His Hockey Team's Last Season

1. CHAPTER ONE

GIANNA

Mara is gesturing to pour tequila into my mouth from three feet away.

She has the bottle up over her head with both hands like she’s making an offering to something, and her hips are going left, right, left, completely off the beat of whatever Stanley’s speaker is playing. She keeps closing the distance on me an inch at a time like I’m not going to notice.

“Absolutely not,” I say.

“Coward.”

I scoff. “I’m wearing white.”

She raises the bottle higher.

I point down at my shirt, which is white and expensive. “Mara.”

“Open up,” she sings.

“No.”

She lunges.

I scream and twist away from her. My sock slips on the floor, my knee catches the edge of the coffee table hard, and the room tips sideways in this long slow way that has nothing to do with physics and everything to do with the four drinks I’ve had since eight o’clock.

Then somebody catches the back of my shirt.

“Jesus Christ.” Rowan pulls me upright with one hand.

He doesn’t stand up to do it. He doesn’t put down his water. He just fists the back of my shirt, and my feet find the floor again. I grab his forearm until the walls agree to stay where they are. His arm is very warm.

“Thank you.”

“Yeah.”

I let go.

Mara is laughing so hard she has the tequila pressed to her chest with both arms, like it’s a baby.

“You almost killed her,” Rowan tells her.

“She moved.”

“I was avoiding being waterboarded.”

“With tequila,” Mara corrects.

“Worse.”

Rowan lets go of my shirt.

He’s sitting on the floor against the couch because apparently every piece of furniture in Hawthorne House has been claimed by somebody in a relationship. One knee is bent, a bottle of water hooked loosely in his hand, his hair still damp from the shower he took after practice.

I stare at him for maybe half a second too long.

Which is unfortunate.

I used to have a crush on Rowan Laurens.

Used to being important.

It lasted about two weeks back in September and was based almost entirely on his face. Then I watched him spend twenty minutes at a party talking to Benson about defensive-zone exits and decided there probably wasn’t enough there to sustain me.

I’ve been fine ever since.

Mara shoves the bottle at me again. “Drink.”

I take it this time.

Across the room, from the couch, my brother says, “Gianna.”

I don’t even have to look at him. I know exactly what his face is doing. I drink anyway.

The tequila burns all the way down, and when I finally turn toward the couch, Benson is staring at me over Lucy’s head like I have personally ruined his New Year.

I smile.

He shakes his head.

I take another drink.

“Stop antagonizing him,” Lucy says, and she’s smiling into his chest when she says it, so I don’t take it seriously.

“I’m not antagonizing him.”

“You’re maintaining eye contact while drinking tequila.”

“It’s sibling communication.” I smile.

“That’s psychological warfare,” Rowan says from the floor.

I look down at him. He doesn’t look up. His face doesn’t do anything at all.

I point the bottle at the top of his head. “See? He gets me.”

Rowan says, “I didn’t say I supported it.”

“Too late, Laurens. You’re a supporter.”

Mara takes the bottle back before I can get a third pull off it and swings around toward the rest of the room with her arms out.

“Anybody else?”

Nobody moves.

Blue doesn’t even lift his head. Percy might have blinked. Melly looks like she’s considering it purely out of pity and then decides against it.

Mara turns back to me, deeply offended.

It is ten-thirty on New Year’s Eve, and Hawthorne House is embarrassingly peaceful.

That should not be possible.

The first time Benson ever let me come here, there was a hole in the drywall beside the coat hooks, somebody had left a keg in the kitchen for so long nobody knew whose it was, and I’m almost positive a guy I had never met was asleep in the downstairs bathtub.

Now the hole is patched, the kitchen smells like the frozen pizzas we made for dinner, and there are throw pillows.

Throw pillows.

Hawthorne House has been domesticated.

“This is depressing,” Mara announces.

Blue looks up from the chair. “You’re holding a bottle of tequila.”

“Exactly. I’m carrying this entire party.”

“This isn’t a party,” Mila says.

Mara turns toward her so fast she has to catch her balance. “Thank you.”

“It’s a gathering,” I say.

Mila considers the room like she’s pricing it. “Barely.”

“There are eleven people here,” Lucy says.

“My grandmother gets eleven people for dinner.”

“That doesn’t mean your grandmother throws ragers,” Benson says.

“You don’t know my grandmother.”

I laugh and cross the room to drop onto the open piece of couch beside Mila, and Rowan moves his leg out of my way before I have to ask him to, without looking up, the same way he moved it the last two times.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah.”

There it is again.

Yeah.

Rowan Laurens can do an unreasonable amount of work with one syllable.

I’ve been cataloging it since October, not on purpose.

There’s the yeah that means agreement. There’s the yeah that means the opposite of agreement and is functionally a door closing.

There’s I heard you. There’s stop talking.

There’s I have no opinion on this. And there’s the one he used on Blue, which meant, I have an extremely strong opinion on this, and I would sooner walk into the ocean than explain it to you.

I steal a pretzel out of the bowl in Lucy’s lap. She slides it an inch closer to me without breaking eye contact with my brother.

