34. Chapter Thirty-Four
Aspen
I’m happy.
That’s the thing I’ll keep coming back to later, when I’m taking it apart, trying to find the exact second it broke, because for about forty minutes, in a packed arena on a Friday night, I was happy. I let myself be, out loud, where people could see.
I’m in the family section between Gianna and Lucy, and Gianna’s got her arm hooked through mine like we’ve done this a hundred times, narrating the warmups, telling me which of the boys did what to whom at which party, and I’m laughing the way I usually don’t, the way I haven’t in public in years.
Lucy’s on my other side, quiet and warm.
Somewhere in the last couple of weeks, I stopped being the coach’s daughter at the edge of things and turned into one of them, a girl whose person is down there on the ice.
Last night, he was at my window. This morning, the drop didn’t come. Tonight I’m going to watch him play, and then I’m going over to his house.
My phone buzzes in my hand. I almost smile when I see it’s my dad — surprised, because he’s got a game of his own right now, and he never texts at this time. I have the live stream ready on my phone for his game.
Dad: Heard he turned down Halifax to play out a college season. That’s a kid deciding with his heart instead of his head, and it’ll cost him a career he doesn’t get back. You’ve got his ear. Get his head right before he throws it away.
My heart sinks into my stomach. He took a moment out of his time to text me this?
And that’s it? I haven’t heard from him since Thanksgiving, and this is all I get?
Just an instruction. I feel sick because I understand what my father is really telling me.
He believes that Stanley turned down the NHL because of me, but he’s wrong.
And I can’t correct it because he thinks we’re together.
I read the text again and shiver. My dad thinks he’s got it exactly right. He thinks my name is written all over this — that I’m the one dragging Stanley down. The anchor. The gravity. The mistake he’s making with his whole future.
And that’s what my dad is naming me: the weight on a good man’s ankle. The worst thing a woman can be to a man’s career — just by existing in his orbit, just by being the thing he might have stayed for.
And then the second floor goes, the one that takes the air out of me, the one that turns this from a private grief into something with no bottom.
My father is asking me to use my influence over Stanley.
But there is no influence. There is no us.
We made this up in a kitchen at a party.
It’s a lie. I have no real claim on that man, no real say in his life, no standing to tell him a single thing about his career, and I’m being held responsible for all of it anyway, by the one person whose good opinion I have spent my entire life trying to earn.
He thinks I have a power I don’t have. He thinks I’m the girlfriend.
And I cannot fix this because I’m not the girlfriend.
The lie has built me a box with no door. Be the girl who ruined Stanley Ermington’s career or be the girl who blew up two families with the truth. Those are my options.
And then the last realization, the cruelest, because it reaches backward.
Last night. The window. The hotel, the promise kept, the most present I have ever been inside my own body — the realest thing that has ever happened to me.
And my father, in one text message, has reached all the way back and put his thumb down on every bit of it, and now I can’t hold it clean anymore.
Now it reads as the thing costing Stanley his future.
Now the best night of my life is the night I let a good man choose me over the thing he was born for.
Selfish. That’s the thought that arrives and will not leave.
I knew the offer was on the table, and I let him inside of me anyway.
I was so scared that he’d leave, but it never occurred to me that he would stay for me.
The one good thing I got has gone shameful in my hands. The toast all over again — proud of the decisions she’s made — except now the decision is me, and the pride has curdled into get his head right before he throws it away.
And under all of it, my own head is saying I told you. A house on a fault line is still a house on a fault line. I knew. I drew the warning myself, and then I climbed inside the house anyway, because I wanted him.
“Okay, but watch nineteen, watch what he does on the forecheck—” Gianna’s saying, squeezing my arm, lit up, “Aspen, are you watching, this is a good line up—”
“I’m watching,” I say, and I smile. She doesn’t suspect a thing.
I smile and nod, and I make the right sounds at the right moments, and inside I am a building coming down one floor at a time. Gianna bumps my shoulder, and I lie to her with my whole face in real time, and the worst part is how good I am at it.
