33. The Beginning Of The Rest Of Our Lives
THE BEGINNING OF THE REST OF OUR LIVES
LAKE
“Hold me up higher! I can’t see anything.”
“Oh my God, they could really win.”
I wave around phone-sized versions of Merit, Staten, and Irelyn, lofting them above the head of some rowdy spectators sitting in front of me. They could’ve just turned the game on, but they wanted to get the full experience.
The championship game is finally here. Buford, well, his absence is something to note. According to Sutton, he and Crew went all Batman and Robin on the poor dude’s ass, and Coach Lawson has now been notified about his behavior.
Harlan hurtles across the rink in a blur of color, currently in possession of the puck and looking for somewhere to offload it into the opposition’s net.
If I thought the atmosphere yesterday was crazy, the tension today is so thick it’s nearly undigestible.
The Mustangs are dominating the scoreboard by one point, there’s ten minutes left in the last period of the game, and anticipation scrapes at my guts as I scoot my butt to the edge of my seat.
I can’t keep track of everything going on.
Between the skull-splitting commotion, the high tide of the Rhode Island Raptors coagulating into a dark mass behind one lone Mustang, the collective breath-hold of the arena, and the arctic temperature that keeps me awake, the overstimulation is going to take me out before the final score is announced.
High-pitched squealing blasts from my phone. “Come on, Harlan! You can do it!” Irelyn shouts.
Harlan does some cool behind-the-legs action that keeps the puck moving at an unpredictable rate. All the players are miniature hunks of automatized steel veering down the wrong tracks, destined to collide in an uncontained fire of sparks and gasoline.
My heart lashes against my chest—I paid a hefty toll of anxiety in return for a spot closer to the ice this time. Legs trembling, I slip a pink Starburst out of my pocket to give me a needed pickup—courtesy of Sutton—and pop it into my mouth for the sugar boost.
I’ve heard whispers here and there about the Mustangs over the weekend, but until Buford is convicted, it seems like their reputation is still up in the air.
Tamara was pleased with the article’s success.
And I was pleased that she hinted at me possibly getting the promotion I wanted a bit earlier.
I’ve worked so hard to get where I am. I nearly lost the person who meant the most to me, but fighting is in my blood, and there was no way in hell I was going to let years of hard work swirl down the drain because of a little moral quandary.
The puck flits back and forth between teams—almost as intangible as mist—and the ice shavings in the air go diaphanous, washing the landscape in brush strokes of paint-muddied water.
I still don’t understand how hockey players move so effortlessly on their feet. It’s a mixture of choreographed dances and improvisation that can either make or break a play. I’d collapse under that kind of pressure.
“Fuck, I can’t watch,” I murmur, a thin, gossamer strand of a breath snaking out between my lips. My pulse is tapping in rhythm to the knock of their stick blades and the discordant scree of skates on tempered ice.
“They’ve got this,” Staten says with a pixelated timbre, her tone sporting enough hope to keep me from serrating the edge of my thumbnail with my teeth.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a barn burner without my thoughts booking a stopover in hyperactive imagination central. Population: all the nerves in my goddamn body.
Two minutes left on the menacingly red clock. The fumble of the disc into the Raptors’ very own talons rings the alarm bells in my head, and I jump to my feet on a whim, boosting my friends higher up into the air.
I chance a look at Sutton—not hard, seeing as he’s the biggest person on the ice—and track his every dizzying movement.
Safe, calculated. His approach is usually born from intimidation, but he’s taking a different strategy this time.
He’s holding up the rear in case the puck backpedals, exerting just enough energy to stay vigilant but appear harmless.
When players usually see him careering toward them, they panic and relinquish ownership, which could squeeze them for time.
I don’t even register that the Rhode Island Raptors employ a fake-out trick to reclaim the puck, using the Mustangs’ lapse in defense to level the score.
My section immediately spews disapproval and vitriol like a champagne cork popping under the jurisdiction of clumsy hands, and the apprehension slumbering in my stomach awakes with a nausea-inducing jolt.
Come on.
Fifty-eight seconds. I know Sutton. I know what he’s capable of. I know how badly he wants this, and I want it for him.
When my section quiets to a dissatisfied grumble, I scream so loud that my vocal cords strain.
