9. Frankie
Frankie
The first thing I learn about hockey is that everyone can tell I don’t know anything about hockey.
“Oh, honey. No,” says the woman beside me in the family suite, catching my hands mid-clap.
She’s been assigned to me, or I’ve been assigned to her, some arrangement of Gwen’s.
Marisa Sullivan, wife of Sully, the team’s loudest defenseman, and president of a book club I am legally forbidden to discuss.
“That was icing. We don’t clap for icing. ”
“It looked fast and good.”
“Everything they do looks fast and good. That’s not the metric.” She hands me a wine in a plastic cup with the tenderness of a war nurse. “Clap when I clap. Gasp when I gasp. You’ll be fluent by the third period.”
“Thank you. This is a beautiful ice rink,” I say, sincerely, and she pats my knee like I’ve suffered a head injury, and somewhere behind us someone snorts without looking up.
The suite is glass on one side and family on the other three, toddlers in tiny jerseys, retired parents, a grandmother doing a crossword who has seen a thousand of these games and can apparently feel icing without looking up.
Below us, eighteen thousand people are one organism with one lung, and the Wall of Gold is somewhere under my feet holding all of us up.
The man I am contractually falling for is down there on the ice, and this version of him is a stranger to me.
Because here’s the thing nobody warned me about, and Gwen’s deck had forty slides and not one of them covered it: I have never seen him play.
I know his scars by name. I know how he takes his coffee and what his father’s voice sounded like at a kitchen table and the exact temperature of his hand in rough air.
But I have never once seen him move at speed, in his own domain, in the place where he is not a man being careful.
The puck drops, and the quiet man from 3B is gone, replaced by something fast and unstoppable.
He’s slower than the kids. Even I can see that, the way you can see a fact.
It doesn’t matter. He’s where everything is about to happen three seconds before it happens, calm in the middle of a sport that looks like a fistfight at highway speed.
Men a head taller bounce off him. Once, gliding out of a scrum with the puck, he does the wrist thing, small slow circles, and the woman two rows down does the wrist thing back at her friend and screams.
I wrote that wrist. Eleven million views taught the entire city to read my marginalia.
“There it is,” Marisa says softly, watching my face instead of the ice. “The conversion.”
“I’m not converted. I’m researching.”
“Sweetheart, you’re standing.”
I am. Somewhere in the last minute I stood up, hands fisted, because a defenseman the size of a vending machine lined him up along the boards and every hockey-illiterate cell in my body understood the physics before my brain caught up, understood the neck and the hips and the word managing, and he slipped the hit at the last quarter second and the vending machine hit glass and eighteen thousand people laughed. I sat down. My heart did not.
The Summit win by two, both of which happen while I’m asking Marisa what a power play is and she’s answering with visual aids made of pretzels.
When the horn goes, the building sings something off-key and joyful, and Marisa hugs me sideways and says, into my ear, under the roar, “Whatever’s between you two, the team needed it.
He came back from retirement sad, honey.
You should know somebody noticed the difference. ”
Whatever this is. Everyone keeps handing me that phrase like exact change.
Then Gwen’s people come for me, all earpieces and gentle herding, because it’s time for the beat. West corridor. The photographer who “got lucky.”
The corridor is concrete and echoes, families and staff drifting through, and he comes down it fresh from the shower in a charcoal suit with his hair still damp, gray temples going silver under the fluorescents, and the tired parts of him tucked away where the cameras can’t reach, and my body, which signed nothing, betrays me anyway.
“Good game,” I say. “You were extremely fast and good.”
“You clapped for icing.”
“One time.”
“They showed it on the bench feed.” Something at the corner of his mouth, that almost, that refusal. “Sully wants it framed.”
We walk. His hand finds the small of my back, camera-light, contract-legal, and here is where the script says he leans in, and a photographer forty feet away earns his fee, and tomorrow the internet gets its fairy tale, everyone briefed, everything sanctioned, nothing real.
He stops walking and turns. Tips my chin up with two knuckles, unhurried, and looks at me a beat longer than any camera needs, and I have exactly enough time to think rule three has a carve-out and we’re standing in it before he kisses me.
I wrote this kiss. That’s the humiliating part.
Chapter twenty-six, the airport chase, the reunion, I choreographed it beat for beat, his hand at her jaw, the pause before like held breath.
I got everything right except what it does to the backs of my knees, the sound he makes low in his chest that no camera will ever pick up, the way my hand grabs his lapel without clearing it with me first, the way the corridor and the contract and the photographer all fall out of the bottom of the moment and leave nothing but the two of us and eighteen months of unfinished sentence.
He pulls back first. Professional. Except his thumb stays at my jaw one extra second, pressing lightly, like a man marking his page before he closes the book, and when he steps away, he reaches up and rubs the back of his neck.
I know that tell. I wrote that tell.
Then the photographer lowers his camera, and I watch it happen: the warmth leaves him like a set being struck.
Shoulders squaring, eyes going flat and public, the hand that tipped my chin already back in his pocket.
Ten seconds ago his mouth was on mine. Now he is a man standing a professional distance from a colleague, and the swing between the two is fast enough to leave a mark.
“Good?” he asks, voice even, and it takes me a second to understand he’s asking about the beat, the staged thing, the work product.
