Chapter 29
twenty-nine
ROWAN
We’re down two in the third, the puck is on my stick, and I don’t want it.
I sat out the first period for the swing at Mason, and I’ve been useless since I came back out. It feels like every time the puck arrives, the only thing I want is to get rid of it, so this time I chip it to Theo before he’s looking, and it skips off his skate and dies.
It’s been like that the whole night.
Luca and Seb have stopped looking for me, which effectively makes us one down. But they know what’s happening, because when you skate with guys long enough, they know when you’re off, and tonight they’re routing everything through the far wing as if I’m not on the ice.
I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t pass to me either.
“Settle it down out there,” Franklin calls from the bench, not to anyone in particular.
And the sound of his voice puts me back in his office.
My hand still purple from Mason’s mouth, I’d laid it all out for him — the post, Murphy’s, the harm Mason was causing — and after Mason’s suspension was confirmed, I’d followed up by getting the guys to help clean up the gossip.
It was logical and clean.
Except I went to her door last.
Handled. That’s the word she used. Not helped.
I can’t forget her face when I told her I’d gone to Franklin. Not angry. Still. The stillness of someone watching the thing she’d spent a year dreading hit her from an angle she didn’t expect. Then she’d told me she loved me but that loving me hurt too much.
And she closed the door in my face.
The hit comes clean. A Lakehurst State D-man reads my lane along the boards and closes hard and drops his shoulder into my chest, and I go into the glass. I’ve taken this hit five hundred times, but usually I’m paying attention, not engaged in self-loathing.
I hit the deck and I don’t get up.
Nothing’s broken. I know broken, and this isn’t it. My shoulder is fine. My ribs are fine. My head is fine. But I don’t get up, not right away, because my body has finally decided the thing my brain’s been talking over for months.
There’s nothing left — you poured all of it into everyone else and never once put anything back, and the tank is empty.
A ref glides over. “You alright, son?”
I think, very clearly, that I could just stay here, but then I nod and get up.
Because the captain gets up, and for now that will have to be enough. So I skate to the bench with my face neutral so the rest of them believe it’s nothing, but the guys can clearly feel it, because nobody chirps at me or tries to rev me up.
The TV timeout comes and the building does its thing — music up, everyone talking — although it’s hard to excite a building when the home team is down against a team it should mop the floor with.
Seb drops onto the bench beside me. “She’s here,” he says. “Did you know?”
My hand tightens on the boards. “Where?”
“Tunnel end. Against the glass.”
My eyes find her.
She isn’t hiding and she isn’t trying to catch my eye. She’s just at the glass, watching me, steady, her gaze not moving when mine lands on it. And as soon as I see her, the want comes back so damn fast.
And then the regret.
I don’t want to win this game. I want her.
And then she lifts a hand and puts it flat on the glass.
I make the quickest move I’ve made all night. I’m up off the bench and skating, not even thinking about how long before we’re back on the ice, and I can feel Franklin’s confusion at my actions. Players don’t do this — leave the bench during a dead timeout — but I do it anyway.
I pull up in front of her and put my hand on the glass opposite hers, fingers spread to her fingers, close enough to see the cold flush in her cheeks and the chip in the polish on her thumb, but not close enough to touch.
She isn’t crying, unlike last time. She’s smiling — small and real and tired at the edges — and I forget I’m supposed to be playing hockey. Her mouth makes all the right movements to say I love you, but I can’t hear her through the glass.
I mouth it back, and my breath fogs the glass between our hands.
Her smile breaks wider through the fog.
Only then do I realize that the noise in the arena has changed. It’s that big collective sound a crowd makes when it’s found something to latch onto, and when I look up, we’re on the jumbotron.
My glove, her hand, my sweat-matted helmet hair, and her messy ponytail.
All of it standing forty feet tall.
I look up at the screen and grin.
And she grins back.
“Hale!” Franklin barks from the bench. “Time’s up — let’s go!”
She taps the glass twice with two fingers. Go.
I mouth I love you one more time and go, not knowing what brought her here or why she changed her mind, only that she did.
Suddenly, I can hear the ice again.
Hearing it isn’t the same as having legs. My next pass dies in a Lakehurst skate, and I lose a board battle I should win, because the tank doesn’t refill just because a girl put her hand on the glass.
But the shift after that, the puck finds me, and the first thing I want is not to get rid of it anymore. I put it where Luca’s going to be before he’s there — a pass I have to trust instead of see — and he buries it, crashing into me along the boards, yelling over the goal horn.
Two-one.
I get back to the bench and Luca is grinning at me.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“Your face was about to say something.”
“My face is an independent operator. I take no responsibility for it.”
Each shift comes a little easier after that. I start reading the ice again, trusting my edges, and the guys feel whatever it is and start putting the puck back on my stick. Niko ties it with six minutes left, a wrister from the circle, glove side.
I get the assist.
Then Luca wins it off a draw with two minutes on the clock — top shelf — and the building shakes. Three-two. We hold it. The horn goes and the bench empties and the noise is all the way up now.
After the handshake, I look for Sloane but can’t find her, so I head down the tunnel to the locker room. What greets me is loud and warm and full of the chaos that follows a comeback nobody saw coming — music, gear flying, Luca re-enacting his goal with a tape roll.