My eyes do a slow lap of the room now, taking inventory as I eat the pretzel.

Benson has Lucy curled into his side.

Blue has Melly perched on the arm of his chair.

Percy is against the wall with Penelope tucked between his legs, speaking approximately once every fiscal quarter.

Stanley’s girlfriend isn’t even here yet, and somehow he’s still staring at his phone like Aspen might crawl through it.

Mara starts pointing.

“This is what happened.”

“What happened?” Melly asks.

I answer, “You all got relationships.”

Blue looks down at me. “Tragic.”

“It is tragic,” I scoff.

Mara’s finger swings to me. “Single.”

Then Mila. “Single.”

Then herself, both thumbs. “Single.”

Then it drops and lands on the top of Rowan’s head. “Single.”

He looks up. “Why am I involved?”

Her brows meet. “You’re single.”

“Okay.”

I say, “Welcome to the resistance.”

He raises his water bottle about two inches off his knee and sets it back down.

I laugh, and Mara throws her hand out at him. “See?”

I’m confused. “He said one word.”

Mara says, “That’s more enthusiasm than I’ve gotten from anyone in this house all night.”

“Because we have practice tomorrow,” Benson says.

Mara turns around very slowly. “No, you don’t.”

My brother nods. “Yes.”

Mara can’t believe it. “It’s New Year’s Day.”

“Coach is aware.”

I ask, “What time?”

“Seven,” Rowan answers.

Mara stares down at him. “Seven in the morning?”

“That’s usually when seven is,” Blue says, and Melly smacks his shoulder without looking at him.

I’m already laughing before Mara gets her mouth open.

“This is disgusting,” she says. “We should be partying.”

I take the bottle from her and take another sip. When I lift the bottle, I catch Benson shaking his head at me.

Mara puts her head on my shoulder, and I put my hand in her hair, and she sighs at the ceiling.

I wait to feel cheated, but it doesn’t come.

I know what a party at Hawthorne is like. People would be out on the porch in coats, the door propped open so the whole downstairs is freezing. There would be a line for the upstairs bathroom and somebody crying in it. There would be at least a group of people here that none of us know.

Instead, the front door is shut, and the room is warm from the eleven of us, and the whole house smells like pizza. Mara shows me a picture of Ivory at a frat party, her bottom lip stuck out.

And I’m into it.

But I’ll keep to myself because Mara is currently grieving.

I look down at Rowan again. He’s got his head tipped back against the couch cushion an inch from my knee, watching Stanley check his phone for the fourth time in three minutes, and I can see the exact second he decides Stanley is up to something.

September was a strange month for me.

That’s all that was.

The front door opens, and the cold comes across the floor and up my legs. Mila swears and pulls me sideways into her, and Stanley is already moving.

Aspen shoulders the door shut behind her with a laptop bag on one arm and a grocery bag hanging off her wrist, her nose red, salt dried across the toes of her boots. Stanley takes the laptop bag off her shoulder and the grocery bag off her wrist and then puts his hand along her jaw and kisses her.

Aspen kisses him back for about a second and a half and then leans around his arm to look at the rest of us.

“Why is Mara holding tequila?” she smiles.

“Because I believe in joy,” Mara replies, holding it higher.

Aspen looks at me.

I put both hands up.

There’s a scatter of hi, Aspen and happy New Year, Aspen from around the room while she unwinds her scarf one-handed, and she’s smiling at the floor in a way that makes Stanley look even more suspicious than he’s looked for the past hour.

Rowan turns around against the couch, and his shoulder brushes my shin and stays there. Stanley puts both her bags on the counter and comes straight back.

Aspen sits down on the coffee table. Not on a chair. On the coffee table, in the middle of all of us, and she pulls the laptop out and opens it across her knees.

“I finished your Christmas present.”

The air changes in the room.

Benson sits forward and Lucy comes off his shoulder. Blue’s attention leaves Melly entirely. Percy lifts his head off the wall. Rowan sits forward, no longer against my leg.

One second, they’re five idiots arguing about whether eleven people is a party. The next second they’re hockey players.

Benson says to her, “You did all of them?”

She nods. “All eighteen games.”

“Eighteen?” Lucy repeats.

“Every one. Twice, for four of them.”

“My girlfriend ruined her Christmas watching you people,” Stanley says, with enormous pride.

“You’re not that bad,” Aspen says, fast, glancing up to make sure they heard her. She turns the screen around so the room can see it, which is a courtesy, because it’s a spreadsheet, and nobody in here except her and possibly my brother has the faintest idea what they’re looking at.

Nobody says anything as they look at the screen.

Five guys who will argue about the temperature of a room for forty minutes, and not one of them opens his mouth right now.

Aspen looks at them over the top of her screen.

“I have good news.”

Stanley puts a hand over his heart. “Finally.”

She says, “You’re good enough to win a national championship.”

Nobody laughs.

Nobody moves.

Even Mara goes still against my shoulder, and Mara has not been still since eight o’clock.

She lets it sit for a second.

Then she says, “You’re also predictable enough to lose before you ever get there.”

Stanley drops his hand and looks at each of the guys. “There it is.”