Chapter 14 #2
She’s wearing a blue sweater the exact shade of her eyes — the shade I have spent two years trying to forget — and her hair is half-up, half-down.
The way she has worn it since she was fourteen.
The way she wore it the first time I noticed she had good lips.
She’s laughing at something Mila said, and her head is tilted back just a little, exposing the long pale line of her throat.
I’ve kissed that throat. I have pressed my mouth right there, right where her pulse goes, and felt it kick against my lips like something trying to get out.
I knew she might be here. The girls have been bringing her around Hawthorne like they’re all best friends now.
And I told myself I was prepared for the time when she’d transfer here.
I had spent the entire two years telling myself I was prepared.
I had decided I would treat her the way you treat a girl you used to know, a girl who used to know you back, a girl whose name you don’t say out loud anymore because saying it does something to the inside of your mouth.
I was so fucking prepared.
I was not prepared for this.
I was not prepared for her in blue.
She’d said she was keeping her distance.
That was the last thing she told the guys — that she highly doubted they’d see her around — and I had leaned on that.
I thought the dignity of her absence was the gift she was giving me.
I thought I was supposed to be grateful for it.
I thought the rule of the next two years was simple: she stays on her side of the campus, I stay on mine, and if we pass on the quad, we pretend the air between us is not made out of everything we were.
But here she is.
Twenty feet away.
Behind a quarter-inch of plexiglass that suddenly feels like the only thing keeping me upright.
She turns her head and looks right at me.
And it is — it is that look that has been living rent-free in the back of my skull for two years, the one I see right before I fall asleep, the one I have tried to replace with other looks from other girls and never could because none of them know how to look at me like that.
None of them ever could. None of them have those piercing blue eyes that tear right through me.
Her lips pull shyly. The corner of her mouth is lifting, like she’s trying not to let me see it and failing.
The kind of smile she used to give me across the gymnasium in tenth grade when she didn’t know I was looking.
Except I was always looking. That was the secret of those years — I was always looking, and she never knew, and somehow she smiled at me anyway, like her body knew before either of us did.
She mouths two words.
Good luck.
Something cracks open in my chest.
I don’t know how else to describe it. There’s a sound in my head like a frozen lake giving way under boots, that deep, complaining groan of ice deciding it’s done being ice.
My ribs feel hot. My ribs feel cold. The cavity behind my sternum goes light and then heavy, and then I forget — actually, genuinely forget — where I am.
What I’m supposed to be doing. Why I’m even here.
All of it goes.
What stays is her.
Her in blue. Her with the tilted head. Her mouthing good luck through a wall of plastic like she has any right to wish me anything after what I did to her — and the worst part, the part that scrapes, is that she still does.
She still wishes me well. Of course she does.
That is who she is. That is who she has always been.
I broke her heart in five different ways across the span of knowing each other, and she’s standing in my rink in my fucking color, wishing me luck like the world is still good.
The world is not. Mine hasn’t been good in a long time.
I look down and see Benson drop to one knee.
His face is below the glass, but Lucy doesn’t care.
She’s smiling down at him, and he’s smiling up at her, and there’s something so easy about them, something so uncomplicated and bright.
And I think, I had that. I could’ve had that but I bullied her and ignored her and told her I didn’t want it.
Benson stands, plays around with the puck, and knocks it over the glass.
The crowd hollers. Lucy shrieks. Gianna laughs.
Mila claps her hands. Benson grins like an idiot and blows a kiss through the plexiglass.
I don’t see any of it really. I see it like you see traffic out of the corner of your eye when you’re crossing a street toward someone you love.
When I look back, Melly is still staring at me.
So now we’re back to it. The thing we used to do.
The thing that started in a hallway in tenth grade and has never really stopped, not even during the years we weren’t speaking — that stupid, unbearable game where I look at her and she looks at me, neither of us moves, neither of us breathes, and somehow in the small hot space between our faces a whole entire life happens. I could stare at her forever.
