30. Nick
Nick
We leave the building together through the front, which has never once happened, past the cameras and the wall of gold with its Sharpie handwriting, my hand around hers where every lens in Colorado can see it, and nobody staged the route and nobody briefed the beat, and the last text Gwen will ever send me in a professional capacity arrives as we reach the doors: I got nothing. Go home. Be normal people.
We go home. We be normal people.
The house above the foothills is lit the way she leaves it now, lamps on timers because she said a fortress should look inhabited, and Fabio meets us in the hallway and escorts us in like a ma?tre d’ who had doubts about our reservation, and there is a moment, just inside the door, where the whole season lands on both of us at once, the loss and the noise and the chant and the boards, and we stand in the entry holding each other up like two people getting off the longest flight of their lives.
“You okay?” she asks, into my chest.
Run the checks. Hip: wrecked, honorably.
Season: over. Cup: someone else’s, forever, and my father’s stone stays bare, and I keep waiting for it to hurt, but it keeps not hurting.
Just clean air where the ache should be.
“I keep looking for the wound,” I tell her, honest, because honest is what we are now.
“Where the Cup should hurt. There’s nothing there, Frankie. There’s just June.”
“That’s because you already finished,” she says, like it’s obvious, like it’s page one. “The Cup was never the story, babe. It was just the prize that kept the story moving.”
“Twenty-two years chasing a prize.”
“The best ones take decades. Ask the Holy Grail.” She’s unlacing my dress shoes in the entryway because bending is not currently in my repertoire, kneeling in her DELANEY jersey on the floor of my house, grinning up at me, and something about the sight of it rearranges my whole chest. “Come on, Lachance. Take me to bed. You’ve got nowhere to be in the morning for the first time since you were five. ”
Nowhere to be. It should terrify me. A year ago I believed the game was the only place I was real, and that when this season ended, I would end with it.
Here’s what I know now, climbing my own stairs behind the woman who has my whole heart: hockey was the first room of my life, not the only one.
You finish a room and you walk into the next one, and if you’ve done it right, somebody has already turned on the lamps.
The bed is ours now, has been since spring, but tonight is different and both of us know it, because tonight there is nothing left outside the room.
No season pending, no contract term, no secret with a clock on it, no version of either of us that exists in someone else’s deck.
Two people with all the time in the world, real names attached.
We take it slow, because slow is what we have now. All the time in the world.
I undress her the way you unwrap something you already know you get to keep, the jersey with her name over my number going last, and she laughs at the care of it and then stops laughing, her breath doing the stutter I fell for at thirty thousand feet, and she touches the newest scar, the one over my eyebrow from the conference final, already learning it, and asks its name, and I say, “Game six,” and she says, “His name is Frank,” and I say, “Absolutely not,” and she christens him Frank anyway, and that is how Frank joins Steve, and this is the marriage I am asking her for, this exactly, a lifetime of vetoes I intend to lose.
“Tell me what hurts,” she says, our old liturgy, palm flat on my sternum, and for once I run the full inventory and come up honest and empty.
“Nothing. It’s June and nothing hurts.” I catch her hand and hold it where my heart is doing its unmanaged thing. “Your turn. Tell me what you like.”
And she does. Then she stops, sits up, and pushes me flat against the pillows, looking down at me with an expression I last saw across a negotiating table. “New rules tonight,” she says. “You’ve run every play all season, Lachance. Lie still. It’s my game.”
So I lie still, which is the hardest thing I have done all spring.
She undresses me slowly and narrates while she does it, telling me in that low storyteller’s voice exactly what she plans to do, and then she does all of it, unhurried and merciless, her mouth at my jaw, my chest, the scar named Frank, lower, until I am the one gasping and wordless in the lamplight, gripping the headboard because she told me to keep my hands off her and is enjoying my obedience far too much.
It is the first time in my life I have handed anyone complete control of anything.
She takes it like a woman who has been waiting years for the keys.
“Enough.” I pull her up my body before she can finish me, and she comes willingly, grinning, entirely pleased with herself, and stretches out over me skin to skin.
“Not yet.” She catches my wrist when I reach for her and pins it back to the pillow with no force at all, the gesture being the entire point.
“Still my game. But I’ll allow a substitution.
” She moves up my body, knees bracketing my ribs, then my shoulders.
Then she’s above my mouth, one hand braced on the headboard, looking down at me with her hair loose and the lamplight behind her. “Hands are back in play.”
I fill my hands with her thighs and pull her down to my mouth, and the sound she makes is one I plan to spend the rest of my life earning.
She rides my tongue in slow rolls, setting her own pace, taking exactly what she wants, the storyteller reduced to fragments now.
My name. God. There. When she comes, the headboard knocks the wall once, hard, her thighs trembling against my ears, and she folds forward and laughs, breathless, into her own arm.
“Well.” She surfaces, flushed, entirely pleased with herself. “That’s going in a book.”
“Don’t put me in a book.”
