Chapter 10 – Alise #2
“Observing like your brain’s already out there on the ice without you?”
Beau stands there, arms crossed, observing the drill with the same unshakeable focus he’s always had.
But I can see the shift in his stance—the quiet strain in the set of his shoulders, the stiffness he’s trying to hide in the way he balances his weight.
Watching him like this makes my chest feel too tight.
“Jealousy’s a powerful motivator.” He blows the whistle loudly, and all the boys freeze, waiting for his instructions. “Go grab some water. We’ll work on some shooting drills next.”
He barely finishes the sentence before one of the kids pipes up, all hopeful grin and messy hair. “Coach, are you gonna get in the net?”
Beau’s smile twitches but doesn’t quite hold. There’s a flicker of something behind his eyes before he reins it in.
“Not this time, buddy,” he responds, trying to seem like the picture of ease.
Anyone else would’ve missed the subtle clench of his jaw and the flex in his neck like he’s swallowing down whatever he actually wants to say.
I ache to ask if he’s okay, to really know how he is feeling, but I keep my question to myself.
Instead, I watch as he turns, heading toward the bench, and for a breathless second, we lock eyes.
I see the weight he won’t speak about and the ache of what he won’t admit.
Instead of choosing my words carefully, I say the first thing that pops into my head.
“You were just in the hospital a month ago.”
“Three and a half weeks,” he mutters, not looking at me as he grabs a water bottle off the wall. “And I feel good. I swear.”
I narrow my eyes at him, scanning his face for any sign he might be lying to me.
The dark shadows under his eyes have faded a little, but they aren’t gone.
His lips are pale, and he’s gripping that water bottle like it’s the only thing anchoring him to the floor.
He’s definitely not fine, and he knows it.
“Promise me you’ll take it easy, even if you feel good. Especially if you feel good.”
His gaze flicks down to my hand, clenched tight on the wall around the rink, thumb worrying the edge like it might splinter before shifting back to my face.
“You been losing sleep over me, Lisey?”
I scoff, but the sound’s thinner than I want it to be. “No more than usual.”
He grins slowly, crooked, and a little dangerous, like he knows exactly what he’s doing. “Liar.”
“You’re not that special.”
“I am to you.” He says it too easily, and it lands hard, like the truth dressed up in our usual sarcastic banter.
My breath catches just long enough for him to see it, and his eyes darken, zeroing in like he’s found something he wasn’t sure he’d get to hold again.
I’ve potentially given away my biggest secret, and now I can’t take it back.
I roll my eyes, but it’s flimsy at best. The weak defense a girl throws up when she’s already bleeding confidence.
“You always this full of yourself, or is this a special occasion?”
Beau leans in just enough to breach the line between teasing and temptation. He’s so close I smell the lingering heat of his skin, the salt of sweat, and the ghost of whatever cologne he’s wearing under all the gear.
“Only when you’re looking at me like that.”
“Like what?” I ask, my voice quieter, like it’s trying not to crack under the weight of my questions.
“Like I’m the problem you don’t wanna solve.”
My pulse trips over itself like my heart’s scrambling for cover, because he’s right.
I have been looking at him like that because, deep down, I don’t want him to change in the slightest. He isn’t a problem to solve, more like I want to circle around him forever, orbiting the danger like a moth too smart to touch the flame but too desperate to leave the light.
I should laugh his statement off and say something sarcastic.
Anything to flip the script, reminding him, and myself, that this is just a game we play.
Although right now, I can’t seem to remember the rules.
The silence stretches between us, tight and buzzing and too full.
My chest aches with the weight of all the things I haven’t said, the years I’ve spent pretending he doesn’t still have this hold on me.
Right when the space between us tips too close to something I might not come back from, Ford skates over, flinging a towel across his shoulders and panting from the last drill like he didn’t just shatter whatever fragile thing was about to take shape in front of him.
“You know,” he says, grinning widely, “you keep hovering like this, Coach, and people are gonna start asking if you’re afraid to get back in the net.”
Beau’s jaw ticks, but Ford doesn’t notice. He just keeps going with the same playful tone. “Don’t worry. Langley will protect your precious save percentage while you rest your ancient knees.”
