Chapter 22
twenty-two
ROWAN
I get to the rink forty minutes before practice and start taping my stick, because it feels like the one thing I can control right now. The locker room is empty, and I take my time, taping so perfect that even my old man couldn’t find fault with it.
We’ve got St. Adrian’s on Thursday and the whole campus is buzzing. Posters are everywhere, the student section is organizing its chants, and somebody already spray-painted RAVENS EAT on the bridge by Fox Row.
I should be locked in, because this is my week.
Last year, I had two assists in the third period, and the student section chanted my name after the final horn, and I stood on that ice with confetti in my hair, thinking I’d earned every second of it.
But the week feels wrong, and I know why.
The room fills up in waves. Seb comes in first, drops his bag, and nods at me. He’s looked tired all week — at Ironwood, he was on the back porch, phone to his ear, talking someone back home through what sounded like a hard time.
But he’s Seb, so since then, he’s handled it the way he handles everything: silently, aggressively, and with the posture of a man who would rather eat glass than discuss his feelings or his life with anyone.
“You good?” I say, because checking in on him has been on my list.
“Yeah.” He sits down, pulling gear out of his bag. “You?”
“Yeah.”
The silence continues until Luca comes in talking about someone’s Instagram story, and Theo shows up behind him with his hair damp from a shower he already took, which makes Seb and me look at each other.
“Pre-practice shower,” Theo says, catching the look. “Helps with mental clarity.”
“You smell like a Bath & Body Works store,” Luca says.
“Thank you.”
Theo drops onto the bench and starts taping his stick. Then, without any lead-up, he straightens his spine, lowers his chin, narrows his eyes, and does the Coach Franklin impression he’s been trying out for the last few weeks.
“Gentlemen, we are not going to lose to a team that thinks matching ties make them a program,” he says, in the exact cadence Coach uses.
Luca loses it and Seb’s jaw goes sideways, which is Seb trying not to laugh. A couple of the sophomores who are filing in crack up, and even I feel the tug of a smile. Only Niko doesn’t respond, walking in and looking at us like we’re idiots.
The knot eases, because it’s one moment where everything feels normal.
But a second later, the tightness returns, so I stand up. “Let’s go.”
Seb looks sideways at me. “Mason’s not here yet.”
I shrug, and we hit the ice. I run the session hard, because if I’m skating, I’m not thinking about Sloane and Mason. We run faceoff reps, breakout patterns, and the new neutral-zone structure we mapped out yesterday. The guys respond, and it’s the best practice in months.
Then Mason shows up.
A late player usually comes through the tunnel fast and contrite. But Mason strolls like he’s walking into a bar, steps onto the ice and slots into the drill mid-rep without looking at me or saying a word to the guys.
“Get in line, Cross,” I say, trying to keep my voice even.
“Yeah, yeah.” He slides into the rotation as Coach Franklin watches from the bench.
He’s been like this since the dinner at Ironwood House. Louder in the room, looser on the ice, with an ease to him that reads as confidence but feels deliberate and pointed, like the charm is aimed somewhere.
He’s also playing for himself — taking the puck wide when the system calls for the outlet, showboating on zone entries, ignoring my line calls — but doing it all with just enough plausible deniability that calling him out would make me look like the one with the issue.
So I push the tempo harder, trying to catch him out, but all I do is make some of the other guys struggle. Seb — the biggest guy but not the fittest — is the first one to get gassed, and more follow pretty soon after him.
Then Mason goes after Theo when he misses a pass.
“Jesus, Ward,” Mason says, loud enough for the guys nearby to hear. “Do you want to try next time?”
I look over. Theo’s face has gone flat, his jaw tight and his eyes downcast. He doesn’t know if he’s allowed to be angry, because the guy who said it is older and better and maybe this is just how it works.
A couple of the older guys look at me.
Cross. Cool it. He’s a freshman.
I’ve said some version of it a hundred times.
The words are right there, and I get as far as opening my mouth, then close it again. Because if I go at Mason, Mason will come back at me, and whatever he comes back with might be about Sloane and him and the kitchen.
He isn’t the only one who’s changed since the time he spent alone with her.
So I call the next drill.
Mason and Theo move on, and so do the guys, and twenty minutes later we’re running a three-on-two. Then Mason skates past me, close enough that our shoulders almost touch, and he whispers something beneath the noise of the drill and the scrape of blades.
