Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Sammie
The door back into the kitchen is heavier than I remember.
It thumps closed behind me with a little gust of warm, cider-and-spice air, swallowing the night whole like it never happened.
The party rushes up to meet me, music thudding, voices cascading, laughter peaking in jagged waves.
And for a beat I just stand there with my hand on the knob, trying to remember who I’m supposed to be in this light.
My lips tingle. My throat is a field where his breath has been. The word I gave him—yours—still hangs inside me like a struck bell. The pulse and wetness built between my legs.
“What took you so long?” Jenna pops her head around the fridge door, glitter smeared across one cheek like a comet tail.
She’s dressed as a cat, ears crooked, eyeliner whiskers smudged from dancing.
A plastic cup appears in my hand before I can form an answer.
“Refill. Hydrate. Coach’s orders.” She adds with a teasing grin.
Coach. My dad.
I manage something that sounds like thanks and sip. Sweet, cold, blessedly normal. I scan the room because some part of me has to. Because my pulse won’t settle until I know where he is. The crowd shifts. Bodies blur. Then I see him.
Triston is on the far side of the living room, anchored like a dark star. He’s not looking at anyone. He’s looking at me. One corner of his mouth lifts, not a smile, not really, just the ghost of one. A reminder. A hand at the small of my back without touching me at all.
Heat blooms under my skin again, treacherous and obvious. I force my eyes away and pretend to study the snack table. Jenna chatters about costumes she’s spotted and a dramatic breakup by the coat rack that I apparently missed. I nod at the right moments. I can’t remember a single word she says.
I can feel him across the room long before I see it.
Not because the floorboards tilt or the music quiets, but because the air changes, that strange pressure that means he’s near sliding over my shoulders like a second shirt.
He doesn’t come to me. Of course he doesn’t.
He knows what it does to me when he takes his time.
“Sam.” My dad’s voice snaps like the break in a stick.
I flinch and almost slosh cider down the front of me.
He’s in the kitchen doorway, brow set, jaw hard, scanning the room like he’s counting threats.
He looks older under the orange lights, the skin around his eyes drawn tight, mouth a line that wasn’t there before the last Halloween.
“I was just—” I gesture vaguely at nothing, feeling six years old and guilty.
“Helping.” Jenna says brightly, bless her, waving a handful of napkins. “She’s been restocking. MVP.”
Dad’s eyes soften a fraction when they land on her, then harden again when they return to me. “Stick close.” He says. “It’s getting late. I don’t want you getting jostled.”
Jostled. As if that’s the worst thing that could happen here.
“I’m fine,” I say. The words are automatic and not entirely true. Fine is not the word for a girl with a secret stamped on her skin.
He follows my glance without meaning to, and for a breath my blood turns to ice. Because his gaze ends where mine would have if I hadn’t yanked it away. On Triston.
Nothing changes in my dad’s face, not yet. But something in the air does. An alertness. The feel of a storm pattern shifting.
“I’ll be right here.” I tell him, because I need him to keep moving, to go back to whatever conversation he came from, to not stand here with the weight of his worry pressing so hard it leaves bruises.
He studies me a bit longer, then nods and disappears into the living room where the coaching staff has staked a claim on the sofas.
My lungs finally unclench. When I look again, Triston is gone.
A second later, my phone hums.
Don’t lose that look. Come stand by the window.
I don’t have a look. I almost text that back, my fingers itching with the urge to argue with the man who could bring me to my knees without laying a hand on me. But the truth is my face gives me away, always has. I’m an open book bound in soft paper. He reads me fluently.
I angle myself toward the back windows as casually as I can.
The glass is a dark mirror that throws me back at myself: hair a little mussed, mouth a little swollen, eyes…
not the same eyes I left the house with tonight.
There’s a shadow outside that could be a tree or the night holding its breath.
I feel watched and strangely steadied by it.
You did well.
Stay where you are.
“I swear, if I find one more cup on a bookshelf.” Jenna says, but her voice is distant now, like it’s reaching me down a long hallway.
I shouldn’t like how the text lands. I shouldn’t glow under praise that would have made me bristle from anyone else. But the cork inside me that has kept everything tight, controlled, quietly grieving for a year… it loosened out there under the stars. It hasn’t rolled back into place.
