41. Lucy
LUCY
NOW
By August, love had stopped arriving like a confession.
It came in coffee cups left on my desk before eight and a toothbrush tucked beside his sink.
It came in the blanket he kept folded over the back of his couch because Dottie liked that one best, and in the way my favorite mug had somehow ended up in his kitchen cabinet without either of us discussing what that meant.
The first time Ty and I had loved each other, everything had felt bright and urgent and too big for the bodies we were living in. At eighteen, love had been summer heat and lake water and promises made under a sky wide enough to make anything seem possible.
This time, adoration did not ask to be believed all at once. It simply kept showing up until the shape of it became impossible to deny.
Dottie noticed before I let myself say it out loud.
Every morning, whether we left from my apartment or his lake house or met in the middle because we were still trying to be responsible adults about the whole thing, she trotted ahead of me with her leash between her teeth and a deeply unrealistic faith in routine.
She expected Ty’s truck. She expected his hand on her head.
She expected him to crouch in front of her and say, “Morning, Dot,” like she had personally saved his life by existing in his general direction.
Before I noticed how easily my hand found his in the dark now.
Before I noticed that Naomi had stopped pretending she was not pleased every time a Paper Lantern cup appeared on my desk.
Before I noticed that the basket of Dottie’s toys in the corner of Ty’s living room looked less like something temporary and more like evidence.
That morning, Dottie pulled me down the shaded path at Alder Lake Park with her ears flopping, her paws damp from the grass, and her entire body committed to the idea that every squirrel was a direct threat to national security.
Ty walked beside me with his coffee in one hand and Dottie’s collapsible water bowl clipped to his belt loop. He had not asked if he could bring it. He had just started bringing it.
That was how so much of the last several weeks unfolded. Quietly. Without ceremony. Without either of us standing in the middle of our lives and announcing that something permanent was being built.
The first morning after he had asked me if I was his girlfriend again, he showed up at my office with coffee and did not kiss me in the hallway.
The next night, he came over and helped me rearrange the books on the shelves he had watched me pick out weeks before, then fell asleep on my couch with Dottie’s head on his thigh and one hand still wrapped around my ankle.
Two days later, I stayed at his house and found a drawer emptied for me in a nightstand.
I had stared at it for so long Ty had leaned in the doorway, arms crossed over his bare chest, hair still damp from the shower, and said, “Too much?”
I slipped my travel makeup pouch and my sketch pad into their new home. “It’s perfectly thoughtful.”
Then he had smiled at me, slow and sleepy and beautiful.
He did not ask me to rush. He did not take one night in his bed and turn it into an assumption that my life had moved. He did not make jokes in front of the team. He did not crowd me at work. He did not push when I needed a door half-open instead of flung wide.
But he made room. A toothbrush. A drawer. A blanket Dottie liked. A quiet place for my coffee on his dock in the morning. His hand finding mine under the kitchen table when the past tried to put its teeth in me.
We were not what we had been at eighteen.
We were slower. More careful. More honest.
Dottie lunged toward a bush, snorted, and then sneezed so violently she startled herself.
Ty looked down at her. “Very intimidating.”
“She is a trained predator.”
“She is shaped like a bread loaf.”
“She heard that.”
Dottie shook her entire body, ears slapping softly against her cheeks, then resumed her walk with great dignity.
I sipped my coffee and listened to the sound of lake water through the trees, the distant slap of someone’s paddleboard against the dock, the buzz of cicadas in the heat already gathering under the morning sun.
Late summer had a thickness to it, even in Minnesota.
It held on. It pressed close. It made everything feel a little more honest than it had any right to be.
Ty glanced over at me. “You’re thinking loud.”
“That is not a real observation.”
“It is now.”
I cut him a look over the top of my cup. “You have gotten very confident for a man who once asked me if Dottie needed her own side of the bed.”
“She steals pillows.”
“She has needs.”
His mouth curved. “So do you.”
There was nothing particularly scandalous in the way he said it. His voice was low, yes, and there was heat under it because there was always heat under it, banked and steady and waiting. But there was tenderness.
