6. Chapter Six
Aspen
I lock the side door, and I exhale. He saw the stick.
I bolt down the hall in my socks, into my room, and his hockey stick is leaning right where I left it by the window — his, Ermington, the gamer, the trophy of my one good decision all night.
I grab it, and I run. Back down the hall.
Through the kitchen. Through the laundry.
Through the inside door into the cold of the garage, where I pop the back of the SUV and slide the stick flat across the cargo floor, under the parcel shelf, gone.
I close the hatch softly. I close the garage door.
I come back inside, and I lock that too.
A soft knock at the side door catches my attention.
No.
I stand in my own kitchen with my heart going, and I think about not answering. For exactly one second, I think about it. Then I open the door, because some stubborn part of me will not let him think I’m afraid of him.
He’s there with a glint in his eyes. His hood down now, cheeks pink from the cold, grinning like he knows.
“I told you to go home.”
He smiles wider, and he walks straight past me into my house.
Did this man just walk into my home — at eleven thirty at night — like it’s an amenity he’s entitled to — while my roommates are asleep upstairs?
I’m after him in a second, hand on his arm, trying to physically turn him around and steer him back out the door I’m holding open.
He doesn’t turn.
It’s like shoving a parked truck. He’s six-foot-four, and entirely unbothered by my hand on his sleeve. As I get in close enough to put real weight into it, I catch the smell of him, and that’s the thing that stops me dead.
He reeks of a party I wasn’t invited to.
He reeks of confidence I wasn’t issued at birth.
He reeks of a man who has never, not once, been told no.
But underneath it, I smell the beer, and the cold air carried on his skin.
I smell his soap, and underneath the soap, something clean and green, like pine.
No, cucumbers. I have known of Stanley Ermington my entire life, and I have never once been close enough to smell him.
I yank my hand off his arm like it burned me.
This is too close.
I understand with total clarity that my problem with Stanley Ermington isn’t just the airplane, or the stick, or the glass. It’s everything. It’s the whole of him. It’s that he gets to be like this.
“Get the hell out, Ermington,” I hiss, low as I can. “My roommates are sleeping.”
“Why are they asleep?” He doesn’t bother to lower his voice. If anything, he nudges it up, just to watch me wince. “It’s barely midnight. What kind of house is this?”
“Lower your voice.”
“Make me.”
I want to murder him. I want to put my hands around his throat and squeeze until the grin comes off. I keep my face exactly as it is, scowling. He looks down at me with that stupid smile.
He turns and heads down my hall like he’s lived here for years.
I freeze for half a beat. “Where are you going?”
“Tour, princess.” He doesn’t slow down. “Show me the layout. I’m thinking of buying.”
“Ermington.” I’m whisper-shouting now, scrambling after him. “Ermington. ERM—”
He doesn’t stop. And he doesn’t hesitate at a single door, doesn’t peek into the bathroom or Kirra’s room or the linen closet — he goes straight to mine, the last door on the right, because he saw it from the outside, so he knows exactly which one is mine.
By the time I catch up, he’s standing in my open doorway, and he’s stopped.
He’s scanning the wall by the window. The wall where his stick was just leaning.
Asshole.
Got him.
I watch him stare at the empty wall and keep every emotion off his face, and then he smiles, slow and enormous, and turns around to look at me.
He glances down like he’s impressed. “You moved it, princess.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t call me that and get out of my room.”
He puts his hands in his hoodie pocket and starts walking in. He walks the perimeter of my room, whistling under his breath, strolling along my bookshelf and my window and the foot of my bed like a man at an open house deciding where the sofa goes.
“Stop.” I’m right behind him, hands hovering, not sure whether to grab him or the things he’s drifting past. “Stop it. You cannot be in here. You cannot touch things. Ermington, I swear to God—”
He drops to his knees by the bed, lifts the dust ruffle, and looks underneath.
“Tell me you vacuum, Linwood.” He comes up with a cobweb in his stupid hair. “Tell me right now, or I’m calling somebody.”
I grab the back of his hoodie in both fists and haul.
He lets me — he’s far too big for it to actually do anything, but he chokes theatrically, hand to his throat, gagging, and then before I can stop him, he flops sideways onto my bed, full length, and hangs his head off the far edge to check the floor on the other side.
“Get off my bed.” I’m begging now, all the steel gone out of my voice. I don’t like the fact that he’s exactly where I sleep every night, and his whole body covers the mattress. “Get off my bed, get off, get—”
He’s mid-grin, hanging upside down off my mattress, and his eyes land on my pillows — on the small, ancient, mostly-bald stuffed shark tucked half under the top one, the one I’ve had since before I could walk, the one I would deny to my grave — and the grin goes.
Just for a second. His whole face changes.
Something moves through it that isn’t a joke and isn’t a jab, something almost careful, and I watch him not say anything.
He must know that my dad played for the Sharks, and I’ve had that mascot stuffed animal as my forever bed companion.
I’ve literally slept with it since I was born.
It’s raggedy now, and it’s embarrassing he’s witnessing it.
