24. Chapter Twenty-Four
Aspen
Monday, my life is waiting for me exactly where I left it, and it doesn’t fit anymore.
This is the thing no one warns you about.
You can go away for a few days and come home to find every object in your home exactly where you left it — the coffee where the coffee lives, the laptop in the same place from Wednesday night, the whole careful machine of your life still ticking — and the only thing that’s changed is you, which means none of it fits, because the person it was all built around isn’t the one who walked back through the door.
I have a call Tuesday — the org’s analytics group, my numbers, my read on a Western Conference team I’ve been tracking since training camp.
I’m behind on my master’s application because I gave a weekend to Connecticut, and now the writing sample sits at two-thirds done and judging me.
So I open the work and let it sort my insides into columns.
Work has never once let me down. And it doesn’t let me down now, either.
The numbers behave. The deck builds. The sentences come.
It just doesn’t fill the room the way it used to.
I keep drifting.
And every time I drift, I drift to the same place. The note.
It’s on my desk, propped against the base of the lamp, where I set it the night I got back and have left it every day since. A torn square of my mother’s grocery notepad, five words on it in handwriting I would know anywhere now.
I’ll make you another pie.
I found it the morning he flew out, back in Connecticut — sitting on top of my father’s oxford, folded over the back of my old vanity chair with the tie laid across it.
He was already gone when I woke up. States between us by the time I woke up.
I left the shirt folded on the chair for my dad.
But I stole the note off the top of it and put it in my coat pocket.
I carried it back home into my real life, and I have not thrown it away.
I watched the game on Friday. I have the entire professional vocabulary for what he did out there.
I could write it up clean — the forecheck pressure, the two turnovers he forced below the dots that turned into goals, the plus-three, the gap control that doesn’t land anywhere on a stat sheet.
I could put eleven pages next to anybody’s coffee on exactly what Stanley Ermington did to a ranked team on no sleep.
But there’s a thing underneath the vocabulary that doesn’t go in a report.
He played furious.
I know furious. I have watched a thousand hockey games, and I can tell the difference between a man who’s locked in and a man who is burning something off. Friday and Saturday, he was burning something off, every single shift, and I think I know exactly what it was.
It was mine. I handed it to him on Thursday.
The worst week of my life laid out flat for the first time in three years.
And the very next night, he carried it out onto the ice under a national broadcast and skated it into the boards, shift after shift, and the announcers called it a breakout, a draft-stock riser, and a statement game.
I set it down the way he taught me.
It doesn’t stay down. That’s the part of the lesson he left out — that whatever a guy thinks about you is his, not yours, works fine on a stranger’s opinion, and not at all on this.
You can put what people think of you on the floor and walk away from it.
You cannot put I watched him bleed for me on television anywhere that it’ll stay.
On my phone, I opened his name twice that weekend.
The first time I got as far as the empty message box, and I had nothing to put in it because every word I’ve ever said to this man has been required by our little arrangement.
The second time, I typed, good game. I looked at it for a long minute and deleted it one letter at a time. I don’t know how to start a conversation with him, so I don’t.
On Wednesday, I received a text message I wasn’t expecting.
Gianna: Let’s have lunch on Friday. You, me, and Lucy.
Gianna Reeve. Benson’s younger sister — louder than him by a lot, the kind of girl who knows how to have fun and is outgoing. I’ve known her for years, and we’ve hung out a few times, so this friendly text message isn’t that bizarre. I’ve even gone to a Hawthorne House party with her friend group.
My first instinct when I read the text message is to dodge her and steer clear.
I am not a girl-lunch person. I have never been a girl-lunch person.
I don’t have a group. I’ve never had a group.
I have my roommates and a best friend from high school, but that’s it.
I’m the contained one. The one who doesn’t get the invite.
The one who made sure, a long time ago, that she’d never need the invite, so that not getting it could never mean anything.
And right behind the dodge, the old reflex — the same one the toast tripped.
They’re asking because of him. This is a courtesy.
This is the thing the girlfriend gets, folded into the group the way a new hire gets added to the birthday list — a function of the boyfriend, not a person in her own right.
They’re being kind to Stanley Ermington’s girlfriend.
The lie has gone and earned me a social life I did not earn myself, and it stings in the exact way my father’s toast stung.
I’m being handed something for entirely the wrong reason.
And then — and I want to be honest about how small this is, and how enormous — I accept anyway.
I talk myself into it, and the talking-into is the vulnerable part, the part I would never say out loud to a living soul: more friends would be nice.
