12. Chapter Twelve
Aspen
I wake up before the alarm, and I know why before I’m all the way awake.
There is a man breathing on my floor.
I stare at the ceiling and listen to the rhythm of his breathing. I turn my head toward the side of the bed.
He’s on his side, knees drawn up, curled around the green linen-closet pillow like it’s something he loves. His hoodie’s bunched under one shoulder. The grin is gone. He looks different when he’s asleep. Softer, almost. I watch him for thirty seconds.
I tell myself that this is the only time we’re doing this.
I tell myself the small ache under my sternum is the cold getting in around the window.
I tell myself a number of things in those thirty seconds, not one of which I would repeat to a living soul, and at the end of them I make myself look back at the ceiling, because watching Stanley Ermington sleep on my floor for one more second is a thing I cannot afford.
Not now. Not before coffee. Not while my entire nervous system is standing in the open with no coat on.
I check the time. 5:52.
He has another five minutes.
At six on the dot, I sit up.
“Ermington.”
He wakes up in three pieces. Torso, shoulders, head, and drags a hand down his face. He looks up at me and grins.
Two seconds, start to finish, and I find that I am almost disappointed to watch the grin slip into place.
“Linwood. Pleasure,” he says, pleased.
I mutter, “It’s six.”
“It is the agreed-upon hour. Yes.”
He stands and stretches, and something in his back pops loud enough to hear, and he groans like a man of eighty.
“Your floor hates me.”
“My floor has standards.”
I get out of bed in the t-shirt I slept in and walk him down the hall in my socks. I open the side door. The cold bites straight in.
He stops on the threshold and turns back, and his face is doing nothing in particular and somehow everything at once. He looks at me one second longer than the moment can hold.
“Thanks for the cereal, Linwood.”
“This is not happening again.”
He smiles a small one and steps out into the dark. I shut the door behind him and lean my forehead against it and listen.
Five steps down the path. Then a pause. My breath hitches when I don’t hear him continue. My heart starts to race like he’s going to walk back in here. And then the footsteps start again, and I breathe.
I go back to bed.
The pillow’s still on my floor in the exact shape of him. I don’t pick it up. I’ll deal with it later. I fall back asleep in the shirt I slept in and dream about nothing at all.
I wake to my phone informing me that I have forty unread messages in a group chat I am not, technically, a member of, but that Kirra has at some point in the night added me to.
I open it. It’s Kirra and Bree. There is no third member. They have been discussing me for the past hour. I pull a hoodie over my head and go to the kitchen. They’re at the island. Kirra has coffee. Bree has tea. They both look up at me at the same instant.
“Good morning, Aspen.”
I look at Kirra as she waggles her brows. Bree smiles widely.
“Morning,” I say.
“Aspen Linwood.”
I pour a coffee and add too much milk. They watch me do all of it.
Kirra cracks first. “So, you left that party on the arm of Stanley Ermington.”
I blink.
“You drove home with him.”
I take another sip and shrug. “We’ve been seeing each other and didn’t want to tell anybody at first. It’s been a couple of weeks. It hasn’t been a thing. We didn’t want to make it a thing. Last night Gavin turned up, and Stanley—”
“Wait.” Kirra sets her mug down. “Gavin Gavin?”
“Yes.”
“At the party?”
I nod.
“Holy shit.”
“And so Stanley—” Bree leans halfway across the island.
“And so Stanley, who, again, I have been seeing, came and found me. And I left. With him.”
Bree’s buying it. Bree’s buying it with both hands and her whole heart. She’s nodding.
Kirra isn’t buying it.
Kirra is looking at me over the rim of her mug with the face she gave me freshman year when I told her I wasn’t homesick.
She doesn’t say anything, though, and I’m thankful.
I finish my coffee and tell them I have work.
I take my mug and walk back down the hall to my room.
I close the door and sit on the edge of my bed.
I will deal with Kirra later.
I will deal with everything later.
I open my laptop and pull up the game tape I need for the report due on Tuesday. I press play. I make it forty seconds before I notice I’ve been staring at the same frozen frame the entire time.
I close the laptop and huff. No, I can’t push this off. I open it again. I press play.
I make it ninety seconds this time, and then a defenseman does something on the screen that has nothing to do with Stanley Ermington, but I find myself thinking about him anyway.
