Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Maren
I stepped out of the truck and the cold came for me immediately. Again. A deeper cold than the airport. This one had been here for weeks, settled into the ground and the trees and everything else. The airport cold had been a surprise. This was a fact of life, indifferent to how I felt about it.
I followed them toward the bank.
The pond was bigger than the photos Griffin sent me before had made it look.
Half a mile across, the ice was flat and blue-white and unsettlingly still, and I wondered how deep the pond was.
Birch trees stood white-barked along the far side, fire already going between two of them, smoke rising perfectly straight in the still air.
The low winter light came in from the side, making everything glow briefly before it was gone.
I stood at the edge of the bank and the cold came up off the ice and I understood immediately why Griffin had been trying to describe this place for four years.
I knew hockey as a thing that happened indoors.
Bright-lit arenas, the crack of a puck off boards, Zamboni smell, the compressed roar of a crowd.
This looked older than that version. It looked like the original, like where hockey was invented, and it seemed like a secret I just got lucky enough to hear.
The guys got dressed and out on the ice with the others in just a few minutes.
I found Ryan without deciding to. The crowd seemed to flock to him.
He was easy to find, not because he was loudest or flashiest but because everything on the ice organized itself loosely around where he was, and once I saw it, I couldn’t un-see it; he remained in my peripheral for the rest of the day.
I’d been watching hockey players since I was four.
I knew what separated someone good from someone who understood the game at a different level.
The good ones moved to where the play was.
The other kind moved to where it was going to be before the play had decided.
Ryan was the other kind. A beat ahead of everything, every shift, reading the ice like he’d already seen the next ten seconds and was just waiting for everyone else to catch up.
Griffin had it too, but from the net—he read the whole ice from the back, which was a different thing entirely.
He had good edges. Clean, decisive turns. I noticed these things clinically, the way I was learning to notice athletic form. Purely observational. It made sense. This was what being about to go in the first round actually looked like up close.
His shoulders were also very broad when he turned on a breakaway, and I was purely observing those too.
He was, objectively, beautiful to watch. The line of him when he turned hard on an edge, the way his whole body was somewhere before the play got there. Nothing to do with hockey. Everything to do with him. I’d been watching him for forty minutes and had checked on Griffin exactly twice.
Stop watching him like that.
I watched for another thirty seconds and then turned to the fire and distributed hand warmers to a couple other people standing around and kept one set for myself. Griffin came out of net during a break, and I read his expression from twenty feet away.
“No,” I said.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You have the face.”
“Come skate.”
“No.”
“Maren—”
“I am going to stand here next to this fire and watch you play hockey. That is my contribution to this afternoon, and it is not negotiable.”
He did the waiting look. I looked back at him pleasantly, a tight-lipped smile on my face, challenge in my expression.
Someone called for him from the ice. He pointed at me—not done, only paused—pulled his mask back down, and went.
He came off the ice in a rotation and sat on the cooler near me, working on his skate laces.
I watched the fire. He watched it too. He was warm from two hours of hard skating and I was standing close enough to feel it coming off him, radiating off him in waves, and I wanted to lean into every bit of it, which was exactly the problem.
“You’re cold,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“That may be true. But you still look cold.”
He glanced at me once, then, without making anything of it, pulled the sweatshirt over his head—navy, MINNESOTA HOCKEY in yellow lettering, worn soft at the collar—and held it out.
The movement pulled his other shirts up just enough to reveal his abs briefly, and the saliva in my mouth pooled.
I had to snap out of the daze before I drooled right then and there.
I looked at the sweatshirt he was still holding out, then at him. “No, thank you. Really, I’m fine.”
“I heard you. Just put it on.”
No expectation on his face. No waiting for credit or thanks or any acknowledgment at all. He was warm, I wasn’t, he had an extra layer, end of analysis. The fact I was about to be wearing his sweatshirt had clearly not registered as a factor in his decision-making.
It was registering as a factor in mine. That was for damn sure.
In considerable, inconvenient detail.
I took the sweatshirt.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Won’t you be cold?”
He stood in front of me in his skates, wearing a T-shirt under a long-sleeved shirt and nothing else. He seemed unbothered by this.
It was warm and soft and it smelled like him—slightly sweaty and warm and the same scent I’d noticed in his bathroom yesterday and told myself I wasn’t noticing—and it hit me mid-thigh so I pulled the collar up and kept my eyes on the ice and my face completely neutral.
