Chapter Three
Paper Airplanes
Sydney
I wake up at six because my body doesn’t realize it’s in a different time zone, and also because I can hear someone moving around downstairs. My brain immediately jumps to “intruder” before I remember where I am.
Archer’s house. Guest room. New York.
Right.
I pad downstairs barefoot, following the sounds of a cabinet closing and a coffee maker gurgling.
The kitchen is bright—morning sun floods through floor-to-ceiling windows, warming the marble counters, hardwood floors, and the island that’s larger than my entire kitchen back in Minnesota.
The ceilings are high, the appliances are the kind you see in luxury designer magazines, and there’s a built-in wine fridge.
This is the nicest house I’ve ever been in, let alone slept in. I grew up in a three-bedroom ranch with carpet that smelled like dog, and now I’m standing barefoot in a multi-million dollar estate.
Archer stands at the coffee maker with his back to me.
He’s wearing gray sweatpants and nothing else.
The NHL has done things to his body that weren’t happening at seventeen.
His shoulders are wider, and the muscles along his torso are defined.
There’s a bruise on his left side, yellowing at the edges.
“Morning,” I say.
He turns around. “Hey. Coffee’s almost—”
He stops.
His eyes drop for just a second—a flash—and then they’re back on my face with a speed that tells me he saw everything and is now pretending he didn’t.
And that’s when I remember what I’m wearing.
Sleep shorts that barely qualify as clothing and a cropped t-shirt from college, washed so many times that the fabric is basically see-through. No bra.
I cross my arms and try to act casual. “Coffee’s almost what?” I ask.
“Ready.” He turns back to the counter. “Coffee’s almost ready.”
He pours two mugs with his back to me, which is considerate and also gives me a clear view of his shoulder blades and the way the sweatpants sit low on his hips.
I decide to look at the ceiling instead.
I’ll just focus on the ceiling and think about drywall, because the last thing I want to do is make things weird between us.
He slides my mug across the island without asking how I take it, because he already knows the answer. Black.
“Thanks.” I take a sip. He takes a sip. We stand on opposite sides of the island like two people who have definitely seen each other naked once and are definitely not thinking about it right now.
Except I am thinking about it. Just for a second—his bedroom back home, the door closed, his hands shaking a little because mine were shaking too.
The way he asked, “You sure?” and I said “Yes” and meant it more than I’d ever meant anything.
Afterward, the way he pulled me against his chest, his heart hammering so hard I could feel it against my cheek, and I thought this changes everything.
Except…it changed nothing. For him, at least.
I take another sip of coffee and bury that memory deep, locked away beneath fifteen years of practice.
“Sleep okay?” he asks.
“Yeah. The guest room is really nice. The pillows are, um—really fluffy.”
“Good. I just got them.”
We are talking about pillows. We are two adults standing in a kitchen at six in the morning discussing pillows because the alternative is confronting the fact that he looks like that and I look like this, and nobody prepared either of us for the morning-light version of forced proximity.
He reaches for a shirt draped over the back of a kitchen chair—a worn Knights t-shirt, soft and faded—and pulls it on in one fluid motion. The show is over. I’m both relieved and disappointed, a combination I’m going to need to get used to if I’m living here.
Then I see it. On the inside of his bicep, just visible for a moment before the sleeve covers it. The small black outline of a paper airplane, about an inch long, the tail slightly crooked because the tattoo artist in our hometown wasn’t great, and we were eighteen and didn’t care.
I have the same one. High up on my thigh, almost to my hip, only visible if I’m in a bikini. Same artist, same night, same crooked tail.
“Hey.” I nod at his arm. “How’s your airplane holding up?”
He pushes up the sleeve and looks down at it, the corner of his mouth lifting. “Still flying. Yours?”
“Same. Still there.”
The tension cracks, and we’re both almost smiling now. This is us—this is what we do. We find the thing that makes it feel normal again.
We got the tattoos the summer after senior year.
He was leaving for Boston, I was heading to UNC, and for the first time in four years, we were going to be in different states.
We were at this coffee shop we liked, and he was doodling on a napkin while I pretended not to panic about the fact that my best friend was about to be a thousand miles away.
He drew a paper airplane and slid the napkin across the table.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“A reminder that we’re just a flight away. No matter where we end up.”