Beau’s smile doesn’t move; it freezes. This can not mean anything good for Ford and the other boys on the team.
“Great,” he responds flatly, before blowing the whistle twice and making a circular motion with his finger near his head. “Laps.”
Ford’s eyes widen in horror before he groans. “Come on, I didn’t even say anything that bad!”
The boys all groan in unison, “Nooooo.”
“You’re the one who told us to chirp more!” one of the boys adds as he starts skating.
“That was before your friend decided to be clever,” Beau deadpans. “Now, you all get to suffer.”
More groans and stick taps, the sound of mutinous laughter echoes against the boards.
“How many?” Ford asks, staring at Beau like he’s trying to figure out if he’s kidding about the laps.
Beau looks over at me, his eyebrow raised. “What do you think, Lisey?”
I tap my finger to my chin, making a show of trying to decide as all the boys plead with their eyes to make it a reasonable number. “Let’s go with the number ten.”
“Seriously?”
“Want to make it thirty instead?” Beau lifts an eyebrow as Ford snaps his mouth shut and skates off.
“That felt… therapeutic.”
“You mess with the goalie, you pay the price.” Beau shrugs, the corner of his mouth pulling up in a smirk.
“Petty. I like it, but does he know what happened?”
“No one knows what happened. Not really.” His thumb scrapes against the seam of his glove.
“What do you mean?”
“The parents know I took a couple of weeks of medical leave, but that’s it.
” His voice stays low. “Darius kind of figured out I wasn’t just taking a vacation, but we didn’t tell him why.
He’s just happy his uncle Beau is coaching for a while.
” He shrugs again, but this time, it’s more defensive.
“What was I supposed to say? ‘Hey, my heart tried to kill me, and now I flinch every time it beats too fast’? I didn’t want it to change the way they looked at me. ”
“Beau, we are all just worried about you. Maybe stop pretending this is normal and let someone in.”
“I let you in.”
Something flutters, then sinks because I have no idea what he really means by that. And I don’t know if I want to ask.
“I’m good,” he says again. “But I’ll take it easy. Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a scout,” I mutter.
“Still honorable,” he responds.
My heart is tangled somewhere between relief and fury and something dangerously close to hope. I can already feel it coming. The shift in his posture and the way his gaze lingers on me like it always does right before he says something I’ll be replaying in my head at two a.m.
“Try not to make me chase you down with a defibrillator today.”
He slows, grin already blooming as he runs a hand through his damp hair.
My eyes scan his too-pale yet slightly flushed face, but I already put my foot in it once.
No sense in making it worse. He knows I’m worried, and if I know Beau, the next thing out of his mouth is going to be a snarky, smart-ass comment.
“I don’t know,” he drawls. “You offering mouth-to-mouth, Lisey?”
God, of course, he’d go there.
I arch a brow, pretending my pulse didn’t just spike. “Only if you go down hard. And even then, there are at least three more qualified people in this building.”
He leans on the boards, one arm draped across the edge like he’s lounging in a bar, not a few weeks out from nearly dying. His smirk turns slow and deliberate. “But would they look as good doing it?”
There it is again, the shift that started in the hospital. His hand finds mine like a lifeline. It’s still here, humming low and electric between us. Every look. Every not-quite-joke. It’s like we’re standing on the edge of something neither of us knows how to name.
Beau leans in further, just an inch, but everything in me coils tight.
His eyes dip to my mouth, and when they flick back up to mine, something in them is raw, like he’s reaching for something without realizing it.
All the noise in the arena fades. The chill disappears.
There’s only the ache of almost. My heart trips so hard it feels like it bruises my ribs as my eyes drift closed.
“Hey, lovebirds,” Darius shouts, skating toward us with a devilish grin stretching across his face. “You gonna kiss, or can we get back to the drill?”
My brain short-circuits, and my eyes fly open, flinching as if someone yanked me out of a dream. My knees buckle as my grip tightens on the wall, barely managing to keep myself from crumbling to the ground and making this moment even more embarrassing.
Beau doesn’t move right away; he straightens slowly as if he’s forcing his body to obey when his every instinct is still in the moment.