Ty stepped closer, close enough that the sleeve of his T-shirt brushed my arm. “We’re going to be terrible at this today,” he said.
“At what?”
“Hiding.”
I looked toward the parking lot through the trees.
The Frosthawks lake day was already happening somewhere across town at an old lodge the organization rented every summer for informal off-season chaos.
Players, staff, families, kids, coolers, grills, towels, probably at least one injured ego before noon.
Arlo was catering because North Line had become less a restaurant and more a civic institution with excellent fries.
After weeks of people pretending not to notice the coffee and the way he looked at me when he thought no one else was watching.
We were absolutely going to be terrible at hiding.
A month earlier, the idea of walking into a Frosthawks event with Ty beside me would have made my skin feel too small.
Not because I was ashamed of him. Never because of that.
But because being seen meant people got to have opinions.
Being seen meant the thing was real enough for others to point at.
I looked at him. “I know.”
His gaze moved over my face, careful in that way he had learned. He did not smile like this was a victory. He did not reach for me like my answer belonged to him. He only asked, “Okay?”
I stepped into him and kissed him. It was supposed to be quick. A small thing, maybe, something to answer him without making too much of the way my chest had gone tight.
Ty’s free hand came to my waist, gentle at first and then firmer when I did not step away.
His thumb pressed into the bare strip of skin where my tank top had ridden up, and my whole body remembered him.
Not eighteen-year-old Ty, not the boy with summer on his skin and a future he did not know how to hold yet.
His mouth moved over mine slowly, like we had time. Like he was not interested in stealing anything. Like he would rather be invited.
The kiss deepened, and the park disappeared in pieces. The cicadas. The lake. My coffee cooling in my hand. Dottie making a deeply offended noise at our feet.
Ty smiled against my mouth.
I pulled back just enough to breathe. “Your girlfriend is trying to walk the dog.”
His eyes were warm and unguarded. “My girlfriend kissed me first.”
I lifted my coffee. “Your girlfriend has a hot beverage and excellent aim.”
“Understood, Shortcake.”
By the time we got to the truck, I had finished half my coffee and made a bargain with myself that I would not overthink arriving together. I lasted until Ty opened the passenger door for me.
“This is suspicious,” I said.
He looked over the top of the door. “Us arriving in the same vehicle?”
“With our dog.”
His mouth twitched.
I caught it too late. “I did not mean—”
“You did.” He leaned in, one hand braced on the roof, and kissed me once, quick and warm. “You said our dog.”
“I was under duress.”
“You were standing in a parking lot.” He looked so happy that it made my ribs ache.
Ty shut my door before I could say anything that would make us both too soft for a team lake day.
The Frosthawks rental lodge sat on a private lake across town, tucked back through a long gravel drive lined with pines and birch trees.
It was old-school Minnesota in a way that felt almost staged, all weathered cedar siding, green trim, screen doors, and a wide back lawn sloping down to a dock and a narrow strip of sand someone was generously calling a beach.
By the time we arrived, the place was already alive.
Kids ran barefoot through the grass with pool noodles.
Someone had music playing low from a speaker near the lodge.
Paddleboards were stacked along the mini beach.
Two of the younger players were engaged in what appeared to be a deeply serious cornhole dispute.
North Line staff moved between folding tables loaded with covered trays, coolers, and enough food to feed a professional hockey team, their families, and possibly an invading army.
Ezra stood near the grill in linen shorts and a Frosthawks cap, laughing at something Lo had said while Lo pointed a plastic fork at him like she was conducting a trial.
Bea sat in the shade beneath a striped umbrella, one hand resting on the curve of her belly, dark hair pinned up, sunglasses on, looking too polished for someone who was thirty-nine weeks pregnant and sitting in ninety-degree heat.
Alois stood behind her chair with a bottle of water in one hand and the posture of a man prepared to physically intimidate the weather if necessary.
Arlo was near the food tables, sleeves rolled to his elbows, giving instructions to two staff members while pretending he had not personally checked every container twice.
Ty put the truck in park.
Every head within a thirty-foot radius turned.