32. Chapter Thirty-Two
Aspen
I’m home by nine, and I’m immediately unpacking, folding, and sorting. The toiletries are back in the drawer, conference lanyard into the trash, the good blazer back on its hanger, everything returning to its home. This is who I am. Competent and contained and alone in my quiet house.
The person I was last night feels like someone else entirely. I don’t think I can be her while I’m here in this house on this street, back in my life. I was bold last night, daring and willing to take control. But surely, he signed papers and is going to be out of here.
I keep checking my phone, waiting to hear it from him.
Waiting to hear that he signed, that he’s going pro, that he’s leaving the rest of us behind because that’s what he’s worked his whole life for, and it’s what he deserves.
He deserves that success. I just got to him a few weeks too early, and some small, stupid part of me is already bracing to find out that I’m not anything more than a fake date that got out of hand.
He hasn’t texted me all day. The silence is starting to sound exactly like a silence I already survived once, the seven-day kind, and I fold my last sweater and place it in my dresser. I’m being insane, but that doesn’t stop me from checking my phone again.
Nothing.
Here it comes, says the part of me that has been right about this before. Here’s the drop.
I put my bag in the back of my closet when I think I hear knocking. It must be Kirra.
“Hold on!” I call out, deep in my closet. I jump to reach the top shelf. I shut the closet door, and then something raps against my window.
I stop midway to my bedroom door and look at the window. The curtains are pulled shut. My heart does something violent before my brain has caught up to what’s happening. I cross the room and pull back the curtain.
Stanley Ermington is standing outside my window in the dark, grinning at me through the glass.
And the happiness comes up out of me before I can even think. There’s no managing it, no contained version of me anywhere in sight, just a flood of relief and want so big it embarrasses me, because he’s here.
I basically run to the side door, but I pretend like I didn’t. He’s already waiting on the other side, grinning that wide grin that’s just for me.
“Hi,” I say.
“Linwood.”
I smile wider. “Ermington.”
“Can I come in?”
I hold the door open, he steps past me, and I walk down the hall. He follows. When we get to my bedroom, I close the door.
“So, how was your flight?” he asks.
“Boring,” I answer, trying not to seem as excited as I feel.
“Yeah,” he says. “Mine too.”
We’re watching each other, aware of the current running between us. I don’t think either of us has stopped smiling. This is easier than I thought it was going to be. All the doubt I had earlier slips away, and there’s a comfort between us that wasn’t there before.
“How did it go?” I ask, dying to know. “The meeting with Halifax.”
“They offered me now,” he says.
My stomach drops.
“They’re banged up, they’re making a playoff push, they wanted me to sign and come down for the rest of the season.
Leave Camden in February. Be a pro this spring.
” He says it plainly, no performance anywhere on it, watching my face the whole time.
“It’s a real offer. The money’s real, the spot’s real.
My agent nearly proposed to the assistant GM in the room. ”
My smile has officially left my face. I don’t say anything. I can’t. I’m waiting for the rest, waiting for the I said yes.
“I said no.”
My stomach drops for a whole new reason. What?
“I told them I’m finishing my season. I’ll sign the normal way.” He shrugs like it’s nothing, like he didn’t just reach into my chest and unclench a fist that’s been closed. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The relief that moves through me is so total it folds me down onto the edge of the bed.
He’s not leaving. Not in February, not now, not yet.
The drop I’ve been braced for all night doesn’t come.
Instead, there’s this, the opposite of the drop, the floor staying right where it is under my feet.
I have to take a breath before I trust my voice.
“That seems like a lot to turn down,” I manage.
“It would’ve been insane to take it.”
His whole face has lit up, gone bright. He sits next to me on the bed and looks at me.
“Linwood. We’re going to win it.” He says it in complete confidence.
“The whole thing. The national title. This is the year — this is the team. Benson is the best captain in the country. Blue’s having the season of his life.
Percy’s standing on his head every night.
We are going to win the natty, and I have been chasing that since I was eighteen years old.
Halifax’ll still be there in the spring — they’re not going anywhere, I’m not going anywhere.
But you think I’m leaving my brothers a man down mid-season to go be somebody’s rental?
With the title right there? Are you out of your mind?
I’d never forgive myself. I want the ring with my brothers. I’m getting the ring with my brothers.”
