25. Chapter Twenty-Five
Stanley
I’m having the kind of night where the puck keeps finding me like a magnet.
The arena’s full and loud and on its feet half the period.
I’m down on the bench between whistles with a captive audience of men who legally cannot leave, which is, for the record, my single favorite set of circumstances on this earth.
So naturally, I start in on Blue.
There’s a TV timeout — the refs are standing around, the whole building has nothing to do for ninety seconds — and ninety seconds of dead air on a bench next to me is not a thing I’m capable of letting pass.
“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” I say, to nobody, to everybody, leaning both arms on the boards.
“No.” Blue, two spots down, already bracing. “No, I don’t, and I don’t want to.”
“The puck.”
“Sterm.”
“The puck. Blue’s puck. The most romantic play in the recorded history of Blue’s career.”
“I will climb over Rowan and end you.”
“Gather round, gentlemen.” I’m doing the nature-documentary voice, the one that makes Rowan put his head down because he knows it’s over for all of us.
“Here we observe the lesser-spotted Blue, in mating season, having determined that the surest path to the heart of one Melly — a woman of taste, a woman frankly out of his weight class — is to take a puck and flip it over the glass into the stands, like she’s a sea lion at the eleven o’clock show. ”
“It worked,” Blue says, clipped.
“It worked,” I agree, “which is the most upsetting part. We’re going to have to study that.
Scientists will want that data.” I turn to the real culprit.
“And who scripted it? Who stood in our kitchen and drew the play up on the whiteboard like it was a power-play breakout? Who told this man, with a straight face, give her the puck, Blue, girls love a puck?”
Down the bench, Benson doesn’t even look over. “I stand by the puck.”
“He stands by the puck!” I throw a glove hand at the heavens. “Reeve, you’re not a captain, you’re a matchmaker. You should have a little cart. You should wear a sash.”
“You done?”
“I’m never done. I’m going to be doing the puck at your wedding. I’m going to stand up, glass of champagne, it started, as these things do, with a puck and a man with no shame—”
“Who’s that,” Blue says, “sitting next to my girlfriend?”
Whatever he’s getting at –– he’s just trying to get back at me. I know Blue. He hates when I roust him.
I, happily, follow his eyeline up. The family section. Where the girlfriends sit, and the assorted people who belong to us.
Melly. Then Gianna, Benson’s sister, mid-story, hands going. Then Lucy on the end.
And between Melly and Gianna, sitting with a smile on her face is Aspen Linwood.
Normally, she’s working the game — phone out, head down, breaking it apart like a math equation. But right now, she’s wearing a smile.
The air goes out of me all at once, like somebody pulled a plug.
I haven’t seen her since I left that morning.
And yeah, this is a public space, but the family section sure as hell is not.
Neither are my teammates’ girlfriends that she’s sitting with.
That’s not public, that’s private. That’s the friend group.
We haven’t talked all week. She doesn’t see me. She’s too busy belonging.
I just look at her for a second, and then I glare at Blue. That smug fucker.
“Ermington.” Coach, behind me. “You’re up. Go.”
I go.
Here is the case, as I assemble it over the back half of a hockey game, in the windows the sport allows me, which are cruelly short.
Window one. Bench, head down, water bottle in hand.
Who invited Aspen to hang out in the family section?
Did Benson and Blue tell their girlfriends about this fake ordeal, so now they’re making her a laughingstock?
Nobody just has Aspen’s number. The woman doesn’t have many friends. That’s something I’ve always noticed.
“Up, Stan.”
I go. I forecheck a guy so hard he’s immediately plotting revenge. I can see it in his eyes. I come back.
Window two. Captain Benson Reeve. The man who couldn’t stand the house rules and how serious I took them. I look down the bench. Benson is watching the rink with the serene, untroubled face of a man whose conscience is clean. He feels me looking. He just gives a small nod at the ice.
“Benson.” I lean down the bench. “You put her there, you prick.”
“Faceoff’s coming.”
“You put her in with your girlfriend and your sister. Reeve, I want it on the record—”
“Go. You’re up.”
I go. I’m up. I take the draw mad — mad at Benson, mad at Lucy, mad at the matchmaking cartel that has clearly turned its full attention on me now that Blue’s safely married off — and mad, it turns out, is good.
Mad is fast. I win the puck, I dish it, and Blue of all people roofs it, and the crowd comes apart.
Blue points at me down the ice with both gloves, beaming, and I point back.
I love him, the puck-flipping idiot, I genuinely love him.
I get to the bench. The boys are mauling me.
I look up at the family section.
Linwood’s on her feet. She’s clapping. She’s looking right at me, and she’s not performing it for anyone, because nobody’s watching her watch me, and the thing her face is doing isn’t for a room or a story or a contract.
That one I don’t make a joke about. Not even in my own head. I just hold it the length of the line change, and then I have to go play hockey again, with it sitting in my chest like a swallowed coal.
We win. It barely registers as information. I shake the hands, I do the thing, I get off the ice.
I corner Benson in the tunnel before the room, helmet off, still steaming.
