11. Frankie
Frankie
The team charter has leather seats, a flight crew that knows everyone’s snack order, and, as of gate time, one romance novelist gripping her armrests like the plane runs on faith.
Gwen’s idea, obviously. A November road swing through Minnesota, a national broadcast, and what the deck called away-market girlfriend visibility, which is a phrase I plan to steal for a villain someday.
What the deck did not cover is that girlfriend visibility requires flying, at night, in winter, with twenty-three professional athletes watching me pre-board like I’m a rescue animal.
Partners don’t usually fly the charter, but Gwen wanted the arrival photos, so here I am, assigned a seat back in the staff rows like the visiting civilian I am.
“She gonna make it?” Sully asks the cabin, delighted.
“She’s fine,” I announce, from inside my coat.
“She’s fine,” confirms a voice, low, beside me, and Nick drops into the empty seat beside me, four rows back from where the seating chart put him. Nobody says a word about it. He buckles in and pulls the shade half down against the tarmac lights.
“You have the window,” I say. “You love the window. You’re a window person.”
“Aisle’s better for my hip.”
The hip is on the other side. I know his body like a manuscript; I know the hip is on the other side.
I let him have the lie because it’s the polite kind, and because the engines are spooling, and because his forearm is already on our shared armrest, palm tilted a degree open, an offer with plausible deniability, and when we hit the first chop over the mountains my hand is in his before either of us consults the official document.
Rule three has a footnote now, apparently.
Turbulence clause. Grandfathered in at altitude.
Nobody on the plane can see our hands under the tray table.
This isn’t for anyone. I ride the whole rough patch with my thumb against his knuckles, not writing a word of it in my head, breathing the way he taught me eighteen months ago, and he reads his game notes with his free hand the entire time, as if holding mine is simply part of his routine.
We land. He takes his hand back the way you leave a warm room. Neither of us files an incident report.
The game is Saturday, and I watch from a suite with visiting-family credentials while Minnesota tries to remove my fake boyfriend’s head from the rest of him.
It’s a meaner game than the home ones, and between the first and second period, escorted down a service corridor toward better snacks, I see something I’m not supposed to see.
A training room door, half open. Nick on a table, jersey off, shoulder pads off, a trainer working his neck with both thumbs while the man himself stares at the ceiling, blank and patient.
There’s a machine wired to his hip with electrodes.
There’s a bag of ice strapped where a bag of ice should not have to live between periods of a hockey game, and his face isn’t in pain, that’s what stops me cold: it’s administrative.
He’s being serviced, like equipment, twenty minutes before he goes back out to do it all again, and he does this every game, and nobody in the suite has any idea.
He turns his head and sees me seeing.
One second. Two. He doesn’t reach for a shirt, doesn’t perform anything, just looks at me down the corridor with the electrodes doing their silent work, and something passes between us that I don’t have the hockey to translate, and then a staffer pulls the door closed, apologizing, and I get walked on to the snacks like a tourist who wandered into the engine room.
He plays the third period. He wins the faceoff that kills their last push. Fast and good.
The mix-up isn’t discovered until eleven p.m.
The team hotel in Minneapolis has the Summit on three floors, and it has me on none of them, because somewhere between Gwen’s office and the travel coordinator, somebody believed the club’s own press release: the reservation says N.
Lachance +1. One room. One king. And the hotel, hosting the team, a medical-device conference, and a Christmas market’s worth of tourists, has nothing else, and neither does the block, and the road manager delivering this news to Nick’s doorway is visibly updating his résumé in real time.
“It’s fine,” Nick tells him, and closes the door, and turns around, and it is not fine, it is a hotel room with one bed and no cameras in it, and we both know exactly what the last hotel room with no cameras in it did.
“So,” I say. “This is a trope.”
“A what?”
“A trope. A load-bearing romance convention.” I’m talking with my hands at a volume I can hear myself, and I can’t stop, the room is shrinking and my mouth knows it.
“One bed. It’s a classic of the form. There are academic papers.
The couple is forced by circumstance into proximity and the tension, which they have been managing responsibly through rules and documents, becomes, um.
Unmanageable. I’ve written it four times. ”
“How’s it end?”
“You know exactly how it ends, you read my—” and I stop, and he’s already looking at me, and the room drops about four hundred feet with no seatbelt sign at all.
We do the responsible things. We are extremely adult.
He calls down for a rollaway; the rollaway arrives with a broken wheel and we both stand there looking at it, and he says, “I’ll take the floor,” and I say, “You have a game tomorrow and a hip they had wired to electrodes an hour ago, you’re not sleeping on carpet, we’re adults, it’s a king, it has a demilitarized zone,” and that is how, at midnight, I end up lying at attention on the far edge of a bed the size of my first apartment, in my most bureaucratic pajamas, next to the man I wrote a whole wedding for in my book.
