17. Show Me
Chapter seventeen
Show Me
Luke
January
Emma
Happy New Year, Coach. Resolution #1: you. Repeatedly. In every room of your apartment. Starting with the front door. Oh, and that empty wall in your hallway. I’d like to be on it.
I read this text in the ballroom of a Caribbean resort while my mother and her new husband Dakota, the-cryptocurrency-guy who might run a Ponzi scheme, cut a six-tier cake. Had to stay seated until my body agreed to behave.
That was three days ago.
Since landing at five I’ve unpacked, showered, started a load of laundry, organized my practice plans for next week, and consumed three cups of coffee that I don’t need but am drinking anyway because idle hands and an idle mind in this apartment are a dangerous combination when I know what Emma plans to do in here.
Tomorrow . I’m supposed to see her tomorrow. Practice doesn’t resume until the sixth, so we’d made plans for dinner. Her choice. Somewhere off campus where we could sit across from each other without the entire student body (or athletic department) as an audience.
Tomorrow. I can wait until tomorrow. I’ve waited years. Another eighteen hours is nothing.
My phone sits on the kitchen counter, screen dark.
A device that contains four hundred text messages from a woman I’m in love with.
They span seven days of escalating intimacy that range from the mundane ( My mom made sweet potatoes and it wasn’t nearly as good as yours from Thanksgiving) to the devastating ( I touched myself last night thinking about Christmas Eve.
About your hand over my mouth. About what you said.
I came so hard I saw stars and they weren’t the glow-in-the-dark ones on my ceiling ).
That last one was sent at 1 AM while I was lying in a resort bed listening to the ocean and trying not to lose my mind.
What I wanted to respond: Tell me everything. What you were wearing. What you were thinking. Whether you said my name when you came.
What I actually responded: You’re going to be the death of me, Cole.
What she sent back: Promise?
I pour my fourth coffee. It’s excessive. I’m aware it’s excessive. My heart rate doesn’t need caffeine. It needs the woman responsible for its current irregularity to either show up or stop texting me things that make me grip the counter like I’m trying to leave indentions in granite.
Tomorrow .
The knock comes at 7:27 PM.
I know it’s her before I open the door. The same way I knew she’d entered the rink at midnight. The same way I know when she’s behind me at the arena. That shift in molecular composition that means Emma Cole is nearby and my body has rearranged its priorities accordingly.
I open the door.
She’s in leggings. They’re black. Gripping her thighs as tightly as I want to be.
And instead of her usual hoodie, she’s in a sweater, something nice and hanging off one shoulder to expose enough skin that I have zero clue what actual color it is because I don't bother looking. Her hair’s down.
No makeup. Cheeks pink from the January cold.
She’s holding a bottle of champagne in one hand and wearing an expression that is simultaneously the most innocent and most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen .
“Happy New Year,” she greets.
“It’s January third.”
“I’m aware of the date.”
“We said tomorrow.”
“We did.” She tilts the champagne toward me.
“But I’ve been in Iowa for the last five days with Sloane’s family.
I mean they’re wonderful and chaotic and have four dogs.
And I just thought… Got back an hour ago and…
” She pauses. Recalibrates. Drops the performance.
“I missed you. And eighteen more hours felt stupid when you’re right here. ”
It is stupid. Every minute I’ve spent away from her has been stupid, and the months before that, and the years before that, and the entire elaborate architecture of noble self-denial I built to justify the stupidity.
“Come here.”
She grins. Steps inside. The door closes behind her.
The apartment is the same as it was when she was here in October.
Sparse. Organized. Still aggressively impersonal.
Except now there are two photos on the bookshelf instead of one.
The engagement party shot is still there.
Beside it, I’ve added one from the season.
It was our away game against Westmont. A photo that appeared on the team’s social media page.
Emma at center ice with her arms raised, the scoreboard lit up behind her.
She notices immediately. Walks to it. Touches the frame.
“When did you put this up?”
“Before I left for the wedding. I saw the one at your mom’s house and…” A beat that I can’t decide how to describe what I want to say. Then, “I wanted something to come home to.”
She turns. The champagne hangs at her side, forgotten. Her eyes are doing that thing where the bravado drops and the real Emma surfaces, the one who’s terrified that the things she wants will be taken away because that’s what her life has taught her.
