20. Futures
Chapter twenty
Futures
Emma
“ Y ou’re doing it again.” Sloane doesn’t look up from spreading peanut butter on both slices of bread because she swears it’s “extra protein.” “The phone thing. Where you check it, smile like you just nailed the game winner, and put it face-down like that’ll erase the evidence.”
Apparently being completely in love with your hockey coach shows on your face like a goddamn billboard.
I flip my phone over, attempting not to look guilty at the text I was just reading. Luke telling me about his afternoon at the tuxedo fitting with Grayson, how Gerald the tailor kept sticking him with pins.
I’d responded that he should wear the suit jacket to practice. With nothing underneath it.
Luke didn’t respond. Of course he didn’t. Luke communicates sexual frustration through strategic silence and jaw clenches, not emojis or, you know... words.
Although he’d used plenty of words Saturday night. Specifically: right there , that’s my girl , and say my name again in a voice low enough to rearrange my internal organs.
“Wedding stuff.”
“Wedding stuff,” Sloane repeats, flat as the ice we’ll be skating on in an hour. “Like your brother’s, or yours? ”
I choke on nothing. Great job not making this obvious, Cole.
“Dibs on maid of honor,” she comments, then points at my shirt. “That’s not your shirt, by the way.”
I glance down and... shit.
I’m wearing Luke’s sweatshirt. The one I stole from his apartment after a particularly memorable evening that involved his couch, his shower, and a conversation about neutral zone transitions that somehow became the most effective foreplay I’ve ever experienced.
In my defense, the way that man breaks down hockey systems should be classified as an aphrodisiac.
I glance toward the living room, checking on the proximity of our other two housemates. “You know the truth, but no one else can. What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing. I just enjoy watching you pretend. It’s like dinner theater, except the lead actress keeps forgetting she’s not supposed to look at the director like she wants to eat him alive.”
“I do not—”
“Yesterday. Film session. He was pointing at the screen and you were staring at his forearm like it was the answer to winning the game.”
I can’t argue. Because the secrecy of our arrangement doesn’t make me more discreet, it makes me hyperaware.
Every time he’s near me, my body runs a full inventory: distance, angle, whether his sleeves are rolled up (devastating) or down (manageable), and how many minutes until I can touch him without anyone seeing.
It’s exhausting. It’s exhilarating. It’s the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to my attention span.
“Afternoon, ladies.” Sky appears at the bottom of the stairs in her pre-pool attire. “Why does Emma look like she swallowed a secret?”
“Oh, she swallowed something alright,” Sloane mutters.
“SLOANE.”
“What? I said something . Could be anything. A vitamin. Toast.”
Sky grabs a protein shake, studying me. Then the oversized Silver Pine hockey sweatshirt I’m wearing.
“That’s a men’s large,” she says casually. Her too. “Chase has the same one. From three years ago. Which means I won the bet.”
“I swear nothing stays a secret in this house.”
“Not when you come in every night like you’ve just had the best orgasm of your life,” Sloane mutters before shoving her sandwich into her mouth .
Sometimes I really hate my roommates.
After Sky heads to the pool and Sloane’s finished her second sandwich, she looks at me with the version of herself that lives beneath the jokes.
The one who held my hair back in Iowa when I drank too much on New Year’s Eve (aka her birthday) and cried about being terrified that Luke might run again.
“You good? Actually good?”
I pull the sleeves of Luke’s sweatshirt over my hands. Consider the honest answer.
“Stupid happy,” I confess. “The kind where I catch myself smiling for no reason and don’t recognize the person doing it.” A pause. “And also terrified. Because the happier I get, the more there is to lose.”
“Does he know that?”
I think about Luke two nights ago, face buried in my hair, voice rough with something too big for words. I can’t lose you, Em. I just got you. “Yeah. He knows.”
“Then you’ll figure it out.” She says it with the unshakeable confidence of a newly-turned nineteen-year-old who hasn’t learned that love doesn’t always solve things.
Still, I spend the rest of the evening praying she’s right.
His call comes at 9:47 PM.
Not a text. A call.
Luke doesn’t call casually. Texts are casual. Calls mean something needs to be said out loud because the words are too important (or too fragile) for a screen.
I’m in my room. Cross-legged on the bed with a textbook I stopped reading twenty minutes ago, surrounded by the ghost of a man who slept here before he slept beside me.