He’s grinning at me, lit all the way up, sure of himself in the golden way that only ever reads as charming on him, and I’m watching him tell me the full truth. I think he already made up his mind all those years ago.
He is a man who does not walk out on the things he loves mid-run.
That’s my read. He has no idea he’s telling me that.
He thinks he’s bragging about hockey. But I’m the analyst in the room.
He’s staying, even when something shinier opens a door right in front of him, he stays.
He told me in the hotel, I’m not a leaver, whatever else I am, and I wanted to believe him and couldn’t quite get there, but now I do.
He’s loyal down to the bone and even has the nerve to be cocky about it. And I like him even more for it.
Especially the part that he’s not staying because of me.
That means more to me than he would ever know.
I would never want to be the reason he didn’t go after his dream, but he’s staying for his brothers, his own reasons, and to catch the title.
Somehow that’s worth more than if he’d told me he did it all for me, because a man who’d rearrange his whole life around a girl he’s been kissing for a week is a man I would never trust. This, I trust. This is real. He stayed for the things that are his.
But there’s a nagging feeling in my chest now, blooming brand new under my skin. Because why would he turn it down? I get the dream of his brotherhood here. He’s clearly obsessed with all the Hawthorne House boys, but this is his dream. I look at him. If he stays, what does that mean for us?
“So it was all about the team,” I say. I don’t know why I say it. It’s out before I can stop it — fishing, scared, wanting the other thing, the thing I have no right to go looking for.
He looks at me, and the grin shifts. He doesn’t take the bait, and he doesn’t deny it either.
“Mostly the team,” he says.
Mostly.
He lets the word sit there in the air. He doesn’t hand me the rest of it. Doesn’t say and you. Doesn’t mention what we did last night. Doesn’t say the thing we can both feel taking up all the oxygen. He just holds my eyes.
His phone goes off in his hand. He glances down at it, and his mouth does a small, fond, helpless thing, and he turns it so I can see — Dad, and a text underneath, too many exclamation points, a thing about how they’d be lucky to have him, a thing about give that girl of yours a hug from me.
The kind of message a man sends when he believes, all the way to the bottom of himself, that his son is about to sign and that his son has a girlfriend.
He hasn’t told them yet. I can see it on the screen that his dad still thinks the answer’s going to be yes.
“He’s going to call later and want a full report,” Stanley says. “He’ll ask about you. He always asks about you now.”
The first cold thread through all the warmth.
Because lying here in my own room with the realest thing I have ever felt, I notice that the lie didn’t get lighter when the rest of it turned real.
It got heavier. It’s still wrapped around all of it — his father’s pride, both families, the whole world of people who believe a story that started as a panic-grab in a stranger’s kitchen.
Everyone thinks this was real from the first day.
And now there’s something real to protect, and it is sitting on top of the fraud like a house built across a fault line.
He’s smiling down at his phone, at his dad, at me, and I keep every bit of it to myself.
He stays a while. He can’t stay the night.
There’s a game tomorrow, his body belongs to the team again, and at some point, he hauls himself up off my bed and kisses my forehead.
I look up at him, grabbing him before he can leave.
He looks at my lips and then my eyes. I lean up and kiss him on the lips.
“Good night, Ermington.”
He kisses me deeper this time. “Good night, Linwood.”
My chest tightens when he kisses me again and then pulls back just a few inches.
“Will I see you at the game tomorrow?”
I nod, not mentioning that my dad wants another report written on him.
I guess word got out about Halifax, so my dad knows all about the offer.
I wonder what kind of grief my dad will give Stanley when he finds out that he didn’t take the offer.
I wonder how Robert will take the news. Now I’m scared.
Two NHL families that are close and intertwined, and I know in my bones, they’re not going to take it well.
“I’ll be there,” I tell him.
He pecks my lips once more and heads for the door. “Come over after the game.”
“Is there a party?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
I try to hide the way my whole chest lifts. “Okay.”
“Sweet dreams, Aspen.” And then he’s gone, and the warmth follows him.
I did the bravest thing I know how to do, and the sky still hasn’t fallen. He came to my window. He told me the truth. He’s not leaving in February. The drop keeps refusing to come.
But I have more to lose now than I ever had in my life.