Then he rolls off my bed and onto his feet, and the grin’s back when he looks down at me quietly. My heart’s pumping in ways I didn’t know possible. He goes for my dresser.
He opens the top drawer.
I lunge and slam it shut, and he yanks his fingers clear half a second before I take them off.
“Touch one more thing,” I breathe, “and I scream.”
“You can’t scream.” He’s delighted. “Your roommates are asleep.”
Asshole.
He moves toward the closet, watching me the whole way like he wants me to see him do it. I’m in front of the doors in an instant — body flat across them, arms out a little, a bluff in full motion, defending a closet that has nothing in it because the thing he wants is in the back of my car.
He stops a foot away and looks down at me. He looks at the closet over my shoulder. He looks back down at me.
“Step aside, princess.”
“No.”
Neither of us moves, and the room goes very quiet. The whisper-fight that’s been carrying us collapses into a silence that’s so much worse, because now there’s nothing to fill the space between us.
I can smell him again — cucumber and beer — and he’s not grinning now.
My stomach turns over because I have years of hating the grin, so without him wearing it, I have none.
He’s looking at me like I’m something he’s reading, eyes moving over my face, slow, unhurried, taking his time.
I stare straight back, not dropping my eyes, or giving him one inch of defeat.
Even as my chest pulls tight and some traitor part of me wants very badly to know what’s going on behind that face.
His gaze travels down, and I think, distinctly, I would give anything to throat-punch you right now.
His lips part. He blinks, slow. His eyes come back up to mine, and the strain is right there in them, the same strain I can feel in my own jaw, and for one unbearable second, I have no idea what he’s going to do.
He doesn’t push to open the closet. He could.
He’s twice my size and full of drink, and he’s spent the whole night doing exactly what he wants.
I’m braced for it, expecting it, because he barged into my house without permission.
He takes one step back instead and gives me the closet.
Relief and confusion land in me at exactly the same time.
“Fine.” He smirks, but it’s slower than his usual. “Keep it for tonight. We’ll come back to it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He watches me for a second. “Okay. Stubborn as always, princess.”
“Stop calling me that.”
My phone lights up on the desk.
We both look. The screen’s facing up, and the name on it is enormous in the dark room.
Dad.
“Daddy checking in?” Stanley says, and there’s something underneath the tease this time I can’t quite catch.
I get to it before he can read the preview, flip it face down, and I feel my face go hot — not because he saw the name, but because I know exactly what that text is going to say, I know it’s going to be about him, about the game, about the report.
“You need to leave,” I say. “Now.”
And that’s when Bree appears in the hall.
She’s in pajamas, hair flat on one side, squinting, drawn down by the noise. “Aspen? You okay, what’s going—”
She sees Stanley Ermington standing in the middle of my bedroom at midnight, and her eyebrows climb all the way up. She looks at me, and it is a long look, a we are absolutely talking about this in the morning look, and I will be answering for it over coffee whether I want to or not.
“I’m fine,” I tell her, too fast. “He’s leaving.”
Bree’s eyes flick once more between us, and she retreats back down the hall.
In those two seconds when I was distracted by Bree, he drifted to my desk that sits right under the window, where I work, where I do my homework. He’s looking at the photo frame of my dad.
He doesn’t ask. He just lifts it and looks.
My father. Twenty-five years old, soaked, mid-roar, the Stanley Cup hoisted over his head in both fists, the best night of his entire life caught and framed and sitting on his daughter’s desk all these years later.
Stanley goes still as he stares at it. The room is dead quiet. I’m watching the side of his face, and I genuinely cannot read what’s moving through it. That frightens me more than anything else has all night, because I can always read people, it’s the only thing I’m good at.
Then he sets the frame back the way it was. And he doesn’t say one word about it.
He doesn’t make a joke about my dad. He doesn’t make a joke about his dad.
He doesn’t say I’m named after that, you know, or my old man’s got one too, or any of the dozen easy things sitting right there for the taking.
He just sets it down and walks past me, out of my room, down the hall.
It’s dead silent now, all the noise gone out of him.
I hear the side door open. I hear it close.
I stand frozen in my own bedroom with my heart slamming against my ribs, staring at the photo of my father on my desk, and I have absolutely no idea what just happened in this room.
I make myself walk over to the desk. I tilt my head and look out the window at the angle where you can just catch the road. Stanley’s out there. Hood up, hands in his pockets, walking the sidewalk back toward his house.
He clearly saw the stick. He left it anyway.
I look at the photo of my father. I should put him face down. I can’t make myself do it.
Stanley Ermington was in my room for less than fifteen minutes.
He saw the empty wall. He saw the shark.
He saw my father. He saw the text on my phone.
He didn’t take a single piece of leverage he could have weaponized in front of me.
I don’t know yet whether that means he isn’t going to use any of it, or whether he’s waiting.
I’m sitting in the middle of my own bedroom, realizing I just got read by a boy I thought could read.
I miscalculated.
I don’t miscalculate.
I’ll see him tomorrow at the game.
And I will not make that mistake again.