“Hey you,” I answer. “Was curious when you’d finally reach out.”
“It’s been a crazy day.” There’s a current to his tone I can’t place. Excitement and caution braided together. The sound of someone holding a box they’ve been waiting to open and aren’t sure they should.
“Good crazy or bad crazy? ”
“Good, I hope.”
“Uh oh.”
He almost laughs. “I got a phone call this afternoon. At the fitting with Gray.”
“From who?”
“Jennifer Walsh.” A beat. “She’s in charge of the player invitations. For this summer’s Olympic Hockey development camp.”
The word Olympic enters my bloodstream and everything goes quiet, that held-breath, edge-of-the-blade stillness where the whole world narrows to a single point.
“Olympics?”
“They’ve been reviewing material from our program. Scouting packages, game film. Emma, they’re coming to evaluate you at our final home game. Against Oakmont.”
My hand grips the phone tighter.
“You and Sloane,” he modifies, and his voice does that thing, the one from the highway, from his bed, from every moment where Coach Anderson dissolves and it’s just Luke.
Raw and real and unable to hide what he’s feeling.
“They want to see you live, speak with you, before committing to your invitation.”
Development camp. The first step of making the Olympic team.
Representing the U.S. as one of the best players in the country.
A dream I’ve spent years fantasizing about, but never saying out loud until last month. Because wanting something that big felt like an invitation for the universe to snatch it away.
“Em? You still there?”
“I’m here.” My voice sounds wrong. Too small for what I’m feeling. “I’m just… The Olympics, Luke.”
“Yeah, babe, the Olympics. Team USA. Where you deserve to be.”
I let that sink in. Let the possibility settle with only the sound of his breathing and mine.
But just as soon as the idea of achieving greatness, of being seen by someone who can bring my career from a college player to a household name becomes real, something else hits.
Fear .
Not because I’m afraid I won’t make it past the first camp, but the fear that I will.
That come June, I might be gone for who knows how long. Off to Lake Placid, to the training center in Colorado Springs, flying internationally for tournaments and media appearances and who knows what else.
That’s why he was hesitant earlier.
That’s why he didn’t call me until now.
“You already did the math,” I whisper.
His exhale is answer enough. “Yeah.”
“When?”
“The second Walsh said ‘summer development camp.’ Probably before she finished the sentence.”
“And?”
“And it doesn’t change anything.”
“It changes everything, Luke.” I press my palm against my hip.
Against the tattoo. Against the number that’s been part of my body longer than he’s been part of my life in the way I wanted.
“If I make the team, it could mean I’m away for the better part of a year.
All of next season, for sure. And I just.. .”
I can’t finish.
I just got you.
The sentence sits between us, unspoken but loud as a horn.
“I’m coming over,” I tell him.
“Em, it’s almost ten. If someone sees—”
“I don’t care.”
“You should care. The Olympic committee sure as hell cares. If anyone—”
“I’m coming over.” Not angry. Not desperate. “I’ll be discreet.”
He doesn’t argue.
He never could when I use that voice.
The drive to his apartment takes seven minutes.
Seven minutes of dark roads and cold January air through the cracked window because I need the shock of it to keep my head clear.
Seven minutes of the radio playing something I don’t hear because the only sound that matters is the echo of Olympic development camp and gone and the fact that Luke built the scouting package that led to the phone call doing laps in my skull.
Seven minutes to sit with the cruelest equation of my life: the man I love hand-built the path that leads me away from him. Did it before he loved me openly. Did it because he loved me more than he wanted me close.
I pull into the parking lot of his complex. Building C. Unit 21B. The apartment I’ve been sneaking into for two weeks like a woman committing a crime she has zero remorse about.
The door opens before I knock.
He’s in sweats and a white t-shirt that’s absolutely destructive to my composure. Even with his hair sticking up in fifteen different angles, he’s adorable as sin.
His eyes find mine and I see it all. The same collision happening in him that’s happening in me: joy and dread, celebration and grief, the paradox of getting everything you’ve wanted and realizing the cost is denominated in the one currency you can’t afford.
I don’t think about it. Don’t weigh it. Don’t run the scenarios or check the angles or consider who might be watching from a neighboring window.
I step through the door and kiss him.
Not tender. Not the slow, deliberate kisses he gives me in bed, the ones that feel like being mapped by someone who plans to make a permanent home of you.