Chapter seven #3
Max was telling her a story about his grandmother in Montreal, something about a Christmas dinner that had gone catastrophically wrong, and my mom was laughing so hard she was crying.
I watched the way he leaned in when he talked to her, the way his whole face transformed when he smiled, and I felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn’t realized was tight.
Then I caught Ash watching Max with an expression I recognized because I’d been wearing some version of it all morning when I thought about Kincaid. That sort of attention that wasn’t quite staring but was definitely cataloging, memorizing, trying not to be obvious about it.
Oh.
I looked away quickly, because if I’d noticed it then someone else might notice it, and that wasn’t my business to notice or comment on.
But I filed it away in the part of my brain that was apparently collecting observations about people being attracted to people they probably shouldn’t be attracted to.
“Dante tells me you’re rebuilding,” my mom said to Max, passing him more bread that he definitely didn’t need but took anyway because you didn’t say no to Italian mothers offering food.
“We are,” Max confirmed. “It’s been a process. But we’ve got good people. Your son included.”
I stared at my plate and tried not to feel the way my face heated.
“He’s tough,” my mom said, with pride that made me want to sink through the floor. “Always has been. Even when he was little, if he fell down, he’d get right back up. Never cried.”
“Ma,” I said.
“What? It’s true. You remember that time you broke your wrist at practice and didn’t tell anyone for three days?”
“I was twelve and stupid,” I muttered.
“You were twelve and determined,” she corrected. She looked at Max. “He gets that from his father. Stubborn as hell, both of them.”
There was a brief silence. My dad had died when I was sixteen—heart attack, sudden, the kind of thing that rearranged your entire understanding of how the world worked.
My mom didn’t talk about him much, but when she did, it was always with a mixture of love and exasperation that made him feel present even though he wasn’t.
“He would’ve loved watching you play professionally,” she said quietly.
I swallowed past something in my throat. “I know.” He’d gotten me there. All the diving me to games. All the hours watching me play. Never once complaining at how much money they spent. Money they didn’t have but spent it anyway.
Max reached over and squeezed my shoulder once, brief and grounding, and I was grateful he didn’t try to say anything because there wasn’t anything to say.
The tiramisu came out after, because apparently my mother had decided we needed dessert despite the fact that we’d already eaten our body weight in pasta. It was perfect—layers of espresso-soaked cake and mascarpone that made Cole make a sound that was borderline inappropriate.
“You should come to Denver,” he told my mom seriously. “Open a restaurant. You’d make a fortune.”
“I’m too old to start over,” she said, but she was pleased.
“You’re not old,” Phoenix said. It was maybe the third thing he’d said all meal, and my mom turned to him with focused attention, the type she gave students who were quieter than the rest.
“And what do you do, Phoenix? Are you a player too?”
“No, ma’am. I work for Mr. Steel. Administrative stuff.”
“Well, I’m glad you do. And that all of you came.” She looked around the table. “Dante hasn’t had friends over in a long time.”
“Ma,” I said again, mortified.
“What? It’s true. You work too hard, you don’t have fun. These boys are good for you.”
I risked a glance around the table. Taz was grinning. Keegan was trying not to laugh. Max had that expression he got when he was filing something away for later chirping purposes. And Ash was still watching Max in that way that made me think I wasn’t the only one having a complicated morning.
We stayed for another hour. My mom showed everyone embarrassing photos from my childhood—me at six with a missing front tooth and a hockey stick bigger than I was, me at twelve with terrible hair and worse acne, me at sixteen looking shell-shocked at my dad’s funeral in a suit that didn’t fit right.
The ride back to the hotel was quieter. Cole, Phoenix, and Cinder were in one car with Taz driving. I was in the other with Max, Ash, and Keegan. Max was driving, Ash in the passenger seat, and I was in the back with Keegan.
“Your mom’s great,” Keegan said.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
The city slid past the windows—Bridgeport giving way to the Loop, the skyline doing its thing against the gray March sky. I should have been thinking about the game tomorrow, about trying to persuade them I could play. About the series.
Instead, I was thinking about the way Kincaid’s hand had felt on my face this morning.
The warmth of his palm. The careful pressure of his thumb checking the swelling.
The fact that he’d stayed all night when he could have left after the second check, could have gone back to his own room and his own bed and maintained every professional boundary that existed between a coach and a player.
He’d stayed. And I still didn’t know what to do with that.