I doubt it was shrill enough for Sutton to hear, but I like to think that he did—that I was able to penetrate through every other force competing for his attention and give him that extra bump of assurance to carry him over the finish line.
Everything changes within a millisecond. The Raptors’ complacency is their downfall.
Sutton does the unthinkable: he swoops up the discarded puck from a rushed face-off, then bolts straight for the opposite side of the rink, surprising even his teammates until they kick into high gear.
The tension suffers a seismic shift; people slowly begin rising to their feet; my friends are losing it over the line.
“Come on, Sutton!” I shout despite the arena being muffled like I’ve been submerged under water.
Thirty seconds.
A dodge of an incoming stick. A reroute that threads the puck between the legs of an unsuspecting Raptor. The quick handling of a professional who’s determined to extinguish any talk of inadequacy surrounding his performance.
Ten seconds.
Sutton—with feet still to clear and not enough time—takes a risk and slaps the puck with the full drawback of his arm, and I would’ve missed the winning shot if I had blinked. The clock stalls at one second. The velocity and force behind the disc were enough to blow a hole right through the nylon.
He did it. He could’ve played it safe, but he took a risk, knowing full well that the blame would’ve fallen on him if he hadn’t made the shot. I’ve never been prouder.
The arena lights up in cheers from all around—hockey players dogpiling on top of one another in victory—and I’m a shrieking, clapping, crying mess of a girlfriend, my heart attempting to jailbreak out of the bars of my ribs and crawl to him.
Him.
The only person who’s ever made me feel alive when I was on the verge of death; the only person who reminded me that even the darkest places are still capable of growing flowers.
When we return home, it’s as if the natural order of things didn’t even miss our absence. All the heartache was left in that hotel room in St. Paul, hundreds of miles away from us.
But the gossip is a different story.
Once the Mustangs stepped back on campus, they were greeted with celebratory cheers.
Snowfalls of whispers had a not-so-soft landing in the beginning, further exacerbated by Buford’s apparent absence from all things Mustang related.
He was rightfully kicked off the hockey team, kicked out of school, and the investigation is still ongoing.
I know all this talk will blow over eventually.
I know it’s not strong enough to dismantle the Mustangs like I originally thought.
They’re seal-tight, and there’s no weight on their conscience because none of them had a clue what Buford was up to behind their backs.
I think winning the Frozen Four definitely cushioned the nuclear blast of the truth bomb.
Despite the harder-to-swallow information about a certain player’s gambling, there were a lot of positive things to write about too.
The article detailed the familial bond between every guy on the team, the strenuous hours of hard work they put in for practices and games, and the sense of community that they’ve grown despite their own individual hardships.
Not all hockey players are liars or cheats or sex fiends like I’d initially thought, and it was wrong of me to make that generalization. The right hockey player is kind, considerate, understanding. And if you’re a part of their pack, they’ll stop at nothing to protect you.
I’m relieved I had time to make things right with Sutton before the championship game.
Instead of dwelling on the past, my brain fashions snippets from our most recent conversation into a franken-creature of unforgettable memories, and the knife-tenderness of his words are on frequent replay, having succeeded one too many times in drawing tributaries from my lacrimal glands.
“I can’t believe my boyfriend went all mob boss on a twenty-two-year-old and I wasn’t there to witness it,” Merit says, fluffing up the plaits in her braid as Irelyn sips on a green smoothie and Staten rotates through a few of her study flashcards.
“God, I don’t want to know what happened in that hotel room,” I grouse, my voice wrecked from the push-and-pull of exhaustion. The slow drip of heat is an unwelcome guest, especially now that summer is just around the corner.
“Oh, you should’ve seen Lake in action. Girl was fully convinced Buford was guilty before the evidence was found,” Ellaria adds.
I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to introduce Ellaria to the girls.
They got on without a hitch, thankfully, and all of them seem disturbingly happy to recount the transgressions of the past few days.
Nothing big really happens in the small, fog-swept town of Maple Grove, so when the tides change and wash up a behemoth of a scandal, eager-eyed spectators come out of the woodworks.
It all plays out in my memory like a bad, fuzzy dream.
The call with Ellaria, writing the article, the fight with Sutton.
