14. Chapter Fourteen
Aspen
I step into the Hawthorne House, and the smell hits first — coffee, a little laundry detergent, a five-man house. It’s not as messy as I thought it’d be, but it’s lived-in enough to be honest about it.
From the outside, it’s a five-bedroom rental identical to mine. From the inside, it’s somehow both bigger and emptier.
Stanley closes the door behind me.
“Your boots are fine.”
I wasn’t going to take them off.
He leads. I follow him around the corner into the kitchen.
Gavin’s at the island with a mug. He looks up and sees me. His whole face changes — not into surprise, into delight, like he’s thrilled to see me.
“Aspen Linwood. In the Hawthorne House kitchen.” He’s already standing. “I’m getting this framed.”
“Hi, Gavin,” I say.
I don’t let my voice do anything in particular. Stanley moves past me to the coffee maker. I set the cup I brought down on the island and hold it loosely.
Gavin ignores Stanley’s existence as his eyes stay on me. “How are you?”
“Good. I’m good.”
“You look good.”
“Thank you.”
At the counter, Stanley doesn’t turn around.
Gavin keeps it friendly as he asks, “Are you still going for the Sharks job? I remember that being the whole plan. You used to talk about that. The Sharks were the dream.”
I pick up the cup I brought, set it back down after a sip. “I’m working for an NHL club already.”
Gavin’s face does a small, immediate adjustment. He didn’t know that.
“Yeah? Which one?”
I tell him.
He blinks once. “Oh.” He thinks. “That’s — that’s a good gig, Aspen. I’m surprised your dad didn’t just get you in where he’s at.”
The kitchen narrows half a degree. I don’t look at Stanley. I can hear that Stanley has stopped what he’s doing at the coffee maker.
“I didn’t want him to.”
“No?”
“I wanted to earn it.”
Gavin nods, slowly. He still hasn’t connected the team I work for to the man whose son is standing six feet from him. He’s reading my face for whether he should be impressed or careful, and he’s picking the wrong one.
“Wild. That’s wild. Good for you.”
“Thank you.”
Stanley turns around and grabs my mug. I told him not to give me his coffee, but apparently, he’s forgotten that. He pours coffee into my mug and then passes it back to me.
“Thank you, babe,” I say lightly.
Gavin stiffens like he just remembered what this is. Stanley’s mouth lifts a little, and then it’s covered by the mug as he takes a sip.
Gavin tries to recover. “Hey, you ever go back to Tony’s?”
Tony’s was an Italian place fifteen minutes off campus. We went every other week. He ordered the same thing every time. So did I.
“Not in a while, no.”
“We should go.”
The room doesn’t move.
Stanley sets his mug down and then glares at him. “Gav,” he says in a deep tone.
Gavin looks at him. “Relax, brother. I meant you too. Bring the boys. The four of us. Five. Whoever.”
“We’ve got plans,” Stanley says and then takes another sip.
And Gavin reads the room — reads it, finally, accurately. He laughs once, soft, mostly at himself. “All right. All right. Some other time, then.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Some other time.” I pick up the coffee Stanley poured me, and I drink from it.
Percy walks into the kitchen and stops when he sees me. His eyes dart to Gavin then to Stanley.
He says nothing and walks out the front door.
Stanley says, “Percy doesn’t really do guests.”
I don’t blame Percy for his awkwardness. I don’t know if I’m coming around enough myself.
Stanley’s phone buzzes on the counter. He picks it up, looks at it, mutters something about his dad –– my heart jumps because now his dad is calling him, shit –– and disappears down the hall toward the back of the house.
The kitchen is left with just me and Gavin and my racing pulse.
I watch Stanley put the phone to his ear, stalking off with his left arm swinging.
I want to follow him to hear what his dad’s going to say, but I know I should give him privacy.
My stomach clenches when I look at Gavin who’s watching me.
He sets his mug down. “Aspen.”
I swallow. “Yeah?”
He’s looking at the counter now. “I want to apologize for how I left things.”
I don’t say anything because all I can think about is the mess of our fathers thanks to this man in front of me.
“What I did wasn’t right, and I’m sorry.”
The kitchen has gone very still. I’m back in my bathroom freshman year, sitting on the closed lid of my toilet with a test in both hands and a man on the other side of the door asking me, through it, if I was sure it was his.
