Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Ryan
I had good days on the ice sometimes, days where it clicked from the first stride and the game opened up flat and legible. Saturday at Jensen’s pond was one of those days.
I was also aware of her on the bank the entire time.
Not distracted—I gave the game what it needed, every shift.
In the gaps, the half-second after the puck left my stick, my attention went to the bank.
She’d found a spot near the fire with a clear view of the full surface and stayed there, barely moving, for two solid hours.
Not casually watching. Reading the plays.
It was clear her attention was on the game.
Not me. The game. I just wished it was me.
I shouldn’t think that. I thought it anyway.
I noticed I was running plays with a little more gusto than necessary for a pond hockey game.
I watched Griffin try to get her on the ice from across the pond. She shut it down before he’d gotten through the first sentence, patient and completely immovable. He did the waiting look. She looked back at him pleasantly until he ran out of runway, pulled his mask down, and went.
Bad idea, I told myself, watching exactly that. Clear-eyed. No hedging.
I got back into the play.
I came off in my rotation and gave her my sweatshirt because I could see she was cold and I had an extra layer and it was a simple transaction. I relaced my skate and went back to the ice.
I told myself I hadn’t clocked the way the sweatshirt hit her mid-thigh. I was watching her anyway. Damn she looks good in my clothes. Stop it. Do not think of your best friend’s sister this way. Fuck. I got back into the play.
The bonfire assembled itself in record time. I guess maybe not a record since there had been a fire already. I pulled off my skates on Jensen’s tailgate and Davo appeared.
“So. Griffin’s sister,” Davo said.
“Is there a question?” I could already feel my jaw clenching, knowing where this was going.
“She’s—”
“Griffin’s sister,” I said with the exact tone needed for him to fuck off with whatever he had on his mind. If I couldn’t have her, he sure as fuck couldn’t.
He thought about this. “Right.” He didn’t sound persuaded.
“Yeah,” I said. “Right.”
He moved on. Smart man.
I watched her mingle with the group and felt the pull I’d been telling myself all day wasn’t there.
It was there. It had been there since the pickup lane at MSP and it was not getting smaller.
If anything it had grown with every hour she’d spent in my orbit, which was the opposite of how this was supposed to work.
She was talking to Jensen about the ice with the same full attention she’d given everything else all weekend.
She gave everything her full attention—the kind where you could tell she was actually filing what she heard.
I’d grabbed my coat from the truck and positioned myself close enough to the fire that I could hear her talking to Jensen.
She laughed at something Petey said—the real laugh, head back, completely unguarded, her whole face in it, the one I’d already heard twice and had been filing against my will each time—and it landed somewhere in my chest like a thrown puck.
I turned back to the fire and breathed and reminded myself of several relevant facts.
Griffin’s sister. Four months. Different cities. The correct decision here had not changed in the last thirty seconds.
Griffin appeared at my shoulder with two fresh beers.
“Davo,” he said.
“Handled.”
“Good.” He watched his sister across the fire. “She’s been like this her whole life. Walks into any situation and makes everyone around her feel at ease. She doesn’t notice she’s doing it and just fits in everywhere.”
“She notices,” I said. “She just doesn’t make a thing of it.”
Griffin looked at me sideways. I kept my eyes on the fire. A beat of silence I was not going to fill.
“She’s something,” Griffin said finally, quietly.
“Yeah,” I said. “She is.”
He looked at me again. I kept looking at the fire.
We stood there in the warmth and noise. The fire was doing real work now, orange light moving across the snow and the faces around it.
Griffin drank his beer and watched his sister for a moment. Said nothing. Just watched.
He drained his beer and looked across the fire. I followed his gaze. Kowalski had found Maren near the cooler and was doing the thing Kowalski did at parties, which was stand slightly too close and talk slightly too much about himself to the prettiest girl in the room. Which was, by a mile, Maren.
“Come on,” Griffin said.
We crossed to them. Kowalski, reading the situation, found somewhere else to be. We watched him go, then she turned to her brother with her chin up and her shoulders squared, already braced for whatever was coming. I got the impression it wasn’t the first time.
Griffin shifted into full protective mode the second Kowalski disappeared—she was fine, she’d been fine, but Griffin had an older brother setting he couldn’t turn off.
She let him go for about thirty seconds before she turned to face him with zero patience.
I caught the end of it clearly enough though, and while I was trying not to listen and seem involved, she said something that nearly made my head explode.
“I am eighteen years old and I’ve had sex before. You know that, right?”
I choked on my beer. I couldn’t stop it. She said it without blinking. Completely calm. To her brother’s face.
Griffin made a sound like he’d swallowed a bug and was trying to hack it back up.
“Are you all right?” she said, turning to me.
“Fine,” I managed though another cough. “Beer went down wrong.”
She held my gaze for one second. I kept my face completely blank while Griffin sputtered.
Griffin's jaw dropped, then tightened, then he seemed to remember he was supposed to be the older sibling here and pulled himself together with visible effort. Maren glanced between us, her expression serene and satisfied, completely aware she'd won.
I could feel Griffin staring at the side of my face.
She went to find Petey. Griffin stood beside me in silence for a few long seconds.
“Not a word,” he said.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You were thinking it very loudly.”
“I was thinking of nothing.” I couldn’t hide my snicker.
He sighed. “She’s fine. Come on.”
I followed him back toward the fire. We stood there for a while, talking, beers in hand, the usual. Griffin went off to talk to someone from Jensen's crowd. I stood at the fire alone for about thirty seconds before I looked across the bank and found her at the waterline.
People had drifted toward trucks and tailgates, looking for somewhere to sit that wasn’t the frozen ground or a chilly cooler. Griffin had moved to the far edge of the group, deep in something with one of the girls from Jensen’s extended crowd. He’d be a while.
I looked across the bank and found her at the waterline—standing alone where the ice met the snow, the fire behind her, looking out at the dark pond.
Just past the edge of the firelight, in the dark.
The posture she had made it look like she was deep in thought, shoulders slightly relaxed, chin up, weight balanced.
I’d been tracking it all day without meaning to. She was observant.
Griffin was occupied. The night was winding down to a less rowdy and more intimate part of the evening, and nobody needed me for anything.
The correct thing to do was stay by the fire.
I stood there for a moment.
Then I walked over.