13. Chapter Thirteen
Stanley
I come downstairs around noon in fresh sweats and a clean hoodie with my hair still wet, and the house is quiet in a way that Hawthorne House on a Sunday after a home game.
Gavin’s standing at the wall with his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants, reading the whiteboard like it’s a plaque in a museum.
The Hawthorne House Rules. Same five he remembers when he used to live here. He’s studying them.
“Rule One,” he says, out loud. “No falling in love before the draft.”
I walk past him to the coffee maker.
“Rule Two. No serious girlfriends in the house. Casual visitors fine. Anybody who knows the WiFi password is on thin ice.” He nods, approving of past-us. “Rule Three. No teammates’ sisters.” He glances over his shoulder. “Mickey’s sister still hot, by the way?”
“If you have the same taste as Donald Duck.”
He chuckles.
“Rule Four. No locker room romances. Rule Five.” He slows down on five. “What happens at Hawthorne stays at Hawthorne.” He smiles to himself. “Yeah. I lived by these.”
He turns away from the board and leans his back against the counter, mug in both hands.
“You remember Petey?”
I remember Petey. Gavin’s senior-year roommate, my freshman year.
Left wing, quiet, a decent shot and a better release than anybody gave him credit for.
Petey met a girl in February of his last year and told everybody he was just hanging out.
By April, he was just dating. By May, he was just moving in, it’s cheaper.
By the following winter, he was at her parents’ lake house in Vermont and not in a single NHL camp.
Petey sells commercial real estate now. He drives a nice car.
He’s, by every account anybody’s got, deeply and genuinely in love.
He posts pictures of his dog. The girl is, I’m sure, lovely.
His name comes up in the group chat about twice a year, and the only thing anybody ever types back is miss you, brother, and then nothing.
“Yeah,” I say. “I remember Petey.”
“Saw him at a wedding last summer.”
“Yeah?”
“Looks good. Happy.”
“That’s nice.”
“Selling condos in Burlington.”
I take a sip of my coffee. I don’t say anything. I look past Gavin into the living room, where there is not one single other guy. The house is empty.
“Where is everybody?” Gavin says.
I do the math without doing it out loud.
Benson is at Lucy’s.
Blue’s at Melly’s.
Rowan? I have no idea.
Percy’s upstairs. Percy is the only other man under this roof still living by the rules on that wall.
“They’ll be back,” I say.
Gavin smiles into his coffee. It’s the smile of a man who has watched this exact scene play out in this exact kitchen, four years apart, with a different set of boys at the table.
“Yeah,” he says. “They always say that.”
He doesn’t push it any further. He doesn’t have to. Three of the five guys who live here are at some stage of breaking the rules off that wall.
I set the mug down, pick a banana from the bowl, and peel it.
“What’re you doing today, Gav?”
“Media at one. Couple-hour shoot. Free after.”
“Cool.”
Neither of us says one word about what either of us is doing tonight. The implication sits on the counter between us.
My phone buzzes in my hoodie pocket.
I pull it out. I read it. The kitchen narrows by a degree.
“Her?” Gavin asks.
I don’t look up. “Yeah.”
“Good morning, future Mrs. Ermington?”
“Gav.”
“I’m just saying. She’s quick on the trigger this morning. Weren’t you just there?”
I type a reply, don’t read it twice, hit send, and pocket the phone. I drink the rest of the coffee standing up. I drop the banana peel in the trash.
“I’m out.”
“Already?”
I tilt my head in her direction. “Three doors down.”
“Tell her I said hi.”
My hand stops halfway to the door. I don’t turn around.
“Sure.”
I walk out.
Three doors down, and the Sunday sun is out to play. Hell, it feels nice on my face.
Petey sells condos.
Three of the five of us are at our girlfriends’ houses right now.
The whiteboard isn’t a joke. I’m still following the rules.
I stop dead on the sidewalk for a second.
Where the hell is Rowan, though?
I start walking again. I get to her porch and knock on the front door this time. She opens the door, and I see her face before she fixes it.
Aspen Linwood holds things together the way other people breathe — automatically, constantly, without appearing to work at it. To anyone who doesn’t know her, she’d look completely fine. To me, I know something’s wrong.
“Linwood.”
“You took your time.”
“Clean hoodie was important to the brand.”
She steps back, welcoming me inside. I walk in, and she closes the door behind me. I follow her into the kitchen, sit down at the island, and let her pour me a coffee I didn’t ask for. I take a big sip.
“So, Thanksgiving with Coach. Do I wear a tie, or just my—”
I don’t get to finish. She’s looking at me like she’s hit her quota of jokes. The grin slides off me. I put the mug down.
“Okay.” I look at her.
She crosses her arms. She doesn’t sit.
I ask the question because the silence is worse than the question.
“How did your dad find out, Linwood? Walk me through it.”
She exhales. She’s clearly been turning this over for some time.
“He called me at eleven-fifteen this morning, and he already knew. So somewhere between roughly midnight last night and eleven this morning, somebody put it in his ear.”