“You called it home,” she comments.
“It’s… getting there.”
The distance between us is six feet. From where I am by the door to where she’s at by the bookshelf, the geography of a small apartment that suddenly feels like a continent.
She crosses it. Sets the champagne on the end table without looking. Stands in front of me without actually touching. Waiting. Letting me choose.
As if there’s any version of this where I don’t choose her .
My hands find the hem of her sweater. Not pulling…
just holding the fabric between my fingers, feeling the warmth of her underneath, grounding myself in the reality that she’s here .
In my apartment. After a week of texts and distance and a Caribbean wedding that reminded me what love looks like when it’s built on sand versus something that feels a lot more like bedrock.
“I had a plan for tomorrow. Dinner. Conversation like normal adults who are dating,” I tell her, not sure what I’m supposed to say, if I can do what I actually want to.
Her hands cover mine where they’re holding her hem. “I don’t need dinner.” Her chin dips toward where the champagne sits on the table behind her. “Didn’t bring champagne because I’m thirsty.”
“I just want to do this right.”
“Who says what’s right?”
“I don’t want you to think—”
“I want you , Luke. Not dinner. Or a fancy date.” She rises on her toes, her mouth near my ear, and her voice drops to something low and liquid and designed to dissolve whatever remains of my self-control. “Just me and you and time and whatever you want to do with it.”
My fingers hook into the waistband at her hips, drawing her against me in a motion that’s more instinct than decision.
That’s when I see the ink I glimpsed last week. Black characters sprawled across her hip bone. One’s I didn’t ask about when we had two minutes and there were much more important needs to take care of.
She’s got hockey sticks behind her ear that I’ve seen a hundred times. Studied it when she wasn’t looking. Wondered when she got it, what it meant.
But this…
I tug the fabric down just an inch more to get a better glimpse of it. Characters I don’t immediately recognize. Elegant, vertical.
Then I fucking freeze.
Because right below them are roman numerals.
XIX
Nineteen.
My number.
MY fucking number.
I’m staring at the tattoo the way I stare at game film. Processing, analyzing, connecting variables that have been sitting in my peripheral vision for months that are now snapping into focus with the violent clarity of a picture I should have seen long ago.
“Luke?” Emma’s voice has changed. The confidence stripped away, replaced by something raw and exposed. “I was going to tell you—”
“Nineteen.” My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. “That was my jersey number when I played here.”
She doesn’t deny it. Doesn’t deflect. Doesn’t deploy any of the weapons in her considerable arsenal of self-protection.
“Yes,” she answers.
“When?”
“Senior year. You played your first game back. After the injury. After everyone said you’d never play again.” Her voice cracks. “You scored on the first shift. I wanted to remember…”
“Remember what, Em?”
“That anything is possible.”
Something in me fractures.
Four years .
She’s had my number on her skin for FOUR YEARS.
Mine .
And I didn’t even know it.
My thumb traces the characters. Light. Reverent. The skin beneath is warm and soft, a counterpoint to the permanence of what’s written there.
“What do the characters say?”
“Strength and determination.”
Christ .
“Emma.” Her name comes out broken. Split down the middle like a word that can’t contain what I’m asking it to carry. “You were eighteen.”
“I knew what I was doing.”
“You put my number on your body.”
“I put you on my body.” She catches my wrist. Not pulling my hand away, just holding it there, my thumb against her ink, her pulse beating beneath my fingertips. “Because I wanted something permanent to remind me that the people I love don’t give up.”
I can’t speak. My throat has closed around something that might be grief or joy or the specific, devastating recognition that I have been loved—truly, permanently loved—by this woman since before I understood what she was offering .
All those years. All that distance. Every text I didn’t return, every holiday I skipped, every time I told myself she was just Grayson’s sister, just a crush, just a phase we’d outgrow.
She had my number on her hip. Proof against her skin that what she felt wasn’t passing or performative or any of the diminishing words I used to dismiss it.
Because the alternative—that Emma Cole loved me with the kind of certainty you ink into your body at eighteen—was too enormous to hold.
“Drew saw it,” I say. The pieces click together like a play developing on ice. “That’s what you meant by his questions. By the pictures he saw.”
Emma nods. “He put two and two together and—”