Page 5 of In the Crease

“That’s Dad’s.”

“He has plenty. He’ll never notice.” She folded it into the duffel. “Under the coat when you’re standing still. You’ll thank me.”

“Griffin says his roommate is picking me up from the airport.”

“Oh really?”

“Yeah. He got stuck at some goalie thing and didn’t want me taking a rideshare.” I didn’t know why I was avoiding saying his name like I didn’t know it. I absolutely knew it.

“Ryan.” She said it with the warmth she always had for Griffin’s hockey friends. “Be yourself.”

“I’m always myself.”

“You’re always yourself, which is mostly wonderful and occasionally a great deal for people who aren’t prepared for the pace of it.” She zipped the duffel and set it by the door. “Give him the first twenty minutes.”

“I can’t do that.” I paused. “Well. I can try.”

“I know. I’m saying it for the record.”

“I don’t even know if it’s going to be mostly just Griffin and me or what.”

“Oh, I am quite sure Griffin couldn’t go a whole weekend without his friends.” She smiled. “And I think he wants you to have the real experience of it. His world.”

“You mean a team full of babysitters.”

“I mean people he trusts.” She kissed the top of my head and said all the things she always said—call from the gate, have fun, Griffin misses you more than he says. I let her say them. One day I’d probably be too far away for her to say them at all.

I grabbed the duffel and headed for the door.

The flight was three hours. I spent the first hour on a biomechanics reading and the second with my forehead against the cold oval of the window, watching the landscape change. The desert gave way to something greener, then flatter, then somewhere over the Midwest it went white. Snow in the fields below. Bare trees. Roads cutting through it all like pencil lines on paper.

I pressed my nose against the window like I was twelve years old and did not remotely care. I’d seen snow before—ski trips, one January in Colorado with my parents—but not like this. Not the whole world under it, as far as I could see in every direction, like the ground had just given up and decided to be sky.

I pulled up the contact Griffin had sent me. Ryan Lindqvist. No photo, no emoji. Just the name and ten digits, clean and direct, which tracked with everything Griffin had ever said about him.

I thought about the roster photo. The jaw. The scar I’d definitely not zoomed in on. The way he’d looked on the ice in a clip I’d watched maybe three times for purely educational reasons.

I put my phone away.

Okay. Here was the situation. I was flying to Minnesota to see my brother. My brother’s best friend was picking me up from the airport because my brother had a goalie session. This was a completely ordinary arrangement between two adults. I was going to get in his truck, be a normal person for forty minutes, see my brother, spend a weekend at a frozen pond, and fly home.

That was it. That was the whole thing.

Ryan Lindqvist was going to be tall and have that jaw, and I was going to say hey like a human being and get in the truck.

Easy.

The descent announcement came. Minnesota rose up beneath me—flat and white and enormous, larger than any place I was used to. Just land and sky and snow over everything like a held breath. The scale of it was different from the air than it looked on a map. I pressed my palm to the cold window glass.

Just say hey. Get in the truck. Don’t do anything stupid.

The plan was solid. The plan had no flaws.

The wheels touched down. I texted my mother, unbuckled my seat belt, and was the third person off the plane.

Chapter Three

Ryan