His jaw flexes, sharp and deliberate, like he’s weighing whether to murder Darius with a look or just let it go.
I’m contemplating the same thing until I see a blur of movement catch my eye up in the stands.
Ramona is sitting beside Ford’s mom, Quinn, with the world’s most obvious smirk plastered across her face. Both of her arms wave dramatically over her head like she’s the grand marshal of the Alise’s Public Humiliation Parade.
The second I meet her gaze, she drops the wave and suddenly finds her coffee cup fascinating, like it holds stock reports or secrets from the Pentagon. Oh, God, can the world open up and swallow me now?
“Subtle.” Beau exhales through his nose, his eyes cutting to the boys on the ice.
“I’m mortified,” I whisper, heat crawling up my neck and down my spine like a slow-burning fuse.
He smiles at me then, not the smirk he wears when he’s performing; this one’s softer, like a secret he’s letting me see.
“You know,” he murmurs, voice barely audible over the scrape of blades on the ice, “for someone so worried about my heart, you sure like messing with it.”
Then he’s gone, turning with a single clean pivot and skating back toward the crease like he didn’t just throw that line over his shoulder and ruin me for the rest of the day.
I stand there too long, hand clutching the boards, waiting for my heart to stop hammering against my ribs. My lips are parted, and I can feel my pulse fluttering in my throat like wings. It wasn’t a kiss, but it almost was. And somehow, that’s so much worse.
When I finally force my legs to move, the climb up to the stands feels twice as long as it should.
My knees don’t bend right, my calves ache, and I’m 99 percent sure my face is still glowing like I accidentally walked into a tanning bed.
I am not thinking about the way his gaze dropped to my mouth or how his smirk looked like it could set off fire alarms. Nope. Definitely not.
Ramona clocks me the second I hit the top step.
“Ohhh, she’s blushing,” she sing-songs before I even sit down.
I drop onto the bench with a groan, dramatically fanning my face with my hand and looking everywhere but at my best friend. “It’s hot in here.”
Quinn gives me a look that’s equal parts amused and delighted. “Should we have given you two a minute,or a chaperone instead?”
“I’m ignoring everything you say from this point forward,” I mumble, making a noise that’s somewhere between a snort and a whimper.
Ramona leans over, propping her chin on her hand like she’s settling in for a movie. “Alise. Babe. That tension could power the Zamboni and the scoreboard.”
“Ramona.” I draw out her name like a threat, but she only grins wider.
“So… when’s the wedding? Please don’t choose a date too close to mine because it took forever for Cooper and me to agree on something. I love you, but I’m not sharing my wedding day with you.”
Quinn lets out an exaggerated whine. “But that would be so adorable. The Hendrix brothers, marrying two best friends from their small hometown. The papers would eat that shit up.”
I bury my face in my hands, a muffled sound breaking free against the heat radiating off my skin. “You’re both the worst.”
“I believe that’s a new record. I think it was less than ten seconds before she told us how horrible we were and wanted to bail on the entire conversation.” Quinn giggles.
“Seven,” Ramona says proudly.
“Okay, actually,” I cut in, desperate to change the subject before I do something truly embarrassing like cry or confess that Beau Hendrix’s stupid half smile just rewired my brain.
“Do either of you know whether anyone came by to fix the snack bar freezer? I just paid the invoice before leaving my office, but forgot to check that they had completed the work. If I have to chase them down to complete this work order one more time—”
“Look at her go,” Ramona whispers like a wildlife narrator. “The graceful subject change in its natural habitat.”
I scowl and bump her knee with mine. She bumps me right back, teasingly and full of affection, that says I see you, even when you don’t say it out loud.
And just like two loyal friends, they dissolve into more teasing at my expense as we watch practice and take every chance they get to tease me about it, but mostly, they let it go.
Thank fuck for that because behind the flushed cheeks and frantic deflection, something is cracking open inside me.
A quiet little tremor in the chest that I haven’t let myself feel in a long, long time.
It’s not just nerves. It’s not just a crush. It’s the terrifying ache of wanting something real to happen between me and Beau. And for the first time in forever, it doesn’t feel impossible.
It feels dangerously close to hope.