Chapter 22 Maverick
maverick
“So, you and Chloe?” Silas does the closest thing to a smile he can muster as he hands me the straps from atop Noah’s Range Rover.
“Crazier things have happened.” I adjust the hat on my head.
“I didn’t say it was crazy.” He goes back to loosening the straps of the canoe, his expression now unreadable.
I haven't told the boys anything about Chloe, partly because she asked me not to, but also because I’ve been lucky enough that neither of them have brought it up.
When I glance up again, Silas is looking at me like he knows something I don’t. I almost tell him it’s nothing serious, or that I’m still the same single idiot I’ve always been. But he looks away, and in that quiet second of breathing room, I realize that might not exactly be true anymore.
“If that canoe scratches my ride, you boys are dead.” Noah pulls his beanie lower on his head, jogging over to his car to help us.
“If it gets scratched, you only have yourself to blame, Kingy boy. You should have been here helping us instead of making out with the sassy one behind a tree.”
“First of all, I was making out with her in the wide open,” he says with his signature grin. “Second, someone had to help Parker with the tent situation.”
I look over Noah’s shoulder to find four tents in piles around a fire pit. Chloe and Savannah are sitting at the picnic table with three different card games and a handful of orange peels between them.
“I call the single,” Silas pipes up.
A quick calculation, and I realize I might have overlooked the sleeping arrangements.
“Heads up,” Silas calls just before lowering the tip of the canoe into my and Noah’s waiting arms.
An hour after we’ve finished unloading the cars and setting up the tents, to my surprise, Chloe has not only gathered wood but started a fire. Something that’s impressive on its own, but even more so because she used a flint striker that Gabe was using as a decoration on his backpack.
“So…this is us?” She stands next to me with her hands on her hips, looking at the tent before me.
“I didn’t even think about the number of tents when we put Parker in charge of bringing them,” I whisper low enough so only she can hear.
“It would have looked weird if we had done anything else, right?” She opens the flap and my eyes fall to the single full-size mattress on the ground.
Groans ripple around the fire pit when I drop yet another marshmallow into the flames.
“Hall, you're fired. What’s the point of a s’mores without the toasted marshmallow?” Savannah huffs as she gets up, marching past me to the picnic table filled with supplies.
“Don’t worry, Sav. He’s a professional,” Chloe calls out from her chair behind me.
When I turn around to glare at her, she drops her head back, and her gentle laugh ripples through the crisp night air.
Noah stands, taking the skewer from my hands with a pat on the shoulder, and I move to sit down in the chair beside Chloe.
After a few less charred marshmallows, the fire continues to crackle, throwing off just enough heat to fight against the chill.
Everyone else has begun to turn into their tents for the night, but Chloe stays up.
She tucks one knee up on the bench beside me, tilting her face toward the stars as she points out each constellation.
At first, I think she’s stalling, avoiding the whole sharing a tent situation, but by the third myth, and the way her eyes light up when she tells the story, I know I’m wrong.
She’s not avoiding me, she’s just lost in the stars. And I’m completely lost in her.
“Look there.” She leans in closer, pointing to the sky. “You see where it looks like a man dancing with a magic hat on?”
I follow her finger to the sky, but the stars fade into the background as my focus falls on her hand. Her bright pink nails curl around the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and even though the campfire smoke masks most of her lavender scent, I can still catch it lingering there.
“That’s Perseus.”
“Yeah?” I pull back, just enough to watch her face light up as she talks.
“He saved the princess Andromeda from the sea monster right before she was about to marry him.” The campfire sparks, but it’s the story she’s telling that makes her green eyes glow as if she can see every detail play out before her.
I watch her and wonder how she could ever let someone take her for granted.
This incredible, beautiful, strong woman, who believes in so many things, but above everything, she continues to believe in love.
She pulls her gaze from the sky, and when her eyes land on mine, she leans back slightly, like she wasn’t expecting to find me watching her. A quick smile flickers across her lips before she ducks her head and looks back up.
The firelight casts dancing shadows along the side of her face, and I have to clench my thumbs in my fists to stop myself from pulling her in closer to me.
“So, you and Noah looked pretty cute in your matching Toronto hats tonight.”
“You think I’m cute?”
“I think you're cocky.”
