“I do.”

“And you spent the night before it teaching a woman with zero balance how to fall down professionally.”

“Best use of an off night I can think of.” He says it easy, like it isn’t a whole confession.

His chin comes to rest on top of my head. I can feel him breathing, his chest rising against my cheek. Warmth soaking through the thin cotton of his shirt. His heartbeat sits right under my ear, nearly as steady as it should be for a man who plays professional hockey for a living.

Mine, I think, and the word arrives so fast and so complete that it startles me. At least for tonight. At least for right now, in this rink, under these lights, he’s mine.

I know what I am. I know what happens on the eighteenth, what I came to this city to do, what happens to a man like this once he finds out what’s actually underneath the trailer-park backstory and the good one-liners. None of that changes what’s true in the next thirty seconds, in the warm, quiet truth of this exact moment.