“You and I both know what happened tonight,” I say.
“We won.” He’s unlacing a glove, ignoring me. “Good win.”
“You need to get a life. You’re spending too much effort trying to make sure we’re all married off before the draft––” I catch it, lower it, the tunnel’s got people in it. “Is that it? You wanna fuck things up?”
Benson looks at me. And here’s the part that kills me: I am the guy.
I am, in this whole operation, the one with the unreadable face, the one nobody can crack, the one who can hold a grin over a thing for three months and never let it slip.
And Benson Reeve looks me dead in the eye with a face like a closed door and says, “She didn’t have a seat, Stan. ”
That’s it. That’s the whole confession. That’s also bullshit because I know she attends every game to keep tabs on me.
“Reeve—”
“Lot of empty chairs in the family section. Seemed rude of G not to offer it.”
Lucy drifts past right then with a lanyard around her neck, and I wheel on her like she’s going to be the weak link, and she is so, so much worse than him. She gives me a smile with nothing behind it but daylight.
“We just thought she’d have fun sitting with us,” she says, sweet as anything, and keeps walking.
They’re good. They’re so good. They did it to Blue with a puck and now they’ve done it to me with a parking spot’s worth of empty seats and there is not one single thing I can prove, and the worst part is that I’m not even mad.
I turn to Reeve. “You told your girlfriend classified information?”
“She didn’t tell G,” he says, like that’s supposed to make me feel better. “So, my sister is going completely off of the party because she heard Aspen call you babe. She and G were already friends, if you didn’t know. There was a simple text message, and Aspen agreed to lunch earlier today.”
I gasp. “They’re taking her out to lunch?”
Benson rests a hand on my shoulder and says, “That’s how these things work, buddy. Linwood is in with the girls now.”
In with the girls now?
What the hell does that even mean?
The Hawthorne House is going by the time I get there. Music through the walls, people on the porch, somebody’s already broken something in the kitchen, and somebody else is already laughing about it. Hawthorne on a win night runs itself.
Linwood’s here. She came with the girls — of course she did, she’s theirs now, the operation works fast — and she’s in the corner of the living room with Gianna and Lucy and a drink she’s barely touched.
I’m across the room with a beer I can’t get it through my head why she’s here.
And why she doesn’t seem like her uptight normal self.
We haven’t talked. Not really. A hey, a good game, but that’s all. I promised her a pie on a note I left, and I’m still waiting for the recipe from Rowan.
Gianna, Mara, and Mila start dancing like it’s no one’s business. Blue looks like he wants to take Melly to a private place. Benson is saying something to Lucy and Aspen.
I think flustered is the right word for what I’m feeling.
I drink my beer and let Walsh talk at me, because that’s my role at a party — I’m the guy the rest of the team unloads on when the guys I live with have hit their limit of me, which happens early and often.
Walsh is mid-rant, sworn off women again, third time this semester.
I’m nodding in the right places and not hearing a word of it, because across the room, Aspen is saying something to Benson and Benson is listening, and I’d give a year off my career to know what’s coming out of her mouth.
His eyes catch mine over her head. He smiles. He turns back to her.
I drink my beer.
The song changes, and the girls swarm Benson and Lucy with Gianna’s phone up. Lucy goes shy and mortified. Reeve doesn’t care, kisses her for the camera, and dips her, and Gianna and Mara lose their minds. They move on to Blue and Melly — Melly’s already in his lap, so that one shoots itself.
Then Gianna turns, scanning. Her eyes land on me. “There he is. Stan, get over here, you’ve been hiding all night.” She’s already herding, phone up, beaming. “I need one of you two. Get in, get close, oh my God, come on—”
I push off the wall and cross to Aspen because there’s no version of this where I don’t. Gianna shoves me the last half-step, and I almost go over my own feet.
“Damn, G.”
She gets us shoulder to shoulder, lines up the shot, and that’s when Blue’s voice comes in low and evil from across the room.
“Kiss.”
I roasted him about the puck three hours ago. This is him getting even.
“Kiss! Kiss!”
And the room picks it up — fists on the table, kiss, kiss, kiss — and it splits right down a seam only some of us can see.
Gianna’s chanting because she believes we’re in a real relationship.
Half the room is chanting because they believe it, too.
And in the kitchen doorway, Benson’s got his arms crossed and Lucy’s tucked under one of them, and neither of them is chanting.
Rowan and Percy have stopped talking to Tate and Walker to watch, and none of them are chanting either.
Gianna’s got the phone up.
I look down at Aspen.
“I’m sorry about this,” I say just to her.
She looks up at me, lips parted, and she’s not half as mad as she’s got every right to be. That’s the thing that undoes me. She’s not bothered. She’s not reaching for the exit. She’s just looking at me.
“Do you do okay under peer pressure?” I ask.
She shakes her head. Barely.
The chant’s gone to a roar. Gianna’s counting us down. And I make the only call there is to make, the one I’d have made in a silent room with nobody watching, except now I’ve got people handing me the excuse to do it and pretend it was theirs.
I close the distance.