He smiled at my reaction—slow and real, starting at the corner of his eye before his mouth caught up.
“Not while I’m playing. It feels good.”
My brain snagged on that word and wouldn’t let go.
Then he laughed at my response. “I have a coat in the truck for later.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Mmhm.” The corner of his mouth turned up just slightly before he turned and skated back out.
I was wearing Ryan Lindqvist’s sweatshirt at a frozen pond in Minnesota in February, and I was going to be extremely normal about that.
Totally normal. I said this while pulling the collar up to my nose and inhaling like a person with zero self-control.
God dammit.
The light dipped, and the fire was stoked up, and the hockey became a bonfire in about ten minutes without any coordination.
Jensen came to stand beside me at the fire’s edge. He was quieter than the others, someone who seemed to save his words for when they counted.
“Good ice this year,” he said, and went to get another beer. “You really don’t skate?”
“You guys looked great out there. And, no, I live in Arizona. Not much need for it growing up. Griffin is the skater,” I replied.
We made some more small talk before someone called him over and he excused himself.
I stood alone and looked at the dark pond.
The moon and the firelight gave it a shine.
The fire was warm at my back and the cold was real in front of me.
Griffin’s voice carried from across the bank, easy, loud, completely himself.
And somewhere in the group behind me, Ryan was there, probably not saying much, which I’d come to understand was not the same as not noticing everything.
I inhaled the collar of the sweatshirt I had on discreetly for maybe the hundredth time.
I was standing at a bonfire in Minnesota wearing the sweatshirt of a man I’d met twenty-four hours ago, and it was cozy and it smelled like him, and I was a hell of a lot warmer since putting it on over my clothes.
It was just a little fascination. Crushing on Ryan was pointless.
In April he’d be somewhere else. Griffin too.
This whole group would scatter, never doing exactly this again.
Standing here with the ice and the birch trees and the fire at my back, it landed differently than it had as something I just knew.
Their group had something different about it.
Older, maybe, or just more settled. Like they actually knew who they were.
I was still standing there when Kowalski appeared at my elbow. He was friendly enough—talking about the ice, the season, asking where I went to school, the usual. He was cute and knew it, which was fine. I smiled and answered his questions and let him do his thing.
“ASU,” I said. “Pre-PT.”
“No kidding. So you actually know what you’re talking about when you watch these guys skate.”
“I know enough.”
“Griffin’s sister.” He said it like he was connecting dots. “He talks about you.”
“Does he.”
“Says you’re the smart one.”
“He’s not wrong.”
He smiled. Moved a half step closer. “You here for the whole weekend?”
“Flying home tomorrow.”
“That’s too bad.”
It wasn’t a line so much as a statement of intent, delivered with easy confidence as if he’d never really been told no. I was formulating a response when Griffin materialized at my other shoulder like he’d been watching the whole time.
Kowalski read the scene immediately and found somewhere else to be.
“You were watching,” I said.
“I was keeping an eye on things.”
“That’s the same thing.”
He put his arm around my shoulders.
“Good?” he said.
“Really good.”
He squeezed once and shifted into his protective register.
“You’re good, right? Everyone here has been—”
“Griffin.”
“I’m just checking.”
“Your teammates are perfectly decent people. I’m fine.”
“Some of them can be—”
“Griffin.” I turned to face him. “I am an adult woman at a bonfire with a beer. I need you to let me just be myself.”
He sighed. “You’re my baby sister—”
“I am eighteen years old, and I’ve had sex before. You know that, right?”
A sound from my left where Ryan stood, trying to suppress a choke.
“You all right?” I asked smugly. I held his gaze for one second.
His jaw was tight, held carefully. Making them both uncomfortable was more fun than I’d thought it would be.
Ryan cleared his throat again. “Yeah, fine. Beer went down wrong.”
I chuckled.
Griffin said, “I did not need that.”
“I’m simply establishing that I’m capable of—”
“Maren. I am asking you, as your brother, to stop talking.”
I stopped. He looked pained. I was deeply satisfied.
“I’m going to go talk to Petey,” I said. “About the neutral zone trap or something. Don’t keep checking on me. I don’t need a babysitter.”
“Please,” Griffin said. “Go immediately.”
I went.