25. Chapter Twenty-Five
Percy
The bus gets in a little before eleven. Six hours back from a rink three states over, and I’ve been awake the whole drive, because I don’t sleep on a bus full of guys breathing in the dark with the road humming under the floor and somebody’s playlist bleeding out of an earbud four rows up.
I sit against the window with my hood up and watch the highway peel past, and by the time we come off the exit, my neck’s a solid bar, and my legs have gone to nothing.
I’m the kind of tired that isn’t sleepy, just wrung out, hollowed, done.
We lost. Hutch played fine. I dressed, sat, and didn’t touch the ice, which is most games anyway. It’s just late, and I want my bed, the dark, and the sound of the house.
The bus swings wide into the lot, the brakes sigh, and everybody’s up before we’ve stopped, pulling bags down, Stanley loud already. Cold air comes in when the door folds open. I get up slow, everything stiff, and shuffle out with the rest of them.
There’s a car idling near the doors with its headlights on.
I recognize it, and for one stupid, wide-open half a second, something lifts clean off the ground in me, because she’s here.
Her car is in my rink’s lot at eleven at night, and there’s only one reason a person waits in a cold lot for a bus to come in.
Then Theo walks in her direction. He’s got his bag over his shoulder, he crosses the lot easily, like he knew she’d be there, and throws the bag in the back and drops into the passenger seat.
I can see her through the windshield in the lot lights.
She’s saying something to him as he gets in, and she’s got the car in gear before his door is shut, and then she looks up.
Across the lot. Right at me. Our eyes meet and hold, long enough that there’s no telling myself it didn’t happen.
Then the taillights swing red across the wet asphalt and pull out of the lot, and she’s gone, with him in the seat.
Something comes up in me then that I have never felt in my life. Not with Mike. Not with Josh. Not in any house I was ever put in or taken out of.
I’m braced for it to be sad. It isn’t. It comes up hot instead, all at once, up the back of my neck and into my jaw and down into my hands where they close hard on the strap of my bag, and I stand there in a freezing parking lot in my travel suit, and I can’t get on top of it.
For nineteen years, I’ve been able to fold anything down small and put it away.
This won’t fold. It just sits in me, shaking, too big, and there’s nowhere to put it.
“Mon Petit Per—” Stanley’s at my shoulder, both bags on his, reaching to grab the back of my neck the way he does.
I step out from under his hand. “Don’t.”
It comes out flat. He pulls his hand back, and for once, he doesn’t say anything.
Blue’s there. He doesn’t ask. He just stops beside me for a second, looks at the empty place in the lot where the car was, and then he lifts my gear bag off my shoulder and onto his own without a word and starts walking. I follow him in.
Benson drives. Rowan calls shotgun, so I’m in the back of the cab between Blue and Stanley, and Stanley hasn’t stopped talking since the parking lot.
“—because if Kovac makes that read in the second, if he just sees the back door, it’s a different game, it’s a completely different game—” He’s leaned forward between the front seats, both hands going. “We were right there. We were right there, Reeve.”
“We were down two,” Rowan says.
“We were a bounce from down one.” Stanley drops back against the seat and stares out the windshield at the road coming at us, and for a second, he’s actually quiet, which never happens, and then he says, “Next year, though. Our senior year. That’s the one.
” He knocks the back of Benson’s headrest. “You hear me? Our senior year –– we win the whole thing. I’ve decided. It’s happening.”
“You’ve decided,” Benson says.
“I’ve had a vision.” He’s coming back up now. “Confetti everywhere. Reeve makes the pass. I slap it in. And we hang a banner. I’m gonna cry at the banner. Everybody lifts me up and I body surf the team. I’m telling you now so it’s not weird when it happens.”
Rowan says something dry. Benson cracks a joke. I sit in the middle of it with my back against the seat and don’t add in a word.
I want that banner.
I don’t know when that happened. I don’t know when Stanley’s dumb championship became a thing I wanted, but it’s here. I want it now. I want to be there for it. I want to be the guy in the net when they hang it.
The house is loud and warm when we get back — Rowan already at the stove, the TV going, guys decompressing off the road. I sit in my chair with my back to the wall and get the French book out and can’t get a single line of it into my head.
I go up to my bedroom before the rest of them. Nobody makes anything of it. I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark with my boots still on, and the hot thing burns down slow.
When she came back in the last week of August and didn’t reach out, I felt way too fucking excited to see her.
Then she didn’t call, and it felt like a knife.
My mind didn’t let her go easily. Every time I had nothing to focus on, my mind always trailed back to her.
Like she had some hold on me that I couldn’t see.
I wondered what she was doing all the time.
I held my fingers over her name on my phone more times than I’d like to admit.
I fucking hate how much I think about her.
I think about her drawing at midnight, sitting on her bed. I think about what she’s doing all the time. I think about Chicago, and I never in my life ever thought about Chicago before. I bought a stupid magazine about architecture because I imagined she bought the same one.
The weird thing is that I just simply like being near her. And I don’t like being near anyone.
I told myself all of it was nothing, the way I tell myself everything’s nothing, and tonight I watched her car pull out of a lot, and it took me apart.
This is what it takes to make me realize I’m completely gone for her.
I’ve been gone a long time. I just found out how far.
And I’ve got no right to any of it. I’m not her boyfriend.
I couldn’t be — there’s a wall in my kitchen with it written down, a rule I walk past every day.
I want her that much, and I’m not allowed to.
My phone buzzes, and I imagine it’s the guys downstairs –– Stanley –– texting the guys about how we blew it this year.
When it buzzes again, I look at it.
It’s her. Calling. FaceTime, her name filling the screen, my reflection in the screen.
Why is she calling?
I don’t understand. My heart’s doing four things at once.
I sit up, glancing down at her name.
Then I answer it.