9. CHAPTER NINE
GIANNA
Usually, these guys lose a hockey game and twenty minutes later somebody is making food, Stanley is yelling at a television, Blue is threatening to throw Stanley through something expensive, and Percy is pretending he doesn’t hear any of it from whichever corner he has claimed.
This time it takes a few days. That’s how I know Michigan State weekend was a bad one.
The music comes back first. Then Stanley starts making jokes people actually laugh at.
By the middle of the week, Benson is no longer replaying the same third period on his laptop every night, and Blue has stopped looking like he might fight the refrigerator if it opens incorrectly.
Rowan is harder to read.
He texts me normally. He answers when I send him things that have nothing to do with anything.
Yesterday I sent him a video Mara took of a squirrel stealing half a bagel from somebody outside the student center, and he responded with, Deserved, which I thought was unnecessarily judgmental considering we had no information about who originally owned the bagel.
He also sent me a picture of Stanley asleep with one sock on.
So I think we’re fine.
I’m at work when Derek emails me.
I see his name while I’m standing behind the equipment counter checking a delivery against an order sheet, and I leave the box open long enough to read the first line twice.
The youth program is interested. Forty participants should be manageable. Let’s move forward with the facility hold once you have Athletics sign-off.
I grin.
Cole looks over from the skate machine. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You look creepy.”
“I am.” I give him my worst smile.
He minds his business while I read the email again.
It isn’t approval for the entire event. I know that. There are still people to talk to, things to price, forms that will probably reproduce overnight if I stop looking at them, but it’s a yes.
The first thing I do is take a screenshot. The second thing I do is send it to Rowan.
Me: LOOK!
He calls me.
I stare at his name on the screen. Then answer.
“Hello?”
“You got it,” he says easily. He sounds pleased.
“I got one part of it.”
“You got the hard part.”
“That’s the hard part?”
“The youth program saying yes is harder than getting Derek to hold a sheet.”
I lean one hip against the counter. “You’re very smug for somebody who did not personally accomplish anything here.”
“I told you it would work.”
“You said it could work.”
“Same thing.”
“No.”
He laughs softly.
There’s noise behind him. A door shuts. Somebody says something I can’t make out.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“Rink.”
“You guys done?”
“Just got off.”
I look toward the equipment room door without meaning to, like he might somehow walk through it while I’m talking to him.
“You’re calling me from forty feet away?”
“Probably more like sixty.”
“That’s ridiculous.” I smile down at the open box in front of me.
Cole glances over again. I turn slightly away from him.
I say, “So now I need Athletics to sign off, and then Derek can hold the space.”
“Yeah.”
“And then I can actually start building the thing.”
He replies, “You’ve been building it.”
“You know what I mean.”
There’s a pause, but it isn’t the kind that makes me want to fill it immediately.
That has been happening with Rowan more often.
I used to think silence with somebody meant the conversation was dying.
With him, it mostly means one of us is doing something else and neither person feels like hanging up yet.
I hear what sounds like a zipper on his end.
“How was practice today?” I ask.
“It was practice.”
“Was it awful?”
“No.”
I scoff. “That was convincing.”
“It was practice.”
“You guys are so weird when you’re losing.”
He says, “We’re weird when we’re winning too.”
Cole walks past me carrying two pairs of skates.
He points toward the phone. “Boyfriend?”
I give him a look so violent he grins and keeps walking.
Rowan says, “What?”
“Cole is being irritating.”
“That narrows it down.”
I laugh. Then I hear Rowan laugh too, and for some reason that makes me laugh harder.
“What?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re laughing.”
“I know.”
“At what?”
“You.”
I’m still smiling when the noise on his end changes. The locker room gets quieter. Then there’s the scrape of a door opening and the hollow sound of the hallway.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Walking.”
“Where?”
He doesn’t answer. I pull the phone away from my ear and look at the screen like that’s somehow going to tell me.
“Rowan?”
Nothing.
Then the equipment-room door opens.
I look up.
He’s standing there with his phone still against his ear, hair damp from practice, hoodie unzipped over a T-shirt, and that stupid calm expression on his face like he did not just walk across the rink to continue a conversation we were already having perfectly well over the phone.
My chest does something small and bright.
He looks at me. I look at him.
Then he hangs up. My phone goes dead against my ear. I lower it slowly.
“You’re ridiculous.” I laugh.
He starts walking toward me. “Oh, are we still laughing?”
I roll my eyes. “I wasn’t laughing at you.”
“You just said you were.”
“I was laughing because you’re annoying.”
He tips his head. “That sounds like laughing at me.”
