Page 24 of In the Crease

I was still awake at two.

I was usually good at putting things down. I’d practiced it for years on the ice. Bad periods on the ice, missed calls, decisions that went wrong. The technique was simple. You set it aside. You made the next play. You didn’t carry what didn’t serve you.

I’d put this down or set it aside five times since the drive home, but it kept coming back up with more detail each time. Each one came back sharper than the last.

The tailgate. The blanket around both of us, her thigh against mine under the wool, the warmth of her shoulder against my arm in the cold. The way she smelled—woodsmoke and cold and underneath both of those something warm that was just her, just Maren, that I’d been aware of since she got in my truck on Friday afternoon and had not successfully stopped being aware of since.

The way her face had looked tipped up at the stars, completely open. The way she asked questions like she really did want the answer. She was attentive and noticed things other people didn’t. She’d studied my scar, the one through my left eyebrow. She’d been looking when she thought I wasn’t and felt something new and strange and warm about it.

The four seconds of not moving on that tailgate. The sustained effort of holding still when every nerve I had was trying to close the distance, and the fact she’d been holding still too? I’d felt it, the same effort from the other direction. She felt it too.

The back of my fingers against her cheek before we got off the tailgate. One slow second. The way she’d stopped breathing for the length of it. Her lips after her tongue had just barely wet them. I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes.

That was the one I couldn’t file away. The visual that kept coming back with the most detail.

Griffin’s little sister. Fuck.

I was four months from a draft that would put me in whatever city wanted me. Hopefully this one. I was pretty sure I did the right thing, even if I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The decision sat in my chest anyway, heavy, the way doing the right thing sometimes did.

Jag vet inte.

I don’t know.

Not I haven’t decided—I’d decided. The decision was right. She was Griffin’s sister and I was leaving in four months.

Even if she’d been at the waterline in the dark in my sweatshirt saying nothing appropriate back at me like she meant it, which she had, and then she’d leaned into my shoulder the whole drive home like it was the most natural thing, and I’d put my hand on her leg and she gave me hers, and now it was two in the morning and I was still lying here running the exact warmth of her small hand in mine on a loop.

I put it away.

I had to keep putting it away.

The line had a name now. A voice. And had sat beside me on the tailgate of my truck in the dark and understood me without me having to say what I was thinking.

I turned onto my side.

She would be in Arizona and in a couple months the draft was going to file the whole thing naturally into the category of things that had been what they were and were now over. Nothing happened. Not really.

I shoved the want down.

I kept shoving it down until sometime past three the apartment went quiet in a different way and my breathing evened out.

I slept.

Chapter Ten

Maren

I woke before my alarm, which was set for six. The room was dark in the gray pre-dawn way, and the gap in Griffin’s curtains let in a thin line of parking lot light. I lay still for a moment and let my body catch up with my mind, which was already running.

Something was ending. My body knew it before I did.

I got up.

I packed in the half-dark. My clothes, the sweaters, my father’s fleece folded on top. Efficient. Quiet. Not making it a thing.

The sweatshirt was on the chair by the door.

I stood in front of it for longer than I should have. Navy cotton, MINNESOTA HOCKEY in yellow lettering, worn soft at the collar. I picked it up.