Page 168 of Offside Angle

I reach across the sand until I find his hand.

Santi threads our fingers together.

“We were so close,” I say after a while.

His thumb moves once across mine. “I know.”

“Two minutes.”

“I know, cariño.”

“I keep seeing it hit a skate.”

“I know.”

That’s all he gives me, and thank God for that.

He doesn’t remind me that we played a hell of a series or tell me there’s always next year. He doesn’t point out that one bounce could have gone differently or start listing everything we did right before it went wrong. I’ve heard enough variations of those things since Game 7 to last the rest of my career, and none of them change the image my brain keeps replaying: the puck hitting a skate, changing direction, Shane already moving the other way.

So Santi lets me hate it.

He sits beside me with his hand wrapped around mine while the waves keep reaching toward our feet and pulling away again. Somewhere farther down the beach, a dog barks once before whoever owns it apparently convinces it that the ocean is not, in fact, an immediate threat.

After a while, I realize the ache in my chest hasn’t gone anywhere, but it isn’t swallowing everything else anymore.

“I thought losing would make me feel empty.”

Santi turns his head toward me. “Does it?”

I look at him before answering.

At the face I knew when we were teenagers and somehow know differently now. At the same eyes that used to find mine across the cafeteria, back when I could convince myself that meant nothing as long as I laughed first. At our hands together in the sand and the shoulder resting warm against mine.

Then I look back toward the water.

“No,” I admit. “That’s the problem.”

Because I am sad. Fuck, I’m still furious. If I think too long about those last two minutes, I can feel the whole thing happening again, right down to the numbness in my foot and the sound disappearing from the building when the puck went in.

But empty?

No.

There’s too much here for that.

There’s Santi beside me, his fingers tangled with mine. There’s Cole planning a wedding because apparently grief gave him administrative energy. There’s Elias buried under five teddy bears, my parents and his parents behaving like the last decade never happened, Lena throwing the first bear onto the ice, and an entire team I’ll be ready to kill for again by the time training camp starts.

There’s this beach.

There’s him.

For most of my life, I thought winning was the thing that filled me up. Hockey made the rules simple that way: win and you’re good, lose and you failed, then work harder until you can fix it.

Apparently the rest of my life refuses to cooperate with that system.

I lost the biggest game I’ve ever played, and somehow I have more now than I did when the playoffs started.

That’s new.