“Great,” I say, one half beat early. “Very convincing.”
“Very convincing,” he agrees, and neither of us looks at the other the whole walk to the cars.
In the visitors’ lot, waiting for the valet, the thought arrives with teeth: he can do that.
He can pour eighteen months of unfinished sentence into my mouth and then turn it off, perform a tenderness he has no intention of feeling.
And I of all women don’t get to be wounded by it, because performing tenderness I had no right to feel is my entire published career.
He learned that trick somewhere. He learned it from four hundred and nine pages of me.
* * *
The gala is Gwen’s project, chandeliers and team gold, sponsors and their wine breath, a step-and-repeat where Nick and I perform the eight-second lean-and-smile so many times my face develops a union.
He works the room the way he plays, positionally, always where the trouble’s about to be, and I watch Denver love him and understand, slowly, what eighteen thousand gold squares actually bought.
Not a center. A place to put their believing.
Rory Locke finds me at the dessert table and shakes my hand with both of his like I’m a visiting dignitary. He’s twenty and gorgeous in the way of golden retrievers and has been sent over, I suspect, by teammates who are all watching.
“Ma’am,” he starts.
“Oh, no. Frankie.”
“Frankie. Okay. Cool.” He exhales, resets, twenty years old and barely containing himself.
“I just want to say, Cap’s different since, like, this.
All of it. Whatever the internet says, I don’t care.
He’s, like, one percent less terrifying.
” He leans in, earnest as a sunrise. “Don’t tell him I said one percent. ”
“Your secret’s in the vault.”
“Also, my girlfriend says chapter twenty-two is the best thing she’s ever read, and if I ever quoted it right she’d marry me, so if you have any, like, tips—”
Marisa materializes and removes him by the elbow like a stage manager, mouthing book club at me over his shoulder, and I stand there holding a tiny cake, absurdly, dangerously fond of a team I’ve only just met.
The goalie arrives differently. No handlers, no approach vector, he’s simply there beside me at the rail overlooking the dance floor, big and still in a way that’s related to Nick’s stillness but colder at the edges, a keeper’s patience, and he watches the room for a while before he says anything.
“Micah,” he says. “I’ve known him for nineteen years.”
Not nice to meet you. A statement of seniority. “Frankie,” I say. “Eighteen months.”
Something that could grow up to be a smile crosses the lower half of his face and declines. “He looks better than he did in September,” he says, to the dance floor. “Sleeps, apparently. Made a joke Tuesday. Whole room heard it.” A pause. “I read your book, Ms. Delaney.”
The rail is very solid under my hands. “It’s fiction.”
“It’s good,” he says, and finally turns and looks at me straight on, and being read by Micah Beaulieu is like being x-rayed. “He doesn’t get another bad year. Whatever you’re doing, do it carefully.”
He’s gone before my heart restarts, and I am still recalibrating when the sponsor finds me.
Hollis-something, or something Hollis, mid-fifties, third scotch, a lanyard of self-importance where a bow tie should be.
He backs me toward the rail by increments, the way men like him do it, all civility, no exits, and asks what a girl like me really got out of a retired jock, because, and he says this smiling, “we both know the shelf life on that story, sweetheart, so what’s the real number? ”
“I’m going to go find the desserts,” I say, and step left, and his hand closes on my elbow.
He doesn’t get to finish the squeeze.
Nick is there. I don’t see him arrive; the room just rearranges and then he’s beside me, not touching Hollis, not touching me, doing nothing anyone could photograph, and the temperature drops the way it must in the last second before a hit you can’t avoid.
He looks at the hand on my elbow until it stops existing.
Then he looks at Hollis, patient, terribly polite, the Captain, and says, quietly, “Walk me through what just happened.”
“Nick! We were just—”
“Take your time.”
Hollis discovers urgent business elsewhere in under six words.
And here’s the part I’ll still be examining long after my pulse settles, the part that undoes me worse than the corridor kiss: Nick doesn’t grab my arm and steer me off like recovered property.
He puts his back to the room, making a wall out of pure shoulder, and looks at me, only me, and asks:
“Do you want to leave, or do you want a better drink?”
My choice. After all of that, the room still mine to call.
“Kansas,” I say.
The word lands, and he almost smiles, nods once, and gets the coats. He gets the car brought around and he gets us out clean, the way he does everything, positionally.
In the car, city lights doing their slow parade, Gwen’s text arrives like a curtain call: a screenshot, the corridor, his hand at my jaw, my hand on his lapel, already at two million and climbing, and one line of Gwen at her purest. Beautiful work tonight. They believe it.
I look at the photograph the entire ride. That’s the thing about being the author. I know exactly which parts I made up, and the kiss isn’t one of them, and the man beside me is watching the road with his jaw set and his thumb rubbing slow circles on the wheel.
Neither of us says it. We are professionals. We have a document. A contract of sorts.
The woman goes home, I narrate silently, while he idles at my curb until the door’s open and the cat is verified alive.
The woman played her part, and Gwen is delighted and the fairy tale is trending.
And if her mouth still remembers a stage kiss like it was testimony, that is nobody’s business, because act one is over, and she knows better than anyone what happens to a story after the hard launch.
It accelerates.