6. Everly
Six
Everly
This is the best writing I’ve done in months. Maybe ever.
I’m on fire. The words are pouring faster than I can type them—not crafted, not constructed, just pulled out from the spaces of my heart where my best stuff comes from.
I’m barely thinking. Just feeling my way through this scene, as if…
Shoot, as if I’m Jake and feeling like the world doesn’t see me.
Let’s not dive into that too deeply, okay? Sure, I get that maybe he’s a little bit more like me than I’d like to admit—I mean, I am aware of the wig and the pen names. But really, this is about Beck—er, Jake. And his issues, thank you so much.
But now I’m in Lily’s POV, and it feels perfect.
On the screen, Lily, a magazine journalist on assignment with the team (yes, it’s the forbidden-workplace-romance trope), is standing in the tunnel beneath the arena, watching Jake tape his wrists before the game.
Lily had studied Jake Reeves for three months.
She had a file. She had color-coded tabs.
She had a system of cross-referenced notes that would make a CIA analyst weep with professional envy, and she’d been absolutely, categorically certain she knew everything worth knowing about the man they called the Blue Line.
She did not know about the tape.
He wound it slowly—wrist, palm, wrist again—with the methodical patience of a man performing a ritual so familiar his hands could do it without consulting his brain.
His face was doing something she’d never seen in a press conference or a postgame interview or any of the fifty-three video clips she’d bookmarked for “research purposes” and then watched at two a.m. for purposes that were decidedly less research and more pitiful.
He was humming. Under his breath. Off key and unselfconscious and so fundamentally human that it hit her center mass in the chest.
She recognized the song. It was the one that had been playing in the coffee shop the morning he’d spilled an entire latte on her notes and then tried to help clean it up and made it worse and apologized four times.
Oh no, Lily thought. Oh no no no no no.
Because the Jake Reeves in her file—the one with the stats and the defensive record and the nickname that sounded like a geological feature—was manageable.
Studyable. Keep-at-arm’s-length-able. But this version?
The one with the tape and the humming and the off-key rendition of a song that meant something to both of them?
This version was a problem. This version had a heartbeat and bad pitch and hands that moved with a gentleness no scouting report had ever mentioned, and she was standing in a tunnel, watching him like a woman who had come to observe a specimen and accidentally discovered a person.
She should leave. Every functioning brain cell was screaming retreat—back up the tunnel, back to the press box, back to the safe, clinical distance that kept her from doing something stupid, like caring about a hockey player who hummed off key and couldn’t survive a latte without a casualty.
Her feet didn’t move. Traitors. Both of them.
-----
Tears slide down my cheeks and drop onto the keyboard. I don’t even bother wiping them, because there’s no time. The words can’t stop. The scene is alive, and Jake is finally a person instead of a specimen, and Lily is completely falling for him.
Finally.
-----
“You’re lurking,” Jake said without turning around. Casual.
“I’m not lurking. I’m observing. There’s a professional distinction.”
“The distinction being?”
“Lurking implies intent to creep. Observing implies intent to document.” She held up her notebook like a shield. “I’m documenting.”
“You’re documenting me putting tape on my hands.”
“It’s a process piece. Very journalistic. The New Yorker would kill for this level of access.”
He turned then. Full face. And the thing that happened in her chest when Jake Reeves looked at her without his game face on—with those ridiculous blue eyes—was the kind of thing that should come with a warning label and a consent form, and possibly an insurance waiver.
“You’ve got ink on your face,” he said.
She slapped a hand to her cheek. “Where?”
“Everywhere. You look like a Rorschach test.” He grinned—the crooked one, the real one, the one that wasn’t for cameras. “What do you see in it?”
Bad decisions, Lily thought. I see an avalanche of extremely bad decisions, and I’m standing at the top of the mountain in a sundress with no poles.
“Journalistic integrity,” she said instead.
He laughed. And the sound bounced off the concrete and wrapped around her like a warm hand on a cold night, and she was suddenly losing a fight she hadn’t realized she’d started.
-----
The cursor blinks. My fingers hover. The scene has gone from funny to honest without asking my permission, which is how all the best writing works.
-----
And heaven help her, Lily stayed. She watched him finish the tape, and she let herself want something she’d spent three months pretending she was too smart to need.
