Chapter Eight
The Spark
Archer
Practice runs long because Coach wants to drill the power play until it actually works, and by the time we’re done my hip is barking and my glove hand is sore and I’ve stopped thirty-seven shots in ninety minutes and I’m thinking about dinner.
Not that I have any idea what’s for dinner, though it has been nice having Sydney there.
Most nights she cooks something simple or orders takeout.
Today she texted me a photo at noon—the twins at the kitchen table, covered in flour, Lily grinning with dough in her hair, Luke carefully cutting shapes with a cookie cutter.
The caption was just: we’re baking. pray for me.
I looked at that photo for too long. Zayden noticed.
“Is that her?” He leaned over in the stall, still pulling off his pads, and caught a glimpse before I could put the phone away.
“Yeah, that’s Sydney.”
He grinned. “How’s she settling in?”
“Fine. She’s good. The kids love her.”
“And you?”
“And me what?”
“How are you doing? With the whole—” He waved his hand. “Situation.”
“There’s no situation. She’s just helping with the twins.”
Banks appeared behind Zayden, towel around his waist, fresh from the shower. “This about Sydney?”
“How does everyone know about Sydney?”
“Because you mention her approximately forty times a day,” Banks said. “Not that I’m counting. Winnie just really liked her, by the way.”
“Good.”
“She also says—” Banks stopped. Glanced at Zayden. Some silent communication passed between them that I didn’t like.
“She also says what?”
“Nothing. Glad it’s going well.” He walked away. Zayden followed. I sat in my stall and stared at my phone and tried not to read anything into any of that.
Then Ollie dropped onto the bench next to me and said, “So I’ve got someone I want you to meet.”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m not interested.”
“Keri’s a friend. She’s a dermatologist. Really smart. Really pretty.” He started unlacing his skates. “She’s been single for a while and she’s, uh—normal.”
“I appreciate the thought, but—”
“Give me one reason you can’t go to dinner.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
The problem is that the only honest reason—I don’t want to have dinner with anyone who isn’t currently in my kitchen covered in flour—is not a reason I can say out loud without every guy in this locker room losing their minds.
And Ollie is watching me with that look, the one that says I know exactly what you’re thinking and I’m going to enjoy watching you pretend I don’t.
“Fine,” I said. “One dinner.”
“That’s my guy.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Saturday night. I’ll send you the details.”
I tell Sydney about the date on Thursday, casually, while she’s folding laundry in the living room. I’m not sure why I’m telling her. I don’t need her permission. But I tell her anyway, and I watch her face while I do it.
“Ollie set me up with someone. For, uh, dinner on Saturday.”
She doesn’t look up from the shirt she’s folding. “Yeah? That’s great.”
“You think so?”
“Of course. It’ll be good for you.” She folds the shirt—one of mine, a gray henley, and I watch her hands smooth the fabric and set it on the pile—and glances up. “What’s she like?”
“I don’t know. A dermatologist, I guess. Ollie says she’s nice.”
“Nice.” She picks up another shirt. “That sounds promising.”
“Does it?”
“Sure. Go. Have fun. I’ve got the twins.”
She’s smiling. It’s a perfectly good smile. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this smile. And yet.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” she says, and goes back to folding my laundry, and I stand there for a second too long before I walk away.
And now it’s Saturday night. The restaurant is upscale—dim lighting, cloth napkins, the kind of place where the menu doesn’t have prices and the water comes in a glass bottle. Keri is tall, dark-haired, and sharp. She asks good questions and listens to the answers and laughs in the right places.
She’s great.
I’m miserable.
Not because of Keri. Keri is doing everything right.
She’s funny about her job—apparently people send her photos of their moles, and she gets excited about rashes—and she doesn’t ask about hockey except to say she’s been to a few games and thought the fights were the best part, which makes me laugh genuinely.
But my head isn’t here. My head is in a kitchen in Brooklyn where Sydney is probably making the twins dinner and letting Lily put stickers on everything and listening to Luke talk about sharks, and I keep thinking about them.
Keri is talking about a trip she took to Portugal last year, and I’m nodding and making the right noises and checking my phone under the table. Not because Sydney texted. But because she hasn’t.
By nine-thirty I’ve paid the check and said goodnight, and I’m in my car, and the relief I feel pulling out of that parking lot tells me everything I need to know about my first date as a newly single dad.
I drive home. The house is lit up—living room windows glowing warm against the dark street. I park in the garage and come in through the kitchen, and I can hear the TV from the hallway.
I can see Sydney on the couch. In my sweatshirt—the navy Knights pullover she borrowed last week and never gave back.
Her hair is piled on top of her head in a knot that’s half-collapsed, and she’s got her legs tucked under her, and she’s watching a cooking show where someone is crying about soufflé.
She looks up when she hears me. “You’re home early.”
“Yeah.”
“How was it?”
I lean against the doorway. She’s looking at me from the couch with her face bare and her eyes bright, and she’s drowning in my sweatshirt, and I want to sit down next to her and not move for the rest of the night.
I want to put my head on her shoulder and close my eyes and let the sound of her breathing be the last thing I hear before I fall asleep.
I sit in the chair across the room instead. “She was nice,” I say.
“Nice?” Sydney tilts her head. “Just nice?”
“She was smart. Funny. She, uh—she does dermatology.”
“You said that already.”
“Right.”
Sydney mutes the TV. She’s watching me now with her full attention, which is worse than the date. “Are you going to see her again?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
Because she’s not you. I shove the thought away. I would never want to ruin what we have by rebounding through Syd. Never. I couldn’t live with myself.
“It just wasn’t—” I wave my hand. “It wasn’t there.”
“What wasn’t?”
The cooking show plays on mute—the soufflé has collapsed and the chef is standing over it with his hands on his head—and the silence between us is louder than anything on that screen.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m going to bed. Goodnight, Syd.”
“Night, Arch.”
I go upstairs, brush my teeth, and get into bed.
Ollie finds me at the water cooler before Monday practice, and I already know what’s coming from the look on his face.
“So how was the date?”
“It was fine. She was great.”
“Apparently Keri thought you were distant.” He fills his water bottle without looking at me. “She said you checked your phone under the table four times.”
“It was three times, and I wasn’t being distant. I was just—it wasn’t there, Ollie. She’s a nice person, and it wasn’t there. The spark or whatever.”
He sets the bottle down and turns to face me. “I set you up with a beautiful, smart, funny woman with her own career, and you came home at nine-thirty and said she was nice. That doesn’t concern you?”
“What do you want me to say?”
I pick up my stick and head for the ice, but he calls after me: “You gotta move on sometime, bud.”
I skate hard, stop every shot, and play the way I always play when my head is a mess—locked in, channeling everything into the crease because that’s the one place where I know exactly who I am and what I’m supposed to do.
After practice, I sit in my stall and check my phone.
Sydney’s sent a photo of Luke at the kitchen table with his shark book open and a glittery star sticker on the center of his forehead that he clearly doesn’t know about.
Lily is in the background with her hands over her mouth, vibrating with silent laughter.
Sydney: Lily put a sticker on Luke’s forehead while he was reading. He hasn’t noticed yet. Do I tell him?
I stare at the photo for a while, at my son’s serious face and the ridiculous sticker and my daughter’s glee, and I type back: Don’t you dare tell him.
She sends three laughing emojis, and I feel more from those three emojis than I felt during two hours of candlelit dinner with a woman who did absolutely nothing wrong.
Keri wasn’t bad. The date wasn’t wrong. She just wasn’t the one for me.