Chapter 12
KEEGAN
I find it during warm-up because I have found Evie in that seat before every home game for five years. Red scarf when the building is cold. Coffee balanced between both hands. One ankle hooked behind the other when she is nervous, as if she can hold herself still by force.
Tonight the black plastic shines beneath the arena lights.
Jake fires a puck at my skates. “Eyes down here, Romeo.”
I catch it on the blade and send it hard into the corner. “Fuck off.”
“After we win.” He circles away before I can answer, shoulders loose beneath his jersey.
The crowd is already standing. Noise rolls down from the upper bowl and strikes the ice in waves. Game 7. Win, and we keep playing. Lose, and the season ends beneath the lights we own. This is the kind of pressure my body understands: a clock, a line, a man trying to take space I need.
My marriage has none of those mercies.
I take the opening faceoff and lose it clean. Their center wins the puck backward, and the first shift becomes thirty seconds of defense. A shot hits my shin pad. Jake clears the rebound off the boards. I change with my lungs burning and glance once toward 114.
Empty. Coach leans over the boards. “Mattix, you planning to join us?”
I grip the rail. “I’m here.” The next shift, I prove it.
Their defenseman pinches too deep. I strip the puck at our blue line, push it ahead, and drive through the neutral zone with one man closing on my left shoulder.
He hooks my hip. I keep my feet, cut inside the second defender, and release before the goalie finishes dropping. The shot catches iron and kicks wide.
The crowd groans as one body. I slam the end boards with my shoulder, turn, and hunt the rebound.
No room for the seat. No room for Chloe’s interview threat, the petition, or Evie wrapped in my coat while I walked away from the kiss I wanted more than air.
The puck reaches Jake at the point. He shoots through traffic.
I get the shaft of my stick on it, and the deflection changes direction under the goalie’s glove.
The red light flares, and the building detonates. Jake hits me from behind, another body crashes into my chest, and gloves hammer my helmet. I shout with them because the goal matters. Because I still love this. Because loving it was never the crime.
When we skate past the bench, my eyes lift despite every order I give them.
Seat two remains empty as the game gets ugly in the second.
They tie it on a rebound after our defense loses the crease.
I take a high stick that opens the inside of my lip and earn nothing because the officials see my retaliation instead.
Two minutes in the box with the crowd screaming my name like volume can make me less stupid.
Jake leans against the glass outside the penalty box during the stoppage. “You done trying to solve feelings with felony assault?”
Blood coats my tongue. “He hit me first.”
“Compelling. Tell the marriage counselor.”
“We don’t have one.”
“At this rate, book two.” Jake taps the glass with one glove.
The official slaps the glass and sends him away. I should be furious. Instead a laugh breaks loose around the mouthguard. Jake grins and returns to the bench.
We kill the penalty. I come out hard enough to rattle the boards on the first check, but I keep my hands clean. Late in the third, the score is still tied. My legs have turned heavy. Sweat stings the cut in my lip. Every breath tastes like iron and cold air.
With less than two minutes left, Jake blocks a shot and the puck spits free. I gather it below our circle and hear him yell before I see the lane. He joins the rush on my right. Two defenders back. I carry until the left one commits, slide the puck under his stick, and drive the middle without it.
Jake returns the pass through the seam.
The goalie reads shot. I pull the puck across my body and hold it half a heartbeat longer, until his pad opens the smallest strip of ice. Then I put it through.
The goal horn begins inside the roar. I hit one knee, fist closed around my stick, and the team buries me at the glass. The C on my chest is crushed beneath arms and gloves. Cameras crowd the other side. Somewhere above us, the empty seat does not change.
We survive the final ninety seconds. At the horn, sticks and helmets fly. Jake catches me around the neck and shouts directly into my injured mouth. I shove him off, laughing and bleeding, while the arena pours approval over us.
It feels good. It is not enough. In the locker room, music shakes the walls.
Someone wheels in champagne despite the round being only the first. Corks strike the ceiling.
Foam sprays across the rubber floor, sharp and sweet in the air.
A bottle reaches me before I finish pulling off my shoulder pads.
My hand closes around cold glass by reflex.