I’m twenty-one years old, and I have never, not once, had this.
And of every group of women on the planet, this is the one that would actually understand the specific deranged shape of my life — Gianna grew up the sister of it, Lucy’s dating straight into it, they both speak the language with no translator required.
I want it.
I let myself want it.
That, for me, is the growth. Not the lunch. Wanting the lunch and not talking myself out of it. Choosing the thing instead of defending the wall I built.
Me: Count me in.
The place is a cramped Italian spot near campus with paper tablecloths and a candle stuck in a wine bottle on every table, and Lucy is already there when I come in.
She stands up and hugs me like we’ve done this a hundred times, which we have not, and Gianna blows in six minutes later already mid-sentence, before she’s fully through the door.
Lucy is warm in a way that is also watchful.
She hugs you and reads you in the same motion — the kind of person who has the whole table understood before the breadbasket lands, who has, I’d bet, had Stanley figured out since long before I did.
Gianna is faster, sharper, and louder, running three conversations at once and saying out loud the thing everyone else at the table has politely agreed not to say.
I came in braced for it to be a performance. For the warmth to carry a transactional edge. For ninety minutes of being the girlfriend.
It isn’t. They’re just nice to me. There’s no audition on my end, and the sheer uncomplicatedness of this helps me lower my guard, because nothing in my life is uncomplicated, and I don’t have a defense built for people who are simply, plainly glad I came.
Somewhere over the pasta, Gianna says something unprintable about a freshman defenseman on Camden’s blue line, and I laugh.
Really laugh. Before I’ve done the analyst thing of explaining the tape that proves her right.
I just laugh, because it’s funny, and I’m inside the joke because I get it.
She talks, lives, and breathes hockey, and so do I.
I have spent my entire life adjacent to a room full of men. Useful in it. Translating for it. Performing for it. I have never once been inside a circle of women who already speak the language, and I didn’t know it would feel this good inside of it.
And then Gianna reaches for the last piece of bread.
“Benson says Stan’s been different since you,” she says. “Like — actually different. Less annoying –– oh my god, no offense.”
I smile because Stanley is so annoying. She takes my smile as permission.
“Girl, I never thought Stanley would change. The guys all said that he’s been having dance parties inside the locker room.” She tears the bread in half. “You have to see the video. Lucy.”
Lucy looks a little reluctant, but Gianna sticks out her hand, and Lucy presses a few things on her phone.
A familiar song I can’t name starts playing, and then Lucy slides the phone over.
Sure enough, there’s Stanley doing something very serious with his face while he sings the lyrics.
He moves his body in good rhythm in the locker room, and then he stands on the bench and moves his hips in a thrusting movement.
I stare at the video, a little stunned that this is how he is in the locker room.
It’s not surprising. I just hadn’t thought about it.
Then his white ass cheeks are on full display, playing peek-a-boo with the camera.
I hear the roar of all the guys, laughing, hollering, and saying all different kinds of things.
I slap a hand over my mouth, and the video ends.
Gianna clicks the phone screen off, sliding it back to Lucy. She waggles her brows at me and says, “So you’re one of us now.”
I blink. One of us now. Just like that.
I can’t correct her. There is no way that actually, none of it’s real comes out of my mouth at this table.
He’s been different since you.
I am quietly, and more every day, afraid that it isn’t a lie.
Lucy is watching me from across the table. She doesn’t say anything.
Gianna says, “Aspen, you’re coming to the game, right? We’ll be there. Sit with us.”
“Oh,” I say, not knowing how to get out of this one.
“You’re coming right?” Lucy asks quietly. “Do you have a ticket?”
Gianna scoffs. “Oh my god, Stan can get you a ticket.”
“Yeah, no. I’ll be there. I’ll text you.”
“You can get ready at our place if you’d like.”
I’m already shaking my head. “That’s okay. I’ll meet you guys there.”
Lucy smiles.
Gianna beams. “You’re coming to Hawthorne after, right?”
I look at Lucy. Lucy appears just as nervous as I am with these questions.
“Yeah,” I say automatically. “Of course.”
“Let’s go together,” Gianna says.
I smile. “Yeah, okay. I’ll see you guys tonight.”
After, I drive home with the lunch sitting warm in my chest and a crack running clean through the middle of the warmth.
I went in braced for a courtesy, and I came out with the worst possible result, which is that I loved it, and I loved them. And now I’m going to have to play the role of Stanley’s girlfriend in front of another crowd tonight.
When I get home, I look three doors down and wonder if I just made another mistake.