Chapter 2
TWO
JULIAN
I'd been thinking about the grumpy goalie for three days.
After our disaster of a first meeting, I'd gone home and googled him.
Renard Conley was the starting goalie for the Silver Lake Storm, and had been with the team for five years.
There were stats and game recaps and a few profile pieces, none of which he'd apparently given willingly.
Every interview read like the journalist had extracted information with forceps.
The articles used words like "intense" and "private" and "unapproachable," which seemed about right given how he'd bolted the moment I'd gotten the dogs untangled.
But the highlights were something else. I watched three of them, then six before I lost count.
He moved in front of the net like the goal was built around him.
He was completely still, then fast in a way that didn't seem possible for someone his size.
There was a save from two seasons back where he'd thrown himself sideways, fully horizontal, to block a shot that should have scored, and the crowd noise spiked so hard the audio clipped.
The comments under that one were all capitals and exclamation marks.
I could see why, even through a phone screen at eleven at night.
But there'd been that moment in the park when Bailey had jumped on him and gotten mud all over his shirt.
I'd expected fury. Instead he'd looked resigned, almost amused for half a second before his expression changed.
I wanted to see that again, which was how I found myself timing my Friday route through the park.
The Storm had a home game tonight. If Renard was as ritualistic as he seemed—and what athlete wasn’t—maybe he'd be walking the same route. It was a guess, though probably a wrong one.
Was this weird? Definitely.
Was I doing it anyway? Obviously.
I had Bailey, Daisy and Cooper today, a manageable group that hopefully wouldn't turn into a complete fiasco.
The park was busier than Wednesday, full of after-work joggers and a kids' soccer practice taking up the field near the entrance.
I'd been telling myself I was just doing my job and if I happened to run into him, fine, no big deal.
Then I spotted him and my stomach decided it was a gymnast doing somersaults.
He walked with that same deliberate pace. He had earbuds in and a focused expression as if the park was an extension of whatever mental preparation was happening inside his head. Even from a distance I could see the tension in his broad shoulders and I wondered what it would take to make them drop.
Bailey saw him before I could redirect her and pulled straight toward him.
"Bailey, no." We were already close enough that he'd noticed us.
His stride faltered when he saw me. Something crossed his face—surprise? annoyance?—before smoothing into a neutral expression. He pulled out one earbud but didn't stop walking.
"Hi!" I tried for friendly and enthusiastic, which wasn't hard because seeing him again made my pulse speed up.
"Hi." He kept moving.
Bailey, bless her stubborn heart, trotted right up to him and sat at his feet, blocking the path completely. He looked down at her and after a moment's hesitation, crouched and scratched behind her ears.
I needed to stop staring at his hands.
"Big game tonight?" I asked, forcing my brain to form actual words.
"Yeah." He was still looking at Bailey.
"Playoffs are coming up, right? That must be exciting."
"It's important."
Okay, not a talker. That was fine. I could talk enough for both of us.
"I watched some of your highlights online. You're really good. That save against the Harborview Hunters last month, the one where you went sliding across the crease was amazing. I don't know much about hockey but even I could tell that was something."
His hand stilled on Bailey's head. "You watched that?"
"Yeah! The sliding thing?" I was definitely babbling now, but the way he was looking at me made it hard to stop.
"Thank you." The words sounded rusty, like he wasn't used to saying them.
Cooper lunged after a squirrel and nearly yanked me off my feet. When I looked back, Renard had angled his body, suggesting he was ready to bolt. But I didn't want him to leave.
"Do you visualize the saves while you're walking? Or is it more about clearing your head?"
He stared at me as though I was speaking another language. "Both."
"That makes sense. I do something similar before a difficult route, figure out which dogs need more exercise and which ones can't be near each other." I caught myself. "Sorry. I'm talking too much."
"Yes." But his mouth twitched as though he was holding back a grin. "I need to finish my walk."
"Right. Of course." I stepped back, pulling the dogs with me. "Good luck tonight."
He nodded and walked past me. Before I could think better of it, I called after him. "I'm Julian, by the way, in case you forgot from last time."
He turned. "I didn't forget, Julian. You didn't tell me."
Then he was walking away, and though his shoulders were still tense, they seemed less rigid than before. I watched him go and hated how I wanted him to look back. And all this over a guy who'd spoken maybe twenty words to me total.
"I know," I told Bailey, who was whining at my feet. "He's interesting, isn't he?"
Interesting was an understatement. Renard Conley was intense and apparently incapable of small talk, but something about him made me want to push at all that careful distance and see what was underneath.
That evening my friend Marshall showed up at my apartment with Thai food and the expression he wore when he'd already decided something was going on and wanted confirmation.
"You've been weird the past few days." He settled onto my couch with his pad thai. "What's going on?”
"I'm not and there’s nothing happening."
"You absolutely are. You've been grinning at your phone whenever I see you." He grinned and shook his fork at me. "Who is he?"
"There's no he."
"Julian."
I stabbed at my curry. "Okay. There might be a he. But it's nothing. I've run into this guy at the park twice and he’s… " I couldn't find the right word. "He's really hard to read."
"How so?"
"I can't tell if he's annoyed when I talk to him or if he secretly doesn't mind. He barely says anything, but then he does these small things." I thought about his hands on Bailey's ears and how he'd said I didn't forget like it was obvious. "I'm probably reading too much into it."
"You like him though."
"I don't know him well enough."
"That's not what I said.”
But he was right. I was attracted to Renard in a way that didn't make much rational sense. Two conversations that barely qualified as such, and I couldn't stop thinking about his jaw and the careful way he'd touched Bailey and the hoarse edge to his voice when he'd said my name.
"Yeah," I admitted. "I do."
"So what are you going to do?"
"The Storm have a home game Tuesday. I might place myself where he happens to walk."
Marshall pointed his fork at me. "You're going to stalk him."
"I’m strategically positioning myself in a public space."
"That's literally what stalking is."
"It's a public park, Marshall."
"You're hopeless." He was smiling though. "Just don't be weird about it."
"When am I ever weird?"
He gave me a look that covered approximately four years of friendship and didn't answer.
After he left, I found the Storm game on TV, telling myself I was watching to understand the sport better. That lasted about two minutes and I just watched Renard.
But really, I was watching him and how he moved to the crease.
I drooled a little when he dropped to his knees and stretched across the goal with a flexibility that shouldn't be possible in all that equipment.
Every save looked effortless. When he made a particularly impressive glove save, the camera zoomed in on his face.
My tummy dipped as though I was going up in an elevator.
This was what he looked like when he was doing something he loved and I wanted to see that expression directed at me.
The Storm won 2-0. Another shutout.
I sat there after the final buzzer with my phone in my hand. Renard had been polite today, not exactly warm, but that almost-smile when I'd been rambling was real. The I didn't forget was real.
There was something he was holding back, and I wanted to know what it was. I'd keep showing up at that park with my dogs and my bad small talk and my apparently hopeless persistence until I found out.
I had a few days to decide if I was brave enough but I already knew the answer.