A part of me still wants to harbor guilt for my involvement, but the other part—the sensible one—is constantly reiterating that these steps were going to be taken by someone, someday, as long as Buford kept the gig up.
I wouldn’t want to put anyone else in that situation, so in some sick, twisted acceptance, I guess I was the best candidate.
The most important part is that I was able to salvage my relationship with my boyfriend.
Speaking of, I haven’t seen him at all today. Though I’d imagine that getting back into the swing of things after a stressful seventy-two hours of lies and deceit would leave anyone bedridden.
All we spoke about on the ride home was Buford’s suspension and the impending investigation. And the team, well, they thanked me for writing an unbiased article. I was almost convinced I wouldn’t be able to, but like Tamara said, a good journalist knows how to remain objective.
“Wait a second, you cricket-bombed Buford’s house?” Staten exclaims, jaw partway open.
“Legend says there’s still a survivor hidden in his walls to this day,” I joke, just as the last of my sentence is rived in half like an axe’s blade caught in the grain of firewood, and a large body careens into our not-so-private conversation.
Sutton comes up from behind me, wraps his arm around my body in a tight squeeze, and my brain pulls a hard right around a blind turn at the sudden uneven distribution of balance.
His signature bergamot smell is the first thing that alerts me to his presence, and my instinctual drive to Krav Maga my silent attacker vanishes as my heart dismounts off my ribs in a happy little flip.
“I missed you,” he whispers in my ear, weighing me down as if he’s a giant mastiff flopping over its owner’s lap.
I laugh, turning around so I can gridlock with his tantalizingly brown eyes.
He lengthens to his full height, and I tip my head up. “We spent three hours on a bus together yesterday.”
His mouth softens into a smile. “That’s child’s play. I think we need to be stranded on a deserted island together for the foreseeable future.”
I contemplate the logistics. Nobody to bother us sounds nice. Surviving in the wilderness sounds…not so nice.
I rise to my tiptoes so I can twine my arms around his neck, my pulse fluttering with definitive wingbeats. “Won’t we, I don’t know, die?”
“Not if I can help it. I’m determined to give you the best extended vacation of your life. Room guaranteed. I’ll construct it out of bamboo trunks and palm leaves. It’ll be your very own slice of paradise. I’ll even hand-feed you the fruit I scavenge.”
“Deal.”
When I stumbled into this thing called life—hot off the assembly line with my fair share of defects—I never expected to find my soulmate at twenty-two. As fucked up as it is, Buford cheating on me was the best thing that could’ve possibly happened.
Sutton Whittaker snuck up on me—the girl with the hard exoskeleton and the equally tough insides—and was never once dissuaded from chasing after my heart. I didn’t know it at the time, but he had it from the moment he said, “Who the fuck are you?” A real sweet story to tell the kids one day.
“How are you feeling? About your job?” he asks, flipping the subject a whole three-sixty degrees.
“Actually, Tammy gave me a promotion for rising to the occasion. Editor in chief, just like I always dreamed about.”
“Trouble, that’s amazing!” Sutton praises.
“Hopefully it helps with my job search in the future.”
“I know it will. Any media outlet would be lucky to have you.”
“And I’ll support you in whatever career path you choose, whether that’s hockey or something else,” I tell him, brushing the tip of my nose with his, every insignificant worry dissolving like sugar granules in water.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to this feeling—the feeling of being loved. Despite my flaws, despite my ill-considered choices, despite a past that doesn’t define who I am anymore.
Merit groans, but it’s good-natured. “Ugh, you guys are sickeningly adorable.”
My mouth nudges at Sutton’s, waiting patiently for his lips to part, and I save my friends the trauma by opting for a sweet, chaste kiss, warmth and affection tangling in my chest.
“I’ve never been this happy,” I whisper, clinging to the one and only person who’s weathered the storm with me and still chose to stay after the endless downpour and the structural damage and the emotional waterboarding.
Sutton is as steady as ever. Even more so, if that’s possible. All hard edges melted down in a forge, along with the resentment that’s been corroding him slowly but surely. Softness is a thing to be celebrated, not shunned.
Our breaths toy with one another—pluming against collagen—the prospect of another kiss promised like the monotonous rising and setting of the sun.
“And I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure you never go another day without questioning how much I fucking love you.”