I looked at the little crooked airplane on the napkin, then at him, and said, “We should get these tattooed,” mostly as a joke. He replied, “Yeah, we should,” and he wasn’t joking at all.
Three hours later, we were in a tattoo shop, and the rest is history.
We drink our coffee. The kitchen is quiet. The kids are still asleep—I can hear the monitor on the counter, nothing but soft breathing.
“Arch,” I say. “How are you doing? Really.”
He leans against the counter and wraps both hands around his mug. “I never thought I’d be divorced,” he says. “That wasn’t, uh—that wasn’t the plan.”
“I know.”
“Bree and I tried. We really did. But for the last two years, we were basically roommates. We slept in separate rooms.” He glances at me. “I don’t think I ever told you that.”
He didn’t. My expression shifts before I can stop it. Two years. He lived in this house with his ex for two years, and they slept in different beds, and he never told me. He called me sometimes when he couldn’t sleep and texted me about the twins, but he never told me how bad it was.
“Two years?”
“About. Give or take.” He takes a sip. “It is what it is. She needed to go. I get it. I don’t blame her.”
I want to push. I want to ask how long it’s been since someone touched him in a way that wasn’t a toddler climbing on his lap or a teammate tapping his pads.
But his jaw tightens, signaling that he’s holding back the rest of the sentence.
If I push now, he’ll shut down the conversation, and I won’t get another opening for weeks.
“Enough about me,” he says, and the wall goes back up. “What about you? You said you quit the studio.”
I trace the rim of my mug with my finger.
“Yeah. They told me they’d hire me back in a heartbeat whenever I was ready, but…
I don’t know. I’ve been teaching ballet to kids for seven years, and I love the students—I do.
Especially the little ones. Watching a six-year-old nail her first relevé is still, like, the best feeling.
” I pause. “But the parents are a nightmare, Arch. You wouldn’t believe the emails I get.
‘Why isn’t Madison in the front row?’ ‘I don’t think this recital costume is flattering for Emma’s body type. ’ She’s eight, Karen. She’s eight.”
He’s watching me while I talk—not interrupting, not nodding along—just watching. His eyes are on my face and then, for a second, on my mouth, and I lose my train of thought completely.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing. Keep going.”
“I, uh—” I take a sip of coffee to regroup.
“It’s not just the parents. I think it’s ballet itself.
I love it. I’ll always love it. But I spent four years getting a degree in dance, and I imagined—” I stop because what I imagined sounds na?ve when said out loud.
A career on stage. Maybe my own studio. Creating dances instead of teaching the same recital numbers year after year.
“You imagined more,” he says.
“Yeah.” I look at him. “I guess I did.”
He holds my gaze for a moment too long. “You’ll figure it out, Syd. You always do.”
“That’s generous. My current life evidence suggests otherwise.”
“Your current life evidence is that you packed a suitcase and flew across the country to help someone because that’s who you are. That’s not lost. That’s, uh—” He runs his hand through his hair. “That’s pretty brave, actually.”
My throat tightens. I take a sip of coffee to avoid responding, because if I open my mouth right now, I’m going to say something embarrassing about how he’s the only person who’s ever made me feel like my mess is acceptable instead of a problem to be solved.
“I’m glad you’re here, Syd.” He looks at me across the island, his gray eyes steady, tired, and honest. “There’s no one else I could’ve called. No one who would’ve just dropped everything and come.”
“You make it sound dramatic. I didn’t have that much to drop.”
“That’s not true.”
I shrug. “You needed help. I showed up. That’s our thing.”
“It is.” He pauses. “Still, I don’t take it lightly.”
He’s right about that. We’ve always been there for each other.
During my sophomore year of college, I called him at two in the morning from my dorm at UNC.
My voice was shaking so badly that he couldn’t understand me at first, and when he finally made out the words—my dad, stroke, hospital—he didn’t ask a single question. He simply said, “I’ll be there.”
He was at Boston University, a thousand miles from Minneapolis. I flew home that morning and came straight to the hospital, where my mom was in the waiting room, looking smaller than I’d ever seen her. I held her hand, watched the monitors, drank terrible vending machine coffee, and didn’t sleep.
Archer walked into the hospital lobby fourteen hours after my call. He had a duffel bag slung over one shoulder and a plastic bag from a gas station in the other. He was wearing a hoodie that he’d probably thrown on in the dark before heading to the airport.