Page 6

The voice slid in between us like a wedge, bright and sure of its welcome, and I didn’t have to turn around to place it.

Melanie.

From three weeks ago.

The kind of night I’d orchestrated specifically so Ash would see me walk out with someone, so he’d stop looking at me like that.

She inserted herself at my elbow with a proprietary hand on my forearm, all confidence, with no idea she’d stepped into the middle of something.

“Didn’t expect to see you here,” I said, and even I could hear how flat it came out.

“I come here all the time.” Her smile was aimed at me, but her eyes had already cut sideways to Ash, cataloguing him, dismissing him. “You never called.”

“Been busy. Playoffs.”

“Mm.”

She didn’t move an inch or take the hint, just tightened her grip slightly like she was staking a claim in front of a witness.

Beside me, I felt Ash go still in that particular way he did, the same stillness from the tunnel, and when I glanced over, the openness from thirty seconds before had vanished like it had never been there at all.

The mask was back.

And it was worse than before because there was disgust in it now, thin-lipped and final.

“One beer,” he said to no one, to me, quiet enough that only I caught it. “Right.”

“Ash—”

He was already turning, already walking, shouldering past Sorin’s booth without a word.

He didn’t look back once, not even when Keegan called after him, not even when the door swung shut behind him hard enough to rattle the neon sign in the window.

I stood there with Melanie’s hand still on my arm and the taste of the win gone completely sour in my mouth, and I thought, not for the first time, that I was spectacularly good at exactly one thing when it came to Ash Thorne.

Making absolutely certain he never got close enough to see me clearly.

Except that was the one thing tonight I hadn’t wanted.

Chapter two

Crease - The marked area directly in front of the goal where the goaltender operates.

Ash

The cab dropped me two blocks early because I told the driver to, some old instinct kicking in even now, even furious and hollowed out the way I was. I walked the rest of the way with my hands jammed in my pockets, breath fogging in the cold, and told myself the whole time that I’d imagined it. That Melanie’s hand on Max’s arm hadn’t meant anything, that the look on his face hadn’t been guilt, that none of it mattered anyway because I didn’t get to want things like that.

I’d told myself a lot of things tonight.

None of them had stuck.

I saw him before I was even close enough to be sure, and something in my gut dropped straight to my boots.

He was leaning against the brick beside my building’s entrance like he owned the sidewalk, hands in the pockets of a coat that was nicer than anything he’d worn when I was a kid, and for one disorienting second, I thought I was still in the tunnel, that none of the last two hours had happened at all.

Then he pushed off the wall and I knew it was real, because the tunnel version of him had been performing for cameras and this version didn’t bother.

“Took you long enough,” my father said. “Nice place. Better than the last one.”