8. Everly #2
“I know.” His voice comes out in a whisper.
His gaze finds mine in the shadows. “I’m sorry I hurt you, Everly.
All those years ago. I’m sorry I sprayed ice in your face.
I’m sorry for what I said the day I found you crying on the ice.
I’ve thought about those moments so many times the last seventeen years, and there’s no excuse. I’m so sorry.”
Shoot. I believe him. And even feel sorry for him. Oh brother.
Still, my throat stings, and I feel that familiar prick behind my eyes. “I forgive you.” It’s barely a whisper—a watery one at that—but it’s there. The weight that lifts from my chest is so sudden and so physical, I grip the side of the couch to steady myself.
Beckett lets out a breath, a smile finally cracking those lips. “Thank you.”
“I’m sorry too,” I add.
He frowns.
“For drawing villainous mustaches on every sports magazine, newspaper, or ad I’ve ever seen you in. I’ll try to stop doing that.”
Beckett’s brows lift and he lets out a laugh, warm and deep, and it heats the whole room.
And then I’m laughing too. It’s cathartic. Healing.
I wonder, tomorrow, when the sun rises, will all of this have been a dream?
“We should get some sleep,” I say.
“All right, then.” Beckett takes it as an order and lies down, pulling his ridiculous paisley bedding up under his arm, facing me in the dim light.
I do the same, ridiculously thankful that I’m not alone right now.
“Good night, Beckett.”
“Night, Everly.”
He flips off the flashlight, darkness surrounding us, seeping into my vision. I close my eyes, will myself to sleep. Except that my mind is still reeling from everything that’s happened today.
Minutes pass before Beckett’s voice breaks through the quiet.
“Can I tell you something?” he says.
“Is it going to make me hit you with my camera bag again?”
“Probably not.”
“Proceed.”
“If I were going to be trapped in a mall during a blizzard with anyone—you’re not so bad.”
Simple. Almost throwaway. Except his voice does something on not so bad that is the opposite of casual. A drop. A softening. The vocal equivalent of a hand extended slowly across the void.
And heaven help me, I sort of want to reach back.
No. Bad Everly.
“You’re not so bad yourself, Benson,” I say to the ceiling.
BECKETT
I can’t tell what’s louder: the sound of my breathing in the dark, or the thunder of my heart.
This is…bad.
What’s wrong with me? I have zero business catching feelings for the coach’s daughter of all people. Least of all this coach’s daughter. And yet, here I lie (and have been for the last fifteen minutes) wondering if she’s lying awake too.
There’s no way I’m getting to sleep like this.
Not a chance.
Five feet away, Everly shifts on her couch. I roll back to my side. With the flashlights turned off, the amber emergency lights outside the store offer very little to see by. I can barely make out the outline of Everly’s shoulder—shaking?
I hold my breath, and that’s when I hear it. She’s shivering.
“Everly…”
The shivering stops, her frame stiffening. “Yes?”
“You’re cold.”
“What? No, I’m not. I’ve got n-nice w-w-warm Chri-Christmas bedding.” Her voice loses all control, and by the end of that sentence, she’s full-on chattering.
I sit up and turn on the flashlight. Everly is curled up in a ball, knees to her chest, breathing into her blanket. “Oh, for the love, Evie. Just—” It’s a bad idea, Benson. Don’t do it. Don’t. “Just come over here.”
“No.” Teeth click.
“Everly.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s it.” I slide my feet to the floor and cross to her couch.
“What are you—”
I toss aside the blankets and scoop her up. Two seconds later, I drop her onto the pull-out. I snatch up her pillows from the couch and toss them at her, along with a few decorative ones. “Build yourself a wall.”
I flick the flashlight off and flop back onto my side of the pull-out, one arm up, hand supporting my head.
“…didn’t have to be so pushy…” she grumbles under her breath as she stuffs pillows down the middle of the bed, building a barricade between us. “And I don’t know how this is supposed to keep me warm.”
I roll over and throw my arm over her, pulling her against the pillows. Then I tuck the shared comforter around her. It’s an oven.
“Better?”
“Mm-hmm.”