Jake’s hand closes around the neck above mine. He does not yank it away. He waits.
For one second I want the burn. Not because I have forgotten the kitchen floor. Because my body remembers victory and has always been taught that celebration comes in a bottle.
I release it. “Get me water.”
Jake passes the champagne behind him and points toward my stall. Two sealed bottles wait beside a folded towel. “Prepared for your diva requirements.”
“You love me.”
“Deeply. Platonically. With boundaries.”
I open the water and drink half of it while champagne runs around my skates. No speech. No announcement. A few teammates notice and look away. Jake stays beside me until the urge passes, then shoulders me hard enough to mean congratulations.
“Fourteen days,” he says.
“Fourteen.”
“Where are you going?”
I look toward the suit hanging in my stall. “To ask for a door.”
He studies my face. “Ask.”
“I heard you.”
“History suggests repetition improves retention.”
The shower takes six minutes. I dress without waiting for media, leave my captain’s obligations with a promise to return calls from the car, and use the service exit. The driver starts toward the estate until I give him Evie’s cross street.
The city slides past in wet streaks of light. My lip swells. My knuckles ache. Adrenaline has nowhere to go now that the ice is gone. I type one message to Evie—We won—and delete it. If she cared enough to watch, she knows. If she did not, the score is not a claim on her attention.
At her building, I tell the driver to leave.
The outside stairs take me to the third floor. Music from the arena still pounds inside my skull. I stand in front of her door with the cut on my mouth, my suit collar wrong, and fourteen sober days held together by water and Jake’s hand on a bottle.
I knock. Once. Again. On the third, the door opens.
Evie stands barefoot in an old team shirt that falls to mid-thigh. My number crosses her chest. Her hair is loose, her dark eyes bright, and the television behind her shows our postgame celebration with the sound muted.
Every violent part of me goes still. I make myself remain on the landing. “You watched.”
She grips the door edge, her gaze catching on my swollen lower lip. The concern she cannot quite hide hits harder than anything I took on the ice. “You’re hurt.”
“Occupational hazard.” The split pulls when I speak, but I ignore it.
Her eyes move over my open collar and the suit I dragged on without fastening correctly. “You should be with the team.”
“I was.” The hallway is too narrow for the force moving through me. I put both palms against the walls on either side of her doorway, caging empty space instead of her. “I needed to see you.”
Evie’s gaze travels over my face, the open collar, the hands planted where they cannot touch. “Did you drink?”
“No.”
“Were you offered one?”
“A bottle was put in my hand.” The truth matters more than looking clean. “Jake took the neck. I let go. I drank water.”
Her chest rises beneath my number. “Fourteen days.”
“Fourteen days.” I do not say I did it for her. Sobriety has to remain mine even if losing her forced me to see the bottle. “May I come in?”
She looks behind her at the small apartment. The chain hangs loose. My jacket is folded over the arm of the sofa.
“Keegan, this doesn’t mean?—”
“I know what it doesn’t mean.” My shoulders shake with the effort of holding position. “I won a Game 7 tonight. The whole building screamed my name, and the only thing I could see was your empty seat.”
“You don’t get to make me responsible for the game.”
“I’m not.” I lower my voice. “I’m telling you victory didn’t fix the place I broke.”
Evie’s hand loosens on the door. She steps back.
The movement grants exactly enough room. I enter and stop inside while she closes the door. My hands find the wall again, braced on either side of her shoulders but never touching. She has one full step behind her. She can move. She can order me out.
“This is the siege?” she asks, breath unsteady. “Three knocks and a consent lecture?”
“I can pound harder if you’re disappointed.”
“Your ego survived sobriety.”
“Unfortunately.” Her shirt shifts with another breath, my number moving over her body. I lean closer and stop before the heat between us becomes contact. “Everything else is in critical condition.”
“Keegan.”
“I am losing my mind without you.” The admission tears out stripped of strategy. “I can win without you. I can breathe. I can stay sober. I can do every goddamn thing required of me. I do not want a life where doing it means I never come home to you.”
Her eyes close. When they open, the guard remains, but her hand rises between us.
Evie’s fist closes in my shirt.