Chapter 10 #2
I cross the living room. Stanley doesn’t move an inch on the couch.
He’s still fast asleep. I step over a Solo cup.
The front door has a long pane of frosted glass on the side of it, and through the glass I can see a silhouette — short, female, two coffees in a tray in one hand.
I know who it is before I open the door.
Mila.
She’s in sweats. She looks like shit with no makeup and messy hair. She looks at me the way she looked at me last night. The eyes are the same. The mouth is the same. The way she is holding herself is the same.
“Where is she?”
I hate that I appreciate her tone. I hate me too. “Upstairs. Sleeping.”
She walks past me into the house, sets the coffees on the entry table, turns, and looks at me head-on for the first time.
Her eyes drop to my collarbone.
She sees the smudge. She closes her eyes for one full second. “Jesus, Blue.”
I clench my jaw, not prepared to hear it first thing in the morning.
“Did you sleep with her?” she asks.
“No.”
She glares like she doesn’t believe me. Her eyes glance down again and then back up. “Swear to me.”
I keep my voice steady. “I swear. We didn’t.”
“Swear on something.”
“We didn’t do anything.”
“Swear on something.”
“I swear on my grandmother’s grave. We didn’t sleep together.”
She looks at me. She’s reading my face the same way she always has. “Did you kiss her?”
“No.”
Her eyes flare. “Did you?”
“No.”
“Blue,” she warns.
I stare at her. “We didn’t do anything.”
She exhales. Some of the fury comes out of her shoulders. Not all of it. She crosses her arms across her chest and looks at me with the rest of it. “Do you know what you did to her last night?”
I shrug. “She has a boyfriend. I know what boundaries are.”
She stops. The fury goes out of her face all at once and is replaced by something else, something I don’t know. Now she’s staring at me. Her expression changes again.
She peeps out a nonchalant, “Okay.”
That’s the end of it. I look over at Percy, hoping that he’s catching this entire interaction, so that I have a witness. He looks at me while sipping his coffee. I look back at Mila.
“Which room is yours upstairs?” she asks.
“Last door on the right.”
She climbs up the stairs without looking back.
I stand in the kitchen archway watching the back of her head disappear up the stairs. Then I walk back to the island. Percy hasn’t moved. He’s still leaning against the counter with both hands around his mug. He watched the whole entry exchange, and his face didn’t do anything.
I hear the murmur of their voices, but I can’t make out a word. Then the footsteps approach. The stairs creak as they come down, and my heart does something my chest doesn’t ask permission for.
I turn toward the doorway and look through.
Mila comes into view first. She has Melly’s white costume folded neatly over one forearm.
Melly walks after her. She’s still in my hoodie. Her feet are bare, and her hair is still in a perfect wave from last night. The mustache I drew on her is mostly rubbed off, but a faint dark smudge sits under her nose and across the right side of her chin where she’s tried to wipe it and given up.
She doesn’t look in the direction of the kitchen, but there’s no way she doesn’t know I’m standing right here. I walk to the doorway and open my mouth.
“Melly.”
Mila grabs the coffees and opens the front door, and Melly keeps walking.
“Melly?”
She stops briefly. Her hand goes to the door frame. Her knuckles go white. She doesn’t turn around. Mila says something to her, and she keeps walking.
Mila looks at me. Just once. The look isn’t angry. It’s the worst possible thing the look could be, which is please don’t. She’s asking me, with her eyes, not to make this harder than it already is.
I look at Melly’s back as she walks away.
My heart is in my throat.
The front door closes.
I hear a vehicle pull away from the curb, and I’m still staring at the front door.
Percy doesn’t say anything when I turn around and reach for my coffee. I chug it and place it in the sink.
I walk into the living room.
Stanley is still face down on the couch with a blanket pulled halfway over his head. He hasn’t moved since I came downstairs. His snoring is light and steady.
I stand over him and push him. He doesn’t move. Then I smack him hard on the chest.
“Fuck.” His whole body jolts. The blanket falls off his head. He sits halfway up with one eye open, and the other glued shut, and his hair pushed up on one side. “— what — what — Blue — what the fuck?”
“Key.”
“What?”
“The rink. Back door. Give me the key.”
He squints at me. He sits up the rest of the way. “Bro. What time is it?”