A guy from the team swoops in with a fratty grin and tries to spin me toward the dance floor.
“C’mon, Coach’s kid, one song for the memories.
” He says, already assuming yes. I press my cup against his chest and shake my head.
“Maybe later.” I told him. He laughs and glides away to someone less complicated.
Another text. He must be only a few feet away, and somehow it feels like he’s worlds.
I told you, only me.
My heart stutters and then finds a new rhythm to obey.
I stare hard at the glass so I won’t turn around and give away that every nerve in me is lit.
It’s ridiculous. It’s dangerous. It makes every nerve in me hum.
My reflection meets my eye as if to say: you’re already in it; stop pretending you aren’t.
“Sam?” My dad again. Soft this time. Closer. I school my face and turn. He’s not alone. The assistant coach stands with him, talking about line changes, but Dad’s eyes are only on me. The question in them is simple and impossible: Are you okay?
“Yes.” I say, and find that somehow, in a way that doesn’t make sense, I mean it. “Do you need anything?”
He starts to say no, then stops. The muscle in his jaw ticks. “Keep your phone on you.” He says, like we’re twelve again and this house hasn’t changed, like rules can still keep the night at bay. “Text me if you go upstairs.”
Upstairs. The word is a cliff edge between us. I nod because that’s what good daughters do, and he lets himself be turned back to the conversation he left, but not before his gaze scans over my shoulder again. I don’t follow it this time, but I feel who it lands on. The way a compass settles.
I move because I have to. Standing in one place makes me a lighthouse; too many eyes can find me.
I drift along the edge of the room where the wall catches my shoulder and turns me, letting me map the party by touch.
From the rough frame of the family photo I refuse to look at tonight, to the smooth curve of the banister, the dips and peaks of the music like an ocean.
By the time I reach the archway to the hallway, there’s a body leaning there like it belongs. It does.
“Don’t go far.” Triston says, quiet enough that the music swallows the words before they reach anyone else. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t have to. My body registers him anyway, the way a tide changes with the moon.
“I’m not.” The truth of it surprises me. Maybe I used to be a runner. Maybe whatever I am now wants to be caught.
He looks at me like I’m a problem he already solved.
His gaze tracks my mouth, then lifts to my eyes with that slow, knowing patience I am beginning to learn is a language of its own.
“Drink water.” He says, and the ordinary instruction lands like a caress because it’s his voice giving it.
He tips his chin toward the kitchen. “Then the back hallway.”
“My dad—”
“Is busy counting the ways he can save a season.” The faintest smile ghosts across his mouth. “He won’t see what he isn’t looking at.”
I want to say that my father sees everything, that there has never been a time in my life when the man didn’t register my smallest change in temperature.
But it’s also true that grief has made him blind to anything that doesn’t look like danger on the ice.
He protects in the language he speaks best. I am not sure he knows how to speak this one.
I do what Triston tells me to do. I drink water until my pulse stops trying to climb out of my throat.
I set the cup down carefully, as if trembling will betray more than nerves and slip into the back hallway that has always been a place to breathe between rooms. It is smaller than I remember.
Maybe I’m larger with wanting than I used to be.
He is there a moment later, the sound of him arriving not footsteps but a shift in the atmosphere that recognizes him as the cause.
“You’re quiet.” He says, studying my face like a map.
“You told me to be.” I say, and watch the edges of his control soften, like he files that away with all the other things he’s learning about me tonight.
He moves closer until the wall is against my shoulder and there is nowhere for me to go that isn’t him. He doesn’t touch. He traps. It works the same.
“What are you thinking?” He asks.
“That I should be better at lying.” I answer, and it makes him huff a sound that might be a laugh if the night were kinder.
“Don’t.” He shakes his head, small. “You don’t lie well. I don’t want you to start.”
The words land in a place just below my ribs and spread warmth. No one has asked that of me before, the truth of myself, not the version that makes everything easier.
“I can’t be what you want in the daylight.” I say before I can stop myself. It’s not fair. It’s not the whole shape of the truth. But it’s the jagged piece cutting my tongue.
One slow breath, then another. “I don’t want daylight from you.”