“Not the worst thing I’ve been called.” I smile at her, popping my gum, and she shakes her head, but I don’t miss the small huff of laughter she lets out.
“What about Silas?
“What about him?”
“Well, you and Noah are off to Toronto next year, yeah?”
“That’s the plan.” I take a sip of my drink, rather than say anything else.
Chloe studies me for a second like she’s decided there’s a different question she actually wants to ask. Thankfully, she’s spent enough time avoiding things to recognize when someone else is doing the same.
“So, what’s the third Stooge doing then?”
“Stooge?”
“Yeah. Larry, Moe,” she points back at the tents over her shoulder before pointing at me, “Curly.”
“It’s the hair, isn’t it?” I ask, running a palm over my head and she shrugs with a playful grin. “Well, Mo is done after this year. He has plans to work for his family’s real estate company.”
“That’s a shame. He has some of the best gap control I’ve seen in a long time.”
“Yeah. Recruiters have tried to get him for a while now, but he—” I pause when her comment actually sinks in.
The only thing hotter than Chloe talking about gap control might be if she started talking about edge work.
“That’s some pretty advanced terminology for someone who just started dating a hockey player a few weeks ago. ”
She shrugs a casual shoulder. “I used to play.”
“Play what?”
“Hockey.”
I don’t hold back my surprise when I ask, “When?”
“Mmm.” Her lips twist as she thinks. “I was probably ten when I started, and then I played all throughout middle school.”
Of course she did. I really shouldn’t be surprised by stuff like this anymore. “Why’d you stop?”
I can sense her hesitancy when she looks down at her lap and pulls on the sleeves of her sweatshirt. She wears the same look she had on earlier in the car. I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees, and settle in. It’s my low risk way of saying, ‘You can tell me anything.’
“It’s kind of a long story,” she finally says.
“If you’re telling it, I’m listening.”
She searches my face, weighing something in her head before she finally speaks. “When I was nine, we went to my aunt and uncle’s house for Thanksgiving. He had shoveled the pond out back, gave me my first pair of skates, and took me out on the ice. Of course, I was natural,” she says playfully.
“Well, of course.”
She smiles briefly and then looks back down at her lap.
“My parents enrolled me in an all girls hockey team, and a few years later, Savannah showed up. She was the girl that everyone wanted to be friends with. It was always, ‘Where’s Savannah?’ ‘You want to come to my birthday party? Maybe. Is Savannah going?’”
I can’t stop the snort that comes out of me because I’ve gotten to know Savannah over the last few months, and I can understand the appeal of wanting to be friends with her, but you’ve got to be willing to risk getting your head taken off first.
“For whatever reason—and I’ll never question it—Savannah didn’t care about any of it. After practice it was always me she ended up talking to.” She smiles at the memory.
“Anyway, one day I was struggling with something, it was so insignificant, I can’t even remember what it was now, but I was packing up my bag, confident that it would be my last day and that I wasn’t coming back.
She talked me out of a fit. She said, ‘There’s always going to be some shit.
It’s how you deal with that shit that defines you.
’ I was in such shock that she said ‘shit’ because we barely had all our adult teeth.
I can still remember the way her black waterproof mittens felt on my face when she wiped a tear off my cheek.
” She brings her sweatshirt covered fist to her face, like she’s reliving the moment.
“Ever since then, it’s been us against the world.
When we were younger, I just thought she was my best friend, but when her mom passed away…
” Chloe’s voice cracks, along with something inside my chest as she bats away the tears now falling from her eyes.
“Something changed. Savannah quit the team, and I knew she was never coming back. I didn’t want to do it anymore without her, but more than that, I couldn’t stand the thought of her being alone.
So, for the first time in my life, I quit something without a second thought as to what my parents, or coach, or anyone else thought.
I spent every minute that we weren’t in school with Sav.
Some days, we did stuff to keep her mind occupied; other days, we just quietly watched movies to get lost in another world.
And then there were days when she would rest her head on my lap, and I would comb my fingers through her hair while she cried,” she whispers the words, but her loyalty is screaming.
I can tell this isn’t something she talks about often—if ever, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what makes me so worthy of her opening up to like this, but just like she doesn't question why Savannah chose her, I won’t question why she’s choosing me now.