“That’s an eleven-hour window.”
She looks at me. I look at her.
“You were right,” she says. “I wonder if he texted his entire team.”
“He has a big mouth. Half their front office talks to half of your dad’s front office on a normal Tuesday.
If Gavin texts a trainer, trainer texts an analyst, analyst texts a guy.
Or Gavin texts his agent about something else and his agent slides it into a call with your dad’s people.
Or Gavin just straight up texted somebody in your dad’s building last night.
I mean, all he had to do was text his group chat. Everybody knows your last name.”
“Why is he like this?” she asks.
“Because he embarrassed himself last night. Telling your dad about us is a free move for him. He gets to be useful to Coach Linwood. He gets to be in the room again. He probably didn’t even tell himself that’s why he did it — he just texted somebody at eleven-thirty because he was annoyed, and now we’re standing in your kitchen. ”
She breathes out through her nose. “So if I call my dad and tell him it was a misunderstanding—”
“He embarrasses himself in front of whoever Gavin’s mouthpiece is. Who might be somebody in his own building. He has to walk it back in front of his own people. And he never forgives any of us for it. Including you. Especially you.”
“Yeah.”
“So we don’t walk it back.”
“We don’t walk it back.”
She nods. She presses her lips together.
“This is a mess, Ermington.”
“Yeah.”
“My father is now invested in this because I panicked.”
“Yeah.”
“I cannot get out of this. He’ll be so upset,” she says, lost in thought.
“Then we don’t get out of it.” I look at her. “We get through it.”
She closes her eyes. “What were your Thanksgiving plans? Originally.”
She looks at me now. I don’t hesitate. I’ve been chewing on it the whole walk over.
“Reeve’s parents are flying in. I was just spending it at Hawthorne.”
Her face does a thing. “You can’t cancel on Benson’s family.”
“Yeah, I can.”
“I’m telling you,” she says, sounding annoyed. “Don’t. I’ll tell my dad you had a prior commitment. He can deal with it.”
“He won’t. He thinks we’re together, and what kind of man would that make me if I didn’t spend it with my girlfriend? He’ll quietly hold it against me for the rest of my life. Your dad doesn’t argue with a no, Linwood.”
She looks at me for a long second. “You know my father well.”
I pick my words. “I’ve known your father my whole life.”
“Right.”
She blinks, studying her mug.
“I’m coming. I’m telling Benson today.”
She looks like she’s about to say something but doesn’t.
“I’m not going for Coach Linwood.” I hold her eyes. “I’m going for you.”
She looks down at her hands.
I wait exactly one second, and then I wreck it, because I am who I am. “Also for the brisket. I’m a man of mixed motives.”
She exhales through her nose. Not quite a laugh.
I drink my coffee and enjoy the silence of her house. Maybe I should leave now. I set the mug down and decide not to.
“Linwood.”
She looks up.
I shoot blindly here. “Come back to my house with me.”
She looks up. “Excuse me?”
“Come over, sit on the couch, and drink something out of one of our cups. Be there for an hour.”
“Why?”
“Because Gavin’s in my house. That’s why we’re doing this, right? Gavin is the reason your father knows, and he’s currently killing three hours until a media shoot.” I inhale. “Gavin has brought you up to me eleven separate times since last night.”
She blinks. “Eleven?”
“Maybe four, but it’s still enough. He told me to tell you he said hi.”
She scoffs. “Why?”
Hell if I know. “That’s just what he said.”
She closes her eyes for half a second. “And you think me sitting on your couch fixes that.”
“I think you sitting on my couch ends it. He watches you walk in with me, in daylight, in my hoodie, drinking my coffee — and he stops trying to be relevant to this. He goes to his shoot. He goes back to his city tomorrow. The story closes.”
She studies me. “You’re not steering me toward your house for any other reason.”
I almost make the joke. I have it loaded. I don’t fire it.
“Linwood. Gavin is in my kitchen until two-thirty and then he’s gone. If you don’t come over now, he spends that time talking about you to me. I’m asking you to come close the loop.”
She looks at me for a long second. “I’m busy today. You get one hour.”
“Generous.”
She holds her coffee mug up. “And I’m taking my coffee with me.”
I look at it. “Insulting.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t drink yours.”
“You’ll come around, Linwood.”
She gets up to find her shoes. She comes back in a jacket and a beanie.
I open her front door. She steps out into the afternoon, and we walk three doors side by side. I don’t take her hand. She doesn’t offer it. By every visible measure, we’re two college seniors out for a Sunday walk.
Halfway between her house and mine, she slows down. “If he says anything to me — anything — I’ll handle him.”
I look at her, wondering if she’s serious. She’s muting me?
“That’s a rule. A Linwood-Ermington rule. Number one.”
I blink at the rule. I can do rules, but muting me? “Okay,” I say.
She lifts an eyebrow at me. “I mean it.”
I nod. “I heard you.”
She goes up my porch steps ahead of me, two stairs up, and she puts her hand on the doorknob like she’s been doing it for days. The door opens. She steps inside. I follow her into my own house.