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His grin does something. He nods once, the way I’ve seen him nod, like he’s confirming a play. Then he’s gone, down the tunnel, swallowed by his team.

He comes out at exactly thirty minutes.

I know because I checked, which I will not be telling anyone. The parking lot’s half-full of dispersing crowd and idling cars, the night gone properly cold now, and the girls and I are clustered near the edge of it — and I realize, as Beau ambles out of the arena in dark jeans and damp hair and that jacket, that the rest of the team has materialized too. Cash, loud, already telling a story. Wyatt, easy, hands in his pockets. Theo, scowling at the middle distance like it owes him money. And Margo has noticed. Margo has very noticed, and has rearranged her posture accordingly.

Beau finds me across the lot.

I walk to him. A few steps away from everyone, enough for the noise to drop, enough for it to be just us in the cold with our breath showing.

“Good game,” I tell him. “You’re —” I land on the true thing, which is shorter than the polite thing. “You’re very good.”

“I know.” But he says it without the cockiness it should carry, almost wry, like he’s letting me hear that he knows I already knew.

A beat passes. The lot empties around the edges of us.

“You made a decision,” he says. Not a question. He’s looking at me steadily, and there’s something underneath the steadiness, something that’s been waiting since Tuesday, and I think — distantly, the way you notice weather — that I like that he doesn’t dress it up. He just asks the real thing and lets it sit.

I’ve known my answer for days. I knew it on the sofa with Margo, I knew it before that, on the sidewalk when he said I’m offering to be the thing and meant it. The knowing isn’t new. The saying is the only hard part, and saying hard things in complete sentences while looking at the person is the one thing I’ve always been able to do.

“I’m in,” I say. “But I have rules.”

He chuckles — low, and real, the kind that gets surprised out of him. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.” Then, glancing past me at the gathered team, the waiting cars, the cold: “Can we discuss rules later?”

I look back at my friends. June’s saying something to Wren. Margo’s pretending not to watch me and watching me. And the team’s right there in the mix of them, Cash mid-anecdote, Wyatt laughing, the whole loud warm crowd of them folding my people in like it’s nothing.

I look back at Beau.

“Later,” I agree.

“Good.” That whole-thing smile again, the unguarded one. “Now let’s go celebrate.”

“It was an exhibition game.”

“Don’t be a party pooper, Beckett.”

And he turns toward the others, toward the noise and the cold and The Penalty Box and whatever this is that I have just, in a complete sentence, while looking at him, agreed to.

I let out a breath I watch leave me in the cold air.

I have no idea what I’m getting myself into.

Chapter 11

Beau

The Penalty Box is four blocks from Corbin, and we walk it in a loose pack, the team loud out front and the girls folded into the middle of us like they’ve always been there, which is a thing the Raven House does to people — absorbs them before anyone’s decided to.

I’m walking next to Sloane. There’s a gap between us, maybe a foot of cold September air, and I spend most of a block being aware of the gap. On the ice I always know where I am in relation to everything — the boards, the puck, four teammates, five opponents, all of it mapped without thinking. Right now I can’t figure out where I’m supposed to be in relation to one person walking beside me on a sidewalk, which is a new and stupid problem, and I notice I want to close the gap about half a second after I notice I’m not going to.

I file that. Add it to the list of things I’m apparently filing now.

“You’re quiet,” Sloane says.

“I’m always quiet after a game.”

“Cash said that’s called Captainy.”

“Cash talks too much.”