“That birthmark,” he says. “High on the inside of her left thigh. Cute, isn’t it?”
Then he’s gone, pushing off into the flow of the next rep, and my hands tighten on my stick so hard my fingers ache inside my gloves. Because I’ve put my mouth on that spot and I know exactly what it looks like and where it sits on her body.
Mason could know from when they were dating, but Sloane told me they didn’t go that far, and Mason never gave any indication things got physical. And if he knew from before, then he’s had that information for months.
So why now?
The drill is still running, but I’m frozen on the ice with my hands locked on my stick, and the impulse is simple and total: skate after him, put him into the boards hard enough to feel it through the pads, and keep going until somebody pulls me off.
But I don’t, because if I light the fuse, the bomb might go off.
So I stand there and I run the next drill.
But the guys know. Seb catches my eye after a whistle and holds it longer than he means to, reading me the way he reads a play going bad. Luca skates close during a water break and taps his stick against my shin pads, not saying anything.
But Theo hasn’t looked at me since the remark, and that’s worse.
As the guys file to the locker room, I stay, because Theo is sitting on the bench, pulling tape off his shins, quiet and alone. That’s a warning sign, because Theo always looks for the group, and he always fills silence.
I sit next to him. “You good?”
He starts unlacing his skates. “He hit the outlet right to the spot and I wasn’t there.” A beat. “I read the rush wrong, so that was on me.”
He pulls a skate off and sets it down.
“I know he’s good, I know that, I just—” He stops, then runs both hands through his hair, damp and going in four directions. “Mason made sure the whole rink heard about it.”
“Theo, I—”
“I’m not asking you to do anything,” he says, finally looking up at me. “I’m just saying.”
I open my mouth. The captain’s sentence is right there — I’ll talk to him, I’ll handle it, it won’t happen again — but it doesn’t come, because I already failed to say it on the ice and I’m afraid of the consequences if I do.
“I know,” I say.
Theo nods, and then he’s gone, but what he said remains. The ice is chewed up from the session, ruts and snow pushed up against the boards, which tells me we worked our asses off today even though I didn’t manage to pull Mason into line.
I used to love this part, the rink after hours, the ice to myself. It’s the same as the weight room in the morning: quiet and calm and mine. In sophomore year I used to stay an hour after every practice, skating slow figures, the cold in my lungs.
I loved it, but then people started needing things.
My father would call today clean. You ran the session. You got the result. You kept everybody moving. He used to tell me the bar moves and you rise to meet it, and I met it for so long that I stopped feeling where it cut.
Never mind the kid on the bench who needed me to stop.
Never mind being too afraid to call someone out.
I sit on the bench, pull my gloves off, and find a blister forming on my right palm from how hard I was gripping the stick after Mason arrived. I wait for some sort of peace, but it doesn’t come.
Eventually, I stand and walk down the tunnel in my skates, blades clicking on the rubber mats. By now, half the guys have cleared out with plans to shower at home before classes, while the rest are in the showers and talking shit.
When I reach my stall, a foil-wrapped plate sits on the shelf. It wasn’t there before practice. The foil is crimped the way Luca does it, which means he stole more of Sloane’s food and then portioned some out for me.
There’s a Post-it note on it:
There were leftover leftovers, so they’re yours by law. P.S. Ask Sloane to cook the meatballs again?
It’s a level of contradictory generosity that only Luca could pull off without seeing the problem. But the reference makes me ache for her all over again, so I sit and pull out my phone and confirm, with no real surprise, that she hasn’t texted me since this morning.
I scroll back through our thread, doing the thing I’ve been doing all week: looking for the exact place it changed. The texts from two weeks ago are long and scattered and full of her: jokes about a professor, plans to catch up, exasperation about Ivy…
But then the messages start to get shorter.
Then polite.
Lifeless.
I put the phone down on the bench and think about what Mason said about the birthmark. It seems to lean into my worst fear, but instead of calling Sloane or confronting Mason, I press my thumb down on the blister.
Because it hurts less than saying the thing I’ve been avoiding.
I don’t even know if I believe it. That’s the truth. I can’t tell anymore whether I’m reading the play or inventing it — I just know she’s pulling away, and Mason is smiling, and every hour I don’t ask, the questions get heavier.
Did you fool around with Mason in that kitchen that night?
Do you want to be with him, rather than me?