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I rub his belly, still grinning like an idiot.

***

Practice starts fine. Skate, stretch, the usual chirping in the hallway about whose playlist is worse. Coach runs us through a breakout wrinkle he wants clean before Thursday, something with the D-man reversing early and the wing cutting underneath instead of looping wide.

Kai runs it once, textbook, like he invented the concept of hockey.

I run it and forget the cut entirely, drift wide like I'm playing a system from two weeks ago.

"Larkin. Head up." Coach doesn't even sound annoyed. Flat. The kind of flat that means he's already decided not to make it a thing yet. "Again."

I run it again. Better. Still not right, still a half-step behind where my feet should be, like my brain's off somewhere in an apartment with a guitar and a dog and a text message that never got answered.

We finish the drill. I get through the rest of practice without another visible screw-up, which feels like a personal victory at this point.

In the locker room, Jordan's at my stall before I've even got my gloves off, arms crossed, doing his thing where he just stands there and waits for you to talk first.

"What," I say.

"Didn't say anything."

"You're doing the face."

"I don't have a face."

"You've got, like, four. This is the one right before you say something I don't want to hear."

That gets almost a smile out of him, which is somehow worse than if he'd laughed. "You've been weird all week. Weirder than your normal weird. And I know it's not the dog, because dogs don't make a guy blow a read he's run four hundred times."

"Had an off day."

"You've had an off week."

"I had an assist in the last game."

"Any other week, you'd have scored it alone."

I don't have an answer that isn't a lie or the truth, and I'm not handing him either one, so I focus real hard on my skate laces like they're a load-bearing structural element of my life.

He watches me fumble with them for a second. Then he claps me on the shoulder, softer than his usual chirp-and-run.

"Whatever it is. I'm not gonna make you say it." A beat, and his eyes stay on me a second too long. "But you should know that at least one person sees that you are off your game."

He walks off before I can figure out if that's supposed to be mercy or a threat.

Friday the mirror photo's still the last thing open on my phone when I should be watching game tape. Pickles mid-stretch in that ridiculous jersey, Quinn caught at the edge of the frame, hair down, laughing at something off-screen that has nothing to do with me.

I've looked at it enough times that I could draw it from memory. That should probably worry me more than it does.

I type it out before I let myself think it through.

Me:

Hoodie's looking good on you in that mirror pic, by the way. Very committed to the bit.

Quinn:

I have no idea what you're talking about.