“Far too late.” She slides back down and settles over me, her forearms on my chest, and the grin softens into the other thing, the thing underneath.
“All of you,” she says, against my mouth. “Right now.”
When I move over her she wraps her legs around me and takes me in with one long breath, skin to skin, nothing held back and nothing in the way, and we both go still at the fullness of it.
“Frances,” I say, into the quiet. Her full name. The whole one.
Her eyes come up to mine and shine. “Nico Lachance,” she answers, every syllable deliberate, and pulls me down.
“I used to think being known was the dangerous part,” I tell her, my mouth at her temple, moving inside her, deep and easy. “Being seen. I built a whole life around never letting it happen.”
“And now?” Her breath hitches. Her nails find my back.
“Now it’s the only thing I want. Look at me, Frankie.” She looks at me. “Keep looking.”
We move slowly, and there is no reason on earth to hurry.
My body aches in a dozen places and I would not trade one of them.
Her hands map my back. My mouth finds her jaw, her ear, and the words I have been saving, and I say all of them, out loud, plainly, while we rock together in the lamplight: that I love her, that I choose her, that the rest of my life started on a plane and I know it now.
She keeps looking. We move together, slow and deep, her heels pressed into the backs of my thighs, her hands in my hair, on my jaw, over the scar named Frank, and the pleasure builds gradually and then completely, and I hold it back as long as I can, because I am not ready to be done being this close to her.
“Keep talking,” she whispers, moving with me. “Just like that. Don’t stop.”
I don’t stop. I talk her all the way there, my hand between us where she needs it, her breath climbing, and when she comes she says my name with her eyes open, watching me, hiding nothing, and it pulls me over with her, deep and slow and wide open, no armor anywhere, nothing between my heart and hers but skin.
Afterward we lie tangled in the lamplight, her leg over mine, my hand tracing her spine, the pines moving outside the window, and nobody performs anything, and nobody leaves, and nobody in this bed is anonymous.
Everybody in this bed is somebody. All names attached. That’s the whole renovation, two years, load-bearing walls and all.
“Chapter thirty,” she says, drowsy, against my shoulder, her leg over mine, the old narration surfacing one last time as pure celebration, first person plural, a new grammar. “We made it to chapter thirty.”
“What happens in chapter thirty?”
“Traditionally?” She yawns. “The epilogue gets set up. Something small and perfect happens, quietly, and the reader closes the book already knowing the shape of forever, and if the author’s any good she doesn’t oversell it.
” She’s asleep before the sentence fully lands, mid-breath, the way she does, and I lie there with the whole of her against the whole of me, and I look at the ceiling I’ve been drafting speeches on all year, and I have exactly one left to give.
***
Morning. The Pines, nine a.m., June light through the front window, and the whole diner pretending, extremely badly, not to be caught watching us.
Because word travels. Donna has our booth ready, the one with the rip shaped like Florida.
Cami is two tables over with her sister, pretending it’s a coincidence.
Marisa is at the counter, elaborately not looking at us.
I have taken forty-one thousand faceoffs and my hands are not steady on the coffee cup.
And Frankie sits across from me, demolishing hash browns and narrating her book-launch anxiety, noticing none of it, God bless her, the least observant professional observer in Colorado, exactly when it counts.
The ring has been in my pocket since April.
That’s the confession I lead with, when she finally winds down. I put the little box on the Formica between the ketchup and Réjean, where it sits, small and certain, and I watch her stop, whole-body, the freeze she caught from me, and I say it simply, no speech after all.
“The oval. Second row. I bought it the Monday after Gwen staged the fake one, and it’s been in my sock drawer through everything, the auction, the gate, the garage, all of it.
I never once took it back to the store.” Her eyes are already ruined.
Donna has stopped pretending to wipe the counter.
“I don’t have a chapter number for this, Frankie.
You’re the structure. I’m just the guy in 3B.
But I know how I want the acknowledgments to read, and I know you read endings first, so here it is, up front, out loud, where everyone can see: marry me, and I’ll spend the whole book proving the first page right. ”
The diner holds its breath, eighteen thousand strong in spirit, twelve in the flesh, and the woman who wrote me before she knew me, who buried me and dug me back up and burned her whole career down to keep me standing, puts both hands over her mouth, and then takes them off, because she’s done hiding anything, and the smile underneath is the one from the top step, the one that started the entire franchise of trouble.
“Yes,” she says. “Obviously, yes, it was always yes, it’s been yes since the chicken.” And then, because she is who she is, world without end: “Frank the scar is going to be insufferable at the wedding.”
Donna cheers. The diner detonates, twelve people strong.
Cami is standing on the seat of her booth, sobbing, her phone nowhere in sight, living every second of it instead of recording it.
And I slide the oval one, second row, onto the hand of Frankie Delaney in a vinyl booth at nine in the morning, in daylight, in public, no cameras and every witness that matters, and somewhere a photographer is missing the whole thing, and that is exactly, precisely, at last, the point.
The last honest thing we did in secret was fall in love. Everything after this, we do where everyone can see.