38. Choose
Chapter thirty-eight
Choose
Sienna POV
Mason shows up at O'Malley's at four in the afternoon, which is either a coincidence or a calculated move, and with Mason Knox it is never a coincidence.
I'm restocking the speed rail when the back door opens. I don't look up. I know the sound of his walk the same way I know the creak on the third stair of my apartment building: it's just a fact of my life, absorbed so long ago it stopped registering as information.
He sits on the counter beside the register, legs dangling, the way he used to do when we were twenty-three and I was still learning how to close a bar alone.
"You're going to the arena tonight," he says.
"Am I."
"You've been staring at the game schedule on your phone since this morning."
I set down a bottle of rye and look at him. He looks back, completely unashamed of knowing me this well.
"He's going to be there," I say. "The vote happens tonight."
"I know."
"I don't know what I'd even be going for."
Mason tilts his head. "Yeah, you do."
I don't answer that. I pick up the rye again and slot it into place and count the vermouth bottles like the inventory is suddenly urgent.
He lets me have about thirty seconds of that before he speaks.
"He was never taught that love and safety were the same thing.
" His voice is quieter now. Not careful, exactly.
Just honest. "He learned that love is a liability.
That caring about someone means they become a target, so you keep them close by keeping them in the dark.
" He pauses. "He's learning. Don't make him pay for finally getting it. "
I stop pretending to count vermouth.
The bar hums around us, refrigerators and the faint tick of the sign above the door, all the small machinery of a place waiting to be needed.
"He kept things from me," I say. "I showed up at his door at two in the morning once, three years ago, when I thought my dad had found my apartment.
He drove me around for an hour until I stopped shaking and never asked me a single question.
That's the kind of trust we have. And he still decided there were things about my own life I didn't get to know. "
"He did."
"That's not a small thing."
"No," Mason agrees. "It's not." He waits a beat. "But you know why he did it. And knowing why doesn't make it right, but it does make it something you can work with instead of something you have to wall yourself off from."
I look at my best friend sitting on the counter of the bar I built from nothing, his face so open it almost hurts, and I think about the version of me who never let anyone in this close.
Who had a back exit mapped in every room.
Who catalogued reasons to leave before she'd finished deciding to stay.
"I hate that you're right," I tell him.
"I know." He grins, and it splits into something warmer. "Also, if you hurt him I'll make your life difficult in petty, inconvenient ways."
The laugh comes up out of me before I can help it, bright and sudden, landing somewhere between funny and relief and something that might be the last of the tension draining out through the soles of my feet.
"What kind of inconvenient ways," I say.
"Nothing dramatic. I'll put decaf in your regular coffee. Label your bottles wrong. Show up at inconvenient moments."
"You already do the last one."
"Exactly." He hops off the counter. "So you've got nothing to lose."
He pulls me in for a hug before he goes, and I hold on for a second longer than usual, and he lets me.
The arena is loud even from the parking lot.
I sit in my car for three minutes, which is two and a half minutes longer than I intended.
The announcements haven't started yet. The captaincy vote, according to the league's official process, happens privately in the locker room, with the team's decision relayed to management before the night's game.
Whether it gets announced publicly tonight depends on the team, on Hale, on whether anyone decides that kind of thing belongs to the locker room or to the crowd.
I don't know what Atticus wants.
I'm not sure he knows either.
But I know what I want, and I've spent enough of my life treating that knowledge like something dangerous.
I get out of the car.
The arena seat I find puts me three rows from the ice, behind the home bench, visible from most angles.
I sit with my coat in my lap and my hands folded over it, which is an improvement on the alternative.
Around me the crowd fills in. A woman two seats over has a Tridents banner.
A group of kids in oversized jerseys argues about the projected lineup.
I watch the clock above the ice and tell myself I'm not doing anything dramatic. I'm just here. He can see that or not see it, and either way I will not disappear.
The first period starts without any announcement.
The suspension was lifted four days ago. He's been cleared. I know this. I've been watching the news like it's a second job.
I watch Atticus play.
He's different without the C. Not worse, sharper maybe, in a way that reads almost like relief.
He plays without the weight of managing every variable on the ice, and what's underneath that is exactly what you'd expect from someone who has been doing this since he was old enough to hold a stick: pure, clean hockey.
A defenceman gets turned around in his own zone and Atticus is already in position before anyone else reads the play.
He wins a board battle in the corner that he has no business winning at his angle and comes out of it with the puck and a second to spare and no expression whatsoever.
Jonah Pike scores in the second period off a pass that Atticus absolutely did not have to make but did, and the crowd comes up in a wave of noise, and I watch Atticus tap Pike on the helmet and skate back toward the bench like it was nothing.
It isn't nothing.
I know that.
The announcement comes between the second and third periods, read over the PA by the arena announcer in the same tone he uses for promotional giveaways:
"The Tridents organization would like to announce that following a team vote earlier this evening, Atticus Knox has been reinstated as captain of the Vancouver Tridents."
The crowd does not react quietly.
Every person in this building is making noise and I am the only one sitting completely still, hands white-knuckled in my lap, because if I move even slightly I don't know what comes out. Relief, maybe. Or the thing I've been calling something else for months and running out of other names for.
When the third period starts, Atticus skates out with the C back on his chest. He stops at center ice for half a second, looking at nothing. Then he looks at the stands.
He finds me in about six seconds, which, in a building with two hundred people between us and the ice, is frankly unreasonable.
His eyes ask the question he can't ask out loud. The one that has nothing to do with hockey.
I nod. Once. Small. Certain.
And I watch his face change.
Not dramatically. Not in a way the cameras will catch or the crowd will notice. Something in the set of his shoulders releases. Something behind his eyes, that particular guarded quality he carries like a habit, loosens in a way I have only seen a handful of times.
He turns back to the ice.
I breathe out.
Around me the crowd is on their feet and I stay in my seat, hands finally quiet in my lap, watching a man I love play hockey with the C back on his chest, and I think about what Mason said.
He's learning.
So am I.