Franklin comes in and says something about character and response, and I hear it without needing it. The whole time, I sit in my stall, smiling at the guys who throw praise my way, but mostly trying to process the shift that put Sloane back into my life.
My phone buzzes on the shelf. I square it flush to the edge of the wood without deciding to, because my hands always want something to put in order. Then I catch myself, and I leave it crooked, because I need to get used to the idea.
It’s a message from my dad.
Dad: Call me. We need to get ahead of the media narrative. Fix it before it fixes you.
Every word exactly what I’d expect — direct, efficient, already two moves ahead. It’s the voice I’ve had in my own head my whole life, the one that says there’s always a move and you make it now, before you’ve even sat down.
It’s the voice that ran that morning for everyone except Sloane.
I don’t call him, because not everything needs fixing in the next ten minutes — and that realization is new enough that it sits strange, a lesson that pain taught me that can now be applied to my whole life.
Seb sits next to me. “She’s in the corridor,” he says.
“Are you her assistant or something?” I grin.
“Someone needs to keep things straight for you.” He shrugs. “Go.”
I don’t even bother showering. I pull on some sweats and head out into the corridor, which is the spine of the building. It’s the part that never makes the broadcast: nothing but concrete, equipment carts shoved against one wall, and a trash can overflowing with cups.
And Sloane, leaning against a wall.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.”
The silence stretches, and I feel the instinct rise — frame the conversation, set the terms, open with the summary, then offer a solution to the problem that drove us apart — and my mouth goes ahead and does it.
“I’ve been thinking about everything that happened, and I want you to know I understand the harm, and—”
I stop.
“I’m sorry, Sloane,” I say, quieter. “For the other day, but also because… well… I don’t know how to do this — any of it — without reaching for a fix.”
“I know,” she says, smiling sadly. “And I don’t know how to do it without instinctively trying to protect myself or close myself off.”
There’s an edge to her words, and I understand it. She opened herself up to me once, dared to be herself, and got burned. Asking her to do it again is a huge leap, and could come at a real cost, but the important thing is that now I know that.
“I don’t have a plan for this,” I say. “Because I don’t know who I am in a room I’m not running.”
“That’s the truest thing you’ve said.” She huffs. “I didn’t need you to fix Mason or go to Franklin or make the report.”
“I—”
“No, Rowan.” She cuts me off. “If we’re going to have a future, I need you next to me. Not in front of me, not carrying me, not handling me — next to me.”
I make myself sit in it a second before I answer.
“I don’t know how to do that,” I say, flat, no cushion on it. “Stand next to something when it’s broken and not reach for the tape. It feels like giving up.”
“It isn’t.” She finally looks straight at me, and her eyes are wet. “It’s loving someone, despite the mess.”
“You’re right,” I say. “I should have said four words before I did any of it: what do you want done?”
“That’s five words, Rowan.” She laughs, although it’s a sob. “But I guess you are a hockey player.”
I laugh.
“But thank you for saying that.” She smiles. “I did the same thing to you.”
I look at her.
“I decided what you could carry, and I decided the kind thing was to distance myself from you before I got heavy. I called it a boundary. It wasn’t.”
“Sloane—”
“Let me finish, because I’m only doing this once.” She sighs. “I’m sorry for not trusting you with the truth, and for deciding for us both.”
There’s silence between us, even as a door opens and shuts down the hall, and I stand with what she has handed me. I came in here with it all assigned — my fault, my fix, my apology to deliver in order — and she has just taken half of it back, not to let me off but because it’s true.
“We’re both pretty fucked up,” she says.
“Terrible pairing,” I say.
“I’m done with making myself small and palatable for everyone around me,” she says.
“Good,” I say, and I mean it more than anything I’ve managed all night. “Be too much.”
And then I do the thing I should have done days ago, on the other side of that door, instead of standing there reading her a list. I reach for her, and I don’t tell her how this goes. I give her the space to make her own decision.
“So I’m asking, and I’ll be around for however long you decide to take to answer,” I say. “What do you want done, with this and with us?”
She looks at me a long time, and the quiet rushes into the gap, and she lets me exist in it. It’s the hardest thing I’ve done on purpose in years, standing in the not-knowing with my hands open and empty, and I do it. I don’t say another word.
“I want to start from here,” she says finally. “With both of us knowing exactly how the other one breaks things.”
“Here,” I say. “Okay.”
She leans her shoulder into mine, and I don’t move. I let it stay. I turn my head and she turns hers, close enough that I can see the mascara smudge under her left eye she’d kill me for naming, and I kiss her.
It’s slow and not quite steady, and neither of us puts our hands anywhere — just a mouth on a mouth, careful, both of us a little scared — and it doesn’t undo the damage or the days of silence or any of the work still in front of us.
When we pull apart, she keeps her forehead against mine, and I can feel her breathing. “You smell like the inside of a hockey bag.”
“You fell in love with a hockey player.”
“I fell in love with you. The smell is a tax.” She pushes off the wall. “Meet me at the pool when you’re done here.”
“What?” I say. “Why?”
“If I tell you, you’ll have a plan for it before you even get there.” Almost a smile. “Just walk in not knowing for once.”
“Okay.” I laugh, then look down, noticing her boot is untied. “Can I get that?”
She looks at the lace, then at me, and laughs. “I know nothing on earth would make you happier, but thank you for asking first.”