I’m losing all patience. When he looks at me through one eye, he reads my face the way Percy did. His eyes go from my eyes to my collarbone and back to my eyes. His face changes, the hungover-Stanley face going off and the other-Stanley face coming on, the sharp one.
“Yeah. Yeah. Hang on.”
He fumbles for his pants on the floor and pulls a keyring out of the pocket. He works one key off the ring and holds it up.
“Back door. Maintenance entrance. Code’s still 0408. Don’t get caught.”
I take the key. “Thanks.”
“Golding.”
I stop.
“You good?”
“No.”
He doesn’t push. He lies back down on the couch and pulls the blanket over his head.
He says, into the cushion, “Take some water with you.”
When I reach upstairs, my bedroom door is hanging open.
I walk in and notice that the bed is unmade.
The blanket is shoved back and matches where we both slept.
The pillow on her side has a dent in it.
My hat is on the nightstand next to the half-full water cup. The trash can is still beside the bed.
I move fast. Closet. Gear bag. Clean t-shirt, gym shorts, socks. I pull jeans on over the shorts I’m already wearing. I don’t have a hoodie, and that’s a problem.
I pick up the bag and walk out and shut the door behind me.
Stanley is in the kitchen doorway when I come down.
He has, between me going up and me coming down, gotten up and put on a shirt and poured himself a glass of water, and he’s standing in the archway like a man who is going to ask me a question I do not want to answer.
“Whoa.”
I’m at the front door already. I have my hand on the handle.
“Whoa, whoa. Golding. Come here.” He walks over and squints at my neck. He tilts his head. “You got a hickey?”
“No.”
“Blue.”
I rub at the smudge with the heel of my hand. “No.”
He looks across the kitchen at Percy. Percy is still at the counter with his coffee. Percy doesn’t look up.
“Pers. What did I miss?”
Percy shrugs. He doesn’t look up.
Stanley looks back at me.
I’m already opening the door.
“Golding —”
I’m out. The cold morning hits me in the face.
I pull the door shut behind me. He calls something through the door I don’t catch.
I get in my truck. The cab is freezing. My breath fogs the windshield before the engine has turned over.
I sit there for a second with my hands on the wheel and the keys in my fist, and I cannot for one full breath remember what I’m doing and where I’m going.
Right. The rink.
I turn the key and drive.
It takes me nine minutes to get there. Stanley’s key works on the first try. It’s dark, but the lights motion-sense on as I pass them, a chain of small fluorescent clicks following me down the cement, and I let myself into the locker room and dump my bag on a bench.
The room is colder than the hallway.
I lace my skates. I don’t allow myself to think of anything else but what’s in front of me. It’s worked for two years, and it’ll work today.
I push through the door from the locker room to the ice, and the cold of the rink hits me clean — the metallic flat cold that lives in this building seven days a week.
I flip one bank of lights from the box by the boards.
Just one. Half the rink lights up. The far end stays dark.
I drop a basket of pucks on the bench, pull the gate, and step out.
The ice is fresh.
The Zamboni was here last night. I can smell it.
I skate one slow lap. Warm up. Loosen the legs. Get the blood going. I’m not going to be smart about the warm-up, but I’m at least going to skate a lap.
Then I dump the basket of pucks on the ice and start firing.
The first one cracks against the boards loud enough to echo.
The sound is bigger than it should be in a room this empty.
The crack hits the rafters and comes back down, and I’m already at the next puck.
I’m not aiming. I’m not looking at the net.
I’m hitting. The puck goes where the puck goes.
I am wristing them off the boards, off the glass, and at a corner of the empty net.
Only one out of every three or four is going in, and I do not care which.
Crack.
She is never going to be mine.
Crack.
I have known this for two fucking years.
Crack.
I keep finding new ways to be surprised by it.
Crack.
When she knows the real me, she won’t stay.
Crack.
The shoulder grabs. Hard. Each shot pulls something I am not supposed to be pulling. I keep shooting. The pain is the only thing in my chest that is not the smudge or the dent in the pillow or the white knuckles of her hand on my door frame.
Crack.
She has a boyfriend, and she is wearing my hoodie home to him.
Crack.
It’ll never be me.
Crack.
She wants nothing to do with me.
Crack.
I fucked it all up.
Crack.