I close the laptop. I lie back. I press the heels of my hands into my eyes.
I pick up my phone, and it’s already ringing in my palm.
Dad.
I sit up so fast that I nearly fall. I look at my screen for one full ring, and my heart is hammering so hard against my ribs that I start to get side pain. I inhale deeply and clear my throat. I pick up on the third ring.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Aspen.”
He says my name once.
I’m in deep shit.
I open my mouth to talk. He doesn’t let me get a word out. My throat tightens.
“I’ve been waiting for this day. When I put that boy in the rink last summer and watched him work harder than anyone I’ve coached in ten years, Aspen, I had a passing thought this could happen.”
“Dad—”
“I’m not finished.”
I close my mouth, staring out my window, horrified.
“I love that boy, Aspen.” I shiver. I knew it. “He’s always been like a son to me. He’s a good kid from a good family, and his father is the closest thing to a brother I’ve got on this earth, and you know exactly what I think of his father.”
I do. I know exactly what he thinks of Robert.
And underneath the warmth of it, something cold is opening in me, because he’s always been like a son to me is not a sentence about a hockey player. This is about Stanley.
“I’m not going to tell you how to live your life,” he says.
“You’re twenty-one. You’re smart. You make good decisions.
But I want you to hear me say this.” He pauses like he’s taking a breath.
“I’m not surprised. I’m not concerned. I am, in fact, relieved.
Because I have been watching you turn into the woman your mother is, and your mother is the finest woman walking the earth, and the only thing I have ever wanted for you is the kind of life she and I built — and if that boy is part of how you get there, then I have done my job as your father. ”
My heart sinks, and tears prick my eyes. I swallow and close my eyes. This cannot be happening. The room is too quiet. My ears are ringing with it.
I need to tell him that Gavin Carroll is lying.
“Dad.”
He says, “You’re coming to Thanksgiving, and you’re bringing him.”
“What?”
“I want him at my table. This is good, Aspen. It’s just what you need.”
What I need?
I look out the window.
“Okay,” I say. Because there is no other available word.
“Okay. Good.”
And then his voice shifts. “Aspen.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m proud of you.”
I stop breathing.
He has never said that to me. Not once, not after the internship, not after I got into Camden U, not after a single report I’ve ever stayed up until two in the morning to make perfect for him.
I’m proud of you. And I’ve got it, finally, at last, for a boyfriend who is not real, for a relationship that is made of nothing, for a lie I told in a kitchen because I couldn’t stand to be near my own past for one more second.
The first time my father tells me he’s proud of me, it isn’t for anything I am.
It’s because of him.
“Okay, Dad,” I manage to say.
“Tell him your mother’s making the brisket.”
“Okay.”
“I love you, kid.”
“Love you too, Dad.”
He hangs up.
Another tear slides out, and I quickly wipe it away.
I can’t believe that my father has been waiting my entire life for what I manufactured in a panic on a Saturday night.
I can’t tell him the truth, and I sit with the fact that Gavin Carroll opened his big mouth the second he could, and it got to my dad that fast.
I cannot back out now.
My dad’s expecting Thanksgiving together.
Stanley cannot back out.
The lie just bought itself a plane ticket, a place setting, and a pan of brisket.
I pick up my phone and open the thread with Ermington.
Me: We have a problem.
It delivers, and I watch the screen. The dots come up almost immediately, and I inhale while I wait.
Ermington: Linwood, we have several problems. Be more specific.
I almost laugh. I make very sure I don’t.
Me: My father invited you to Thanksgiving.
The dots appear. Vanish. Come back. Vanish.
A long pause.
Ermington: When’s Thanksgiving?
Me: Thursday.
Ermington: Linwood.
Me: Ermington.
I stare at the screen. The dots come up one more time and stay for a long while.
Ermington: Okay. I’m coming over.
Me: No.
Ermington: Be there in a hop, skip, jump.
I look up. The pillow’s still on my floor, still holding the shape of him. I look around the room at the mess I’ve made, and then I glance down at my clothes.
Shit.
I rush around my bedroom and clean as much as possible, and then I open my closet to find something to wear. I have no idea what to put on, but he’s going to be here any second. I step in front of the mirror, and my hair is a wreck.
Today is Sunday.
It’s supposed to be my day of rest.
He’ll be here in two minutes.
Help me.