The lights are off. Minneapolis hums against the glass. Neither of us is asleep, and neither of us is pretending well.
“Frankie.”
“Yep.”
“What you saw. Between periods.” A long pause. “That stays out of print.”
“Nick, obviously, I would never—” and then, because the dark makes me honest and stupid in equal parts: “It scared me. Not the machines. The way you looked. Like it was normal.”
“It is normal.”
“That’s the scary part,” I say, and I hear him breathe, and the quiet after that is different from the quiet before it, thicker, like the air pressure changed, and I do the thing I do in these situations. I name it. Out loud. To defuse it.
“Okay, so, obviously there is tension,” I announce to the ceiling, brisk, clinical, a professor of us.
“We’re adults, it’s chemistry, it’s proximity, it’s two attractive people with a shared traumatic meet-cute and a legal document, and the responsible thing is to acknowledge it, name it, and let it pass, which is what I’m doing right now.
Naming it. There. Named. It has no power anymore, that’s how naming works—”
The bed shifts.
He’s up on one elbow in the dark, looking down at me, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him, and my professor voice dies in my throat with its affairs completely unsettled.
“It’s not working,” he says. Low. Wrecked around the edges. “The naming.”
“No,” I whisper. “It’s not.”
His hand comes up slowly, giving me plenty of time to call Kansas.
I don’t. His thumb lands at my jaw, right where it stayed in the corridor, and I hear the sound I make.
Then his mouth is on mine, and there is no camera and no contract and no genre convention on this earth that could hold the roof on it.
It goes molten fast. Eighteen months of wanting, and we know each other by heart. His hand maps down my spine and under my shirt, bare palm on bare skin, and I hear what that does to his breathing. My leg hooks over his. The pajamas fail at their one job.
His mouth moves to my throat, my name in it, rough, like it got away from him.
My top becomes a problem we solve together, and then his mouth is on my breast and my fingers are in his hair, and I have written this exact scene four times and gotten every important thing about it wrong.
The weight of him. The heat. The sound he makes when my hand slides down his stomach and finds him, hard and heavy through thin cotton, his hips pressing into my palm like the body just outvoted the man.
“Frankie.” A warning with no conviction anywhere in it. His hand skims up the inside of my thigh, close, closer, and my whole body pulls taut, and I arch up into him, and he makes a low sound I wrote once and got wrong. The real one has grief in it—
And he stops.
Braced over me, breathing like a third period, forehead dropping to my collarbone, one hand still fisted in the sheet by my head, everything in him held at the top of the swing.
“Not like this,” he says, into my skin. “Not on a clerical error.”
“Nick—”
“Listen. Please.” He lifts his head, and even in the dark I can see what this is costing him, the fine shake in the arm braced beside my head.
“I spent two years learning not to reach for a thing just because it feels good and it’s within reach.
You’re not a craving, Frankie. You’re the opposite.
That’s the point.” His thumb traces my jaw, unbearably gentle for a man breathing like that.
“I have never wanted anything the way I want you. Not the pills. Not the game. Nothing. Which is exactly why I’m not taking you on a hotel’s mistake.
When this happens, we choose it. Both of us, wide awake, nothing to blame it on. Not a storm. Not a seating chart.”
There is a version of me that argues. She’s vetoed by the version that’s been left before, by a father, by an ex with my premise in his teeth, by every person who took what the moment offered and let the moment take the blame.
“Okay, Just Nick,” I say, wrecked, and his whole body flinches at the sound of it.
He rolls onto his back and lies there, one forearm over his eyes, breathing like the third period ran long.
Then he gets up, walks to the bathroom, and runs the tap, and I listen to a forty-one-year-old professional athlete splash cold water on his face like a teenager, and I have never felt more powerful or more wrecked in my life.
He comes back. The demilitarized zone reinstates itself down the middle of the king, twelve inches of catastrophically charged cotton, and we lie there side-by-side breathing hard, not touching, deliberately, which is somehow more intimate than everything we just did.
“Just so you know,” I say, to the ceiling, when I can talk, “that was the most romantic thing anyone has ever stopped doing to me.”
“Go to sleep, Frankie.”
“I’m going to have to rewrite every hero I have.”
“Sleep.”
I don’t sleep for a long time, and I know he doesn’t either, because I know his breathing asleep, I have one night of primary source and I’ve never forgotten a page of it, and somewhere over the dark I understand that the air between us has changed for good, the way it does after the first crack of a storm that hasn’t decided when to break.
The woman lies in the dark next to the whole rest of the book. And for the first time in her life she does not want to skip ahead and read how it ends.