I’m there for a moment. The week ahead of that moment — the week I was late, the week I was alone with it, the week he didn’t text to check, didn’t ask, didn’t, in fact, treat it like a thing that was happening because I had broken up with him.
He saw the negative and took it as the end.
I knew that I wasn’t let off the hook until I got my period.
It was an antagonizing week. When I finally got my period, I cried for days because he didn’t care.
The school year ended in his favor, and he left for the draft, and that was that.
“You can’t take it back, Gavin,” I say because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from being Coach Linwood’s daughter, it’s making sure I’m heard. My father once told me that there’s no relationship without being heard.
Gavin agrees, “No.”
“Did you know that I was alone with it for a week?”
He shakes his head. “You weren’t, though, right?”
I shake my head. “I was a week late, and ––”
He breathes, “I panicked. I know, and I’m sorry, Aspen.” He stares at his coffee.
I don’t say anything more. I don’t owe him this. I could leave him with that look on his face for the rest of our lives and let the apology go unanswered, and I would, frankly, sleep just fine.
But the apology is good. It’s the apology I didn’t know, until I heard it, I’d been waiting for. And refusing to take it would be a small cruelty I don’t, currently, want to choose. I can move on from it.
“Thank you,” I whisper, “for apologizing.”
He nods and doesn’t look up. “Yeah.”
I pick up my coffee and drink from it. Stanley, somewhere down the hall, is on the phone with his dad and is taking his time about coming back, and I think, briefly, that he might have heard the first sentence of this and stepped further away on purpose.
Stanley comes back down the hall a minute after that, phone going into his pocket, like a man who timed his return.
Gavin checks his watch and stands. He rinses his mug at the sink and sets it in the rack. He lifts his jacket off the back of a chair.
“All right. I’m out. Stan, thanks for the couch.”
“Anytime, Gav.”
“Aspen.” Gavin pauses in the kitchen doorway, looking straight into my eyes. “Take care of yourself.”
I blink. “You, too.”
He nods. He goes. The front door closes.
And it’s just the two of us in the kitchen.
I look up, and Stanley’s watching me. He doesn’t say anything or mention the call with his dad. Then he glances at the microwave clock above the stove.
“Linwood, there are eleven minutes left of your hour.”
I glance at the time.
He looks at me, and he grins. “Eleven minutes. You wanna play FIFA?”
I stare at him. “FIFA?”
“Ten-minute match. You pick the team.”
“I don’t play FIFA.”
“You write reports on professional hockey for a living. I think you can crack FIFA.”
“I don’t have time for this, Ermington.”
“You’ve got, by your own clock, eleven minutes.”
I cross my arms, and he’s already walking into the living room.
I stand in the kitchen for one second. I look around, feeling lighter. Then I walk into the living room and sit down next to him on the couch.
He hands me a controller without looking at me, already clicking through menus, already humming something under his breath, and he is, somehow, more relaxed than I’ve seen him since this whole thing started.
“I’m taking PSG,” he says.
“That’s the rich team.”
“That’s the winning team.”
“I want— I don’t know. Arsenal.”
“Arsenal.” He glances over. “Princess.”
“Shut up, Stanley.”
He grins and picks my team for me, and the match starts.
I lose inside three minutes. Badly. He scores four goals in the first half and starts narrating his own celebrations like there’s a broadcast crew in the room.
“Top corner, Linwood. Top corner. You see that?”
“You are insufferable.”
“I’m a champion in real life and digitally.”
I roll my eyes. He laughs at his stupid joke, and I smile. A genuine one.
It ends 6–1, and he’s still narrating it. At some point in the last however-many minutes, I have taken my boots off without one conscious thought about doing it. My feet are up on his couch in socks. The coffee — his coffee — wasn’t as bad as I thought, so my mug is sitting empty on the table.
It’s only when I catch the microwave clock through the kitchen doorway that I realize we’ve been playing for thirty minutes.
I set the controller down. “I have to go.”
He looks at me. “Okay.”
I add, “You suck at this game.”
He smiles as I put on my boots. I’m acutely aware that he’s watching me.
I stand. He stands. He walks me to the front door. I step out onto the porch and turn back. I don’t say anything. Neither does he. We just give each other a single nod.
I go down his steps and onto the sidewalk and three doors home. I don’t look back, but I know he’s still standing in the doorway because I didn’t hear the door shut.
I close my own front door behind me.
I lost 6–1.
I cannot remember the last time I lost at anything and didn’t care.