Benson grabs my shoulder. “Come on, lover boy.”
I snap, “Don’t.”
He laughs, but he doesn’t know. None of them know.
Rowan made a joke about her once — about my ghost, he said, the one Golding doesn’t talk about — and I told him to drop it, and he had, and that was the end of it.
The boys of the Hawthorne House have always had suspicions.
They didn’t have her name until she gave it to them.
They don’t know the death grip that this girl has on my heart.
Benson pushes me away from the glass. Rowan pats my chest. I start skating backward, and I cannot make my eyes leave hers. He and Rowan loop back toward the bench. I follow them. My legs do it. My legs have been doing this on autopilot, and they don’t need my permission.
Something makes me glance over my shoulder. She’s turning to walk back to her seat.
The girls are crowded around Lucy, looking at the puck Benson threw.
Melly is the only one not looking.
She’s walking back to her seat with her hair brushed over one shoulder and the blue sweater is staring at me. Blue staring at me like a flag, like a sign, like a small careful message like she picked blue on purpose.
I’m supposed to be skating to the bench. I’m supposed to be doing my final warmup loop with Walker. I’m supposed to be in the chute with my helmet down, my mind narrow, and my body ready for forty seconds from now when the puck drops.
Instead, my feet turn.
I skate back to the glass.
I don’t decide this. Some older version of me decides it.
The version who used to tell her to stop staring at me, who once would purposely stand in her line of sight just to see if she still cared, and the version of me who felt empty in college when I realized what I had lost. He decides for me.
He takes the wheel. He says, No, we are not skating away from her, we have skated away from her enough for one lifetime, we are going back.
I have my stick in my left hand.
I raise it.
I tap the plexiglass with the heel of it. Once. Twice. Sharp. The kind of knock that echoes across the arena.
The girls turn.
Melly turns.
She stops mid-step. Her hand is on the back of the seat she was about to drop into, and her whole body goes still.
She looks at me like she cannot believe her eyes.
Like she cannot believe I would risk it publicly.
Like she knows exactly what kind of trouble I am about to be in, and she is already a little bit angry on my behalf.
I gesture with my glove.
Come here.
She blinks. Once. Slow.
And then she walks fast. I see her mouth move, and even through the noise and the plexiglass, I can read it.
Blue, what’re you doing?
She puts her hands flat against the glass. Fingers spread. Small pale fingers I have held and felt pressed against my chest.
Coach barks my name from the bench. “Golding!”
I don’t look at the bench. I’ll think about the bench later.
Right now, there is a girl with her hands against the glass, her hair coming down a little on one side, and she is holding her breath.
I don’t blame her because I know I’ve been a coward.
I have been a coward for so fucking long.
The cowardice has had a hundred costumes — distance, hockey, the future, the draft, the plan, and the version of me I keep telling myself I have to be — but underneath all of it, under every excuse I have ever fed myself about why I could not have her, the truth is that I was afraid she was the kind of love I couldn’t survive.
I was afraid that if I let her be number one, then everything else would fall.
I was afraid that loving her right would mean rearranging my entire life around her, and I didn’t know how to do that and still be a hockey player.
So I let her go.
I let her go and I told myself it was for her.
And the lie of it has been killing me. Slowly.
Quietly. In the small hours of every morning of the last two years.
In every space I have walked into and looked for her face and didn’t see it.
At every party, I have left early because the girl across the room was wearing her color.
Our color. In every single time someone has asked me if I’m seeing anybody, and I have said no, and meant I already saw her, and there is no one else to see now.
I’ve been a coward.
I’m tired of being a coward.
I skate back a few feet. The puck sits balanced on my blade. I have the softest hands on this team. Coach has said it since I was a freshman. Golding’s hands, he says, Golding’s hands are a goddamn gift.
Tonight I am going to use them on something other than a goal.
I lift my stick.
I hit the puck.