27. Chapter Twenty-Seven
Stanley
She walks towards her house, and this time, I let her.
That’s the whole act of heroism I’ve got in me tonight, standing on my own front walk in no coat, the cold I stopped feeling ten minutes ago crawling back into me, the party a dull thud behind the door. I let her go.
I have spent my entire life able to see a play before it develops.
I read the gap two seconds before it opens; I know where the puck’s going before the guy holding it does.
It’s the one thing I have never once had to work at.
And I’m standing on this sidewalk completely unable to read the simplest sequence anyone has ever handed me, because the two facts I’ve got refuse to live in the same sentence.
She kissed me back. Both hands on me, no camera, no chant, nobody for a hundred feet.
She kissed me back like she meant it down to the foundations.
And then she said I can’t and left like I’d hurt her.
Both of those are true. They cannot both be true.
I run it again and they’re still both true.
There’s no gap to skate into, no read to make — just two facts grinding against each other and a girl getting smaller down a dark street.
Everything in me says go. Go after her, fix it, fill the silence, that’s the move, that’s always the move — forward, toward, talk. I take half a step off the walk.
And I stop.
Because I already chased her once tonight.
Out the door, into the cold, and I told her the truth and got a real kiss back for it, and it still wasn’t enough.
And a guy doesn’t get to do that twice in one night.
Going again wouldn’t be for her. Going again would be for me.
It’d be me needing her to take the I can’t back so I can feel all right walking back into my own house, and she does not owe me that.
So I do the single hardest thing a man built like me has ever been asked to do, which is stand completely still and let a thing I want walk away without chasing it.
It costs more than the kiss did. By a distance.
I watch her door open and step inside.
Then it’s just me out here in the cold and a party I have to walk back into.
When I finally walk back in, the party is still going. Mara and Gianna are dancing. I don’t know how to deal with what just happened, so I fall into a two-step with the girls and sing the lyrics to the song.
Gianna leans over and asks, “Where did your girlfriend go?”
Gianna’s the only one in this house I still have to sell it to, so I give her the easy answer. “She went home.”
She pulls out her phone and taps a few buttons. Aspen and I pop up on the screen, lip-locked. “You guys are so cute! Look at you two.” She shoves her phone back in her pocket. “You need to bring her around more.”
Mara leans in and says, “She’s the biggest hockey nerd. She was naming every move you guys were doing at the game tonight. It was like watching it on TV.”
I smile at that. The girls return to dancing, and I need some air.
Benson is in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water.
“I don’t know, Stan,” he says, watching me. “That looked real from where I was standing.”
That’s exactly the thing I needed but didn’t want.
I give him a grin. “Everything I do is real, Reeve.”
He just looks at me.
It’s thinner than usual, the deflection, and we both hear exactly how thin, and he lets it go anyway because he’s my best friend and can see I’m already not okay.
“Don’t let it fuck with the draft.” He points in the direction of the whiteboard. “House rules.”
Then he’s gone, back into the noise, and I’m standing in my own kitchen holding a cup of water, and three doors down, the realest thing I’ve done in years is not talking to me and isn’t coming back tonight.
Saturday, we play, and I spend the warmup not looking at the family section, and then I look anyway.
Melly’s there. Gianna’s there. Lucy’s there.
Mara, Mila, and Penelope are there. The seat between Melly and Gianna is empty.
She didn’t come. I play fine. We lose. I don’t remember a second of it.
That’s when I know I didn’t just rattle something loose on that sidewalk. I broke it.
Monday morning, my agent calls, and the timing is either a mercy or a joke.
“Halifax wants you in a room,” Marchetti says.
“Nothing formal — dev staff, the scout who drafted you, probably the assistant GM pokes his head in. A get-to-know-you. And the timing’s perfect, because the league’s analytics and ops conference is in their city Wednesday and Thursday — same one every year, half the front offices in the league send people — so the Halifax brass is all in town anyway.
I slotted you Thursday morning around it.
Fly in Wednesday, sit down Thursday, and home Thursday night for your Friday game. Clean.”
And underneath the logistics sits the entire rest of my life.
Because this is part of how it gets decided — sign now, take the entry-level deal, turn pro, and go.
The biggest call I will ever make, and this meeting’s a piece of it: a room of people in good suits deciding whether the kid they drafted is ready.
This is supposed to be the most important meeting of my life.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Book it. I’m in.”
I grab it with both hands, and not because I’m calm.
I grab it because hockey is the one room in my whole life that has never confused me for a second.
Every other room right now is static — the street, the silence, the photo, the I can’t.
Hockey is the one place I always know where the puck’s going.
I need somewhere to stand that makes sense.
Halifax is somewhere to stand.
That week, I’m at the rink like I moved in.
Extra reps, extra video, staying late to take pucks off the wall until my hands quit shaking from something that isn’t the work. Locked in, I tell the boys. Locked in for Halifax. They buy it, or they’re kind enough to pretend, which from this crew comes out about the same.
And I’ve gotten nothing from her. It’s been days.
I haven’t texted her, she hasn’t texted me, and I keep doing the thing I’d sworn I wouldn’t.
I open her name, sit there with the empty box, type something, read it, delete it, and put the phone down.
I have no idea what I’m doing. I tell myself the silence is fine.
She needs room. I dumped the truth on her in the cold, and the truth’s out there now.
The next move is hers, and I’m not going to crowd her. I’m focused on Halifax.
The night before I fly, Percy catches me staying late again, alone, taking pucks off the wall in a building that wants to close.
He doesn’t say anything. Percy never says anything.
He skates over, dumps a fresh bucket of pucks at my feet so I don’t have to keep going back for them, taps me once on the shin pad with the toe of his stick, and skates off to the far end to do his own thing.
That’s the whole conversation. I see you white-knuckling it. I’m not going to make you talk about it. Here’s a bucket of pucks.
I shoot until they turn the lights down on me.
On Wednesday, I fly.
Flying’s easy. It’s the easiest thing I do all week.
Headphones in, a man on a business trip, a folder of Halifax material open on the tray table that I get about a third through before I give up and watch the clouds.
Nobody on a plane needs anything from me.
Nobody on a plane has kissed me in the cold and then walked away from me. I could do this forever.
I catch a cab to the hotel my agent booked — a big glass tower downtown, the kind of place a club puts you when it’s trying to make an impression.
I don’t think twice about it. Marchetti mentioned a conference, so the building is probably stuffed with half the league’s hockey-ops people.
It’s cool, but I’m tired, and I want to put my bag down and lie flat before tomorrow eats me.
I walk into the lobby with my duffel on my shoulder.
My heart races out of control.
Aspen Linwood is standing at the front desk. Roller bag parked at her heel. ID out, checking in, her hair down, in a coat I’ve never seen — twenty feet away, in a hotel four hundred miles from home, five days after she fisted both hands in my shirt and kissed me back and then told me she couldn’t.
I stand there with my bag on my shoulder, and my brain runs the exact sequence it ran on the sidewalk — all the data, no read, two facts that refuse to share a sentence.
Why is she here? How is she here? She works for my dad’s club.
Not Halifax. There is no reason on this earth for Aspen Linwood to be in this city, let alone this lobby, let alone at the one desk in the one hotel my agent dropped me into for the most important meeting of my life. I run it, and it won’t resolve.
She hasn’t seen me yet.
I’m standing in the middle of a hotel lobby — gutted, stunned, and baffled. What the fuck am I supposed to do?
She signs the screen.
She picks up her bag.
She turns around.