I don’t know how long I’ve been typing when I hit the last line of the scene.
Could be an hour. Could be four. Time has no meaning when you’re writing.
(Same is true for calories. Anything you eat while writing goes straight to your brain, I’m pretty sure.) I type the final period.
My hands still. Twelve pages. The best twelve pages of my career.
I pull out one earbud.
It’s very quiet.
No, not quiet. Silent. The silence of a building that has been vacated, sealed, and abandoned by every human being except one idiot novelist wedged between bleacher rows like a raccoon in a dumpster.
I’ve been left for dead. Or the rapture finally happened…which doesn’t bode well for me.
The rink lights are off. The ice, a dark mirror. The stands are empty. No Zamboni. No music. No nothing.
I yank the other earbud out. My heartbeat takes over as the loudest sound in the building.
My gaze travels to the row of tiny windows across the opposite wall of the rink. Outside, snow is already piling across the glass, scraping away in hurricane-level wind only to be replaced by more snow.
It’s March in Minnesota, so the second coming of winter shouldn’t be surprising.
I scramble for my phone. The time reads 8:02 p.m. And wouldn’t you know it, that little No Service icon blinks across the top of the screen.
Four hours. I’ve been tucked in this bleacher gap for four hours, invisible, inaudible, completely absent from the physical world while apparently an entire blizzard arrived and the building died around me.
This is a new personal record for dangerous creative dissociation, and I am not adding it to my résumé.
I slip my laptop back into my bag—it’s dying anyway—and unfold myself from the gap, knees cracking, back protesting, and scramble down the bleachers.
The wood screams under my boots. The sound is enormous in the dead arena, bouncing off the boards and the dark ice and the banners hanging limp in air that’s already turning cold.
I head through the double doors and back into the mall.
Amber emergency lights pour over the halls, painting the corridors in stripes of sickly gold and deep shadow.
The stores are gated, metal shutters pulled down for the night.
A sugary aroma wafts from Sutton Sweets, evidence of a shop closed down in a hurry.
Blue Line Books sits empty and dark. Even Blake’s Café is dark—Helen’s gone, stools inverted on the counter, chalkboard facing the wall like it’s been sent to the corner. Norah Jones is silenced for the night.
This is beyond spooky. And I write murder for a living.
I run to the main entrance. Locked. Glass doors rattling in wind like the rails of one of those rickety roller coasters. Beyond them, it’s all white. Not snow. A Game of Thrones–worthy WALL. Winter is coming.
I try the emergency exit by the food court. I slam my shoulder into the metal bar. It doesn’t budge. Ice is crusted along every seal. I guess that’s to be expected by a blizzard in March. It’s more ice than snow.
Up next: the side entrance near Laced Up. Chained from the outside.
I stand in the corridor. Yes, I’m breathing hard. Next thing to appear will be White Walkers. Or zombies.
Okay. Think. I’m a thriller writer. I have put fictional characters in exactly this scenario. I can handle a mall.
I know this building—I mapped it out just this afternoon.
There are six exits, all locked. But the service corridors are still accessible.
As for my survival supplies—there’s a hardware store (which is a crazy thing to put in a mall, I know, but thank goodness for the hockey dads out there keeping it alive), an array of helpful specialty shops, and a furniture showroom.
So if worse comes to worst, I can hunker down in there for the night.
I can handle this. I’m the protagonist, not the victim—
I hear footsteps.
Coming from the rink corridor.
My initial reaction is relief. That it’s probably a security officer, doing final rounds…
hours after the rink has shut down…on a Saturday night…
in a blizzard. Okay, the more I think it through, the less friendly those footsteps sound.
Especially when I recall Helen’s words and the unmanned security office I passed on my earlier tour.
So, I guess we’re going with zombies?
No. My thriller brain seizes control—shoves the panic into a closet, locks the door, assumes command. I duck behind the fountain. Back against stone. Breathing controlled. Four counts in, four counts out.
Weapons assessment. Laptop: no—contains career-best writing and incriminating evidence. Decorative rock on fountain rim: cemented to the architecture. A no-go. Camera bag with telephoto lens: two pounds of glass and metal. Functional flail if you commit.
I grip the strap. Slide to the fountain’s far edge. In my books, the protagonist never hides or waits. Waiting is passive. Passive gets you killed in chapter three.