“It’s different.”
He reaches the counter and stops on the other side of it. I’m still holding my phone. He looks down at it.
“You could’ve hung up.”
“You could’ve stayed wherever you were.”
“I was coming this way.”
“Oh. You were?”
He smiles. “No.”
I laugh.
He does too.
And there it is again.
That stupid feeling in my chest. The warmth spreads farther than it did when he walked in. I put my phone down on the counter.
“What are you even doing in here?”
“You were laughing at me.”
“So you crossed the building?”
He nods. “I needed to come see it myself.”
I stare at him.
He shrugs. Like that explains anything. He reaches for the screenshot still open on my phone and turns it slightly toward himself.
“You got your forty.”
I nod. “Potentially.”
He says again, “You got your forty.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Do you understand how approvals work?”
He watches me. “Enough.”
“No, you don’t. This is not done.”
“I didn’t say it was done.”
I laugh again. “Fuck you.”
“No.”
The answer comes so flat and fast that I stare at him. Then his mouth twitches.
“You’re becoming funny,” I say.
He says, “Don’t tell anybody. You’ll ruin my reputation.”
“What reputation?” I scoff.
He looks offended.
I laugh harder.
He just stands there while I do, and I have to put my hand over my mouth because Cole is somewhere behind me, and I’m supposed to be working.
I lower my hand. He’s still looking at me. My smile stays. So does his. And something in me settles.
“I like this,” I say.
His eyebrows lift. “What?”
“I like you,” I say.
His face changes, and I hear the words that just left my mouth. My smile drops. Fuck ––
Rowan doesn’t say anything.
I grip the edge of the counter. “That sounded—”
“Yeah.”
“No.” I shake my head immediately. “Don’t say yeah.”
His mouth moves like he’s trying not to smile. “Okay.”
“Don’t say that either.”
Now all he does is smile. The smile looks genuinely confused, which makes this more humiliating.
I drag both hands over my face. “Oh my God.”
“G.”
“I can’t believe I just said that,” I scoff at myself.
“Gianna.”
I look towards him. “Stop being calm.”
“What do you want me to do?” he chuckles.
“I don’t know,” I shrug. “Panic a little.”
He thinks about that. “No.”
I stare at him through my fingers. “Why are you fine?”
He shrugs. “I didn’t know.”
That lands differently. I swallow. “You didn’t know?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“Not even a little?”
“No.”
I narrow my eyes. “That’s kind of embarrassing for me.”
He laughs once. “Sorry.”
I look down at the counter. Then back up. He hasn’t moved.
“So,” I say. “This is awkward now.”
“A little.”
“Great.” I close my eyes. “You’re so annoying.”
“I know,” he says.
The warmth in my chest comes back. I press my lips together. “And yet, I still like you.”
His eyes stay on mine.
“I like this,” I correct myself.
“Sure,” he says.
I groan. “Rowan.”
He laughs, and somehow that makes me laugh too.
“Don’t enjoy this,” I tell him.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Maybe a little.”
“Oh my God.” I turn and put my forehead against the metal shelving beside the counter.
Cole walks by and looks at me. I look back at him.
“What?”
He slows. “Nothing.”
“Keep walking, Cole.”
He keeps walking.
Rowan looks over his shoulder for a moment, watching him go.
“Cole knows now,” Rowan teases.
I blush. “You should go.”
He points at himself.
I nod. “Yeah.”
His eyebrows lift like he finds this deeply unfair, considering I’m the one who summoned him here by sending a screenshot and then accidentally detonated the conversation.
“You came all the way over here to bother me,” I tell him. “Mission accomplished.”
“I came because you got good news.”
That shuts me up for half a second.
He says it like it’s obvious. Like there was a perfectly reasonable path between me sending him a screenshot and him walking across the building just to stand on the other side of this counter while I talked too much.
I look away first. “Go.”
“Okay.” He starts backward toward the door.
I point at him. “And stop saying that.”
“Sure.”
“Worse.”
He grins, turns, and leaves.
I watch him until the door swings shut behind him. Then I stand there staring at the empty doorway.
For several seconds, nothing happens inside my head at all. Which would be nice if it lasted. It does not.
Cole comes back around the corner carrying a roll of tape and stops beside the counter. “He didn’t say it back.”
I look at him. There’s no cruelty in his face. He isn’t smirking. If anything, he looks mildly fascinated, the way somebody looks when they’ve accidentally walked into the middle of a conversation they absolutely intend to remember later.
“I know,” I say.
Cole nods once. Then he keeps walking.
I stare after him.