I roll back over and allow myself a satisfied grin in the dark.
A moment passes and she settles down, nestling in. I can smell vanilla—her shampoo, or lotion, or some other girly product. She rests a hand on her pillow, next to her face. I can sense it, like her fingertips are just millimeters away from mine.
Minutes pass, the darkness enveloping us like a blanket before Everly speaks. “I’m gonna miss Sutton Arena.”
“Me too.” I let out a breath. “This rink meant a lot to my dad. The idea of losing the arena feels like losing another part of him.”
She goes still.
“He was an enforcer, you know,” I say. “For the Blue Ox. Before they were the Blue Ox—back when they were a minor league affiliate. Michael Benson. He was the guy you sent out when you needed someone to fight.”
“I didn’t know that.” Her voice is velvet against the black. “What happened to him…if you don’t mind me asking?”
I glance toward her on instinct, forgetting the darkness that hides us.
“He got in a fight. Late in the third of a nothing game—end of season, didn’t matter for standings.
But fighting was his job.” The words come out flat.
“He went down. Helmet came off—chin strap failure. His head hit the ice, and he just…didn’t get up. He died two days later. I was eight.”
She doesn’t speak. Doesn’t gasp or reach for me. Just sits with it. Lets the words exist without trying to fix them. Shoot, I like her even more for that.
“Just once,” I say, “I wish he could have seen me skate—really skate. I wish he could have sat in the stands and known it was worth it. That the ice, the love of it, the sound of his skates I hear every time I step on a rink—that it turned into something.”
I feel her fingertips enter the atmosphere of mine. Not quite touching, just there.
“I know what you mean,” she says. “It’s not the same thing—not even close—but I know the feeling of wanting to show someone what you became.”
“Oh?”
“I had this writing teacher. Mr. Decker. I was fifteen, writing constantly—notebooks full of stories, up until two a.m. I’d written a piece of Buffy fan fiction. Earnest, overwrought, terrible dialogue, but I’d worked on it for weeks, and it was the first thing I’d written that felt like me.”
“What happened?”
“I turned it in as a creative writing sample. He read it and laughed. Then he read it to the class. He did the voices and everything. And then he dropped it on my desk and said, ‘Miss Hart, if you’re going to waste paper, at least waste it on something original.’”
Anger moves through me, swift and hot, aimed at a man I’ve never met.
“And every time I hit a bestseller list, there’s this part of me that wants to walk into his classroom and put the book on his desk and say, ‘Does this seem silly to you?’” She laughs—short.
A self-deprecating breath. “Wow, I’m sorry.
Totally not the same thing. Your dad would be proud of you, Beckett. My story was stupid.”
“A teacher took the thing you loved and humiliated you for it in front of everyone. That’s not stupid. That’s the kind of thing that shapes you.” I roll to my side, facing her. “Don’t rank your pain against mine. There’s no scoreboard for this.”
I can’t see her, but I know we’re looking at each other—seeing each other.
“I’ll go with you,” I say.
“What?”
“To his classroom. I’ll drive. You bring the book. I’ll stand in the doorway, looking large and disapproving.” I gesture at myself—pointlessly, I know. “I’m excellent at looming.”
She laughs, and it sounds like the kind of laugh that escapes before you can catch it.
“Thank you. You’re very sweet.”
“Yeah…well, don’t tell anyone. I have a reputation.”
Another beat passes, and I feel her shift closer.
Maybe that’s why I say the next thing. “I was jealous of you.” My words emerge softly. “When we were kids. Because you had a dad.”
I let it go plainly. No spin. Just the truth cast into the dark.
She doesn’t pull away. “I was jealous of you because you had my dad’s attention.”
And there it is. The knot. Two kids circling the same man, each terrified of losing him, each blaming the other. I needed her father because mine was dead. She needed her father because hers was leaving.
“We were kids who needed the same person,” she says, “and there wasn’t enough of him to go around.”
“There might have been. If we’d let there be.”
Her fingertips brush mine.
I go still. My fingers twitch. I don’t pull away, but I don’t close my hand around hers either. “Everly—”
A sound cuts through the dark.
And it’s not friendly.