Lucy goes quiet beside me. I feel her look at me once, twice — Lucy, who sees things, who’s watched rooms her whole life from the edge of them the same way I have.
She doesn’t say anything. But at some point, she reaches over and rests her hand on my knee for a second, light, and takes it back. Like she knows something is off.
It nearly takes me apart. The small kindness, when I have no room to take it in.
The game is happening somewhere past the glass, and I can barely keep hold of it.
Color and noise and the horn and the crowd rising and sitting around me like weather.
I track Stanley because my eyes won’t do anything else — his name on his back, number eleven, the way he moves, the thing about him that’s always been impossible not to watch.
And then the fight.
Blue drops his gloves right in front of us, chaos at the glass, the whole section on its feet, and Stanley’s in it before I can breathe, hauling Blue back out of it, and somebody’s fist catches him across the face.
His helmet goes spinning across the ice.
He bends down to get it, right below me, and he looks up, sees me, and winks.
Golden. Cocky. Blood coming up on his cheekbone and a grin on him like this is the most fun he’s had all year. Twenty minutes ago, that same wink would have undone me in the best possible way. I would have carried it around for a week.
But instead, it knocks the air out of me.
He’s down there free and alive, in the middle of the thing he was built for, having the night of his life, and I’m up here being blamed that he is throwing his whole future in the trash, and the thing he’s throwing it away for is me.
I don’t react. I can’t make my face do anything at all. I just stare at him, and I watch the grin flicker — watch him catch that something’s wrong, watch his eyes drop to the phone in my hand — and then the linesman is moving him along, and he’s gone, back to the game.
Blue’s in the box, and we’re a man down. Stanley does not play worse for it. He plays like something set on fire. He’s everywhere, he covers the whole sheet, he’s brilliant, and the building loves him for it.
The Wolves win. Stanley has a hand in all of it, and the horn goes, and the place comes up roaring.
Gianna’s screaming and hugging me. I hug her back, and somewhere in the noise, behind my working face, I make the decision the whole spiral has been marching me toward since the second I opened that text.
I have to end it. Not because I stopped wanting him.
God, no — I want him more than I have ever wanted anything in my life, and that’s the whole tragedy of it, that’s the knife.
I have to end it because I want him. Because as long as I’m in his orbit, I’m a variable in his career I can’t rule out, and I’m not gambling his whole future on my read being the right one.
The only thing I can control is whether I’m in the equation at all.
So I take myself out of it. I don’t know yet what I’ll tell my father, or his, or any of them.
I can’t think that far. There’s no version of the rest of it that isn’t a mess, and the mess can wait.
The only thing I can hold onto, the only clean thing left, is to get out of his orbit.
My phone lights up against my knee.
Stanley: You still here?
Stanley: Coming to find you.
Two messages, the dots, then nothing — he's waiting on me to answer. I look at it until the screen dims. I can’t make my thumbs do it.
There’s nothing to type that isn’t either a lie or the end, and I’m not ready to type the end in a text, so I type nothing, and I let him think I just didn’t see it.
Stanley finds me in the hallway off the family entrance. His hair is still wet from his shower, the adrenaline coming off him in waves, and the wink still somewhere in his face — a man walking toward his girl after a really good night.
“Aspen.” His grin starts to fall. “What—”
“You should have taken the offer,” I say, truthfully.
He stops dead in his tracks. “What?”
“Halifax. You should have signed. You should have taken it without hesitation.” My voice is level. “You’re being an idiot, Stanley. You’re throwing away the NHL to finish a college season, and everyone in your life can see it but you.”
“Where is this—” He’s blinking at me, the joy draining out of his face, and I make myself watch it go, because I’m the one doing it to him. “Aspen, what happened, what’s—”
“This happened.” I gesture between us, at the whole impossible space of it.
“This. Us. Whatever this — it was never real. We made it up. In a kitchen. Because I needed to get away from Gavin, and it was fake. It was supposed to stay fake, and I let it turn into—” My throat shuts.
I force it open. “My father thinks you’re throwing it away.
That part of it is because of me. And I don’t think he’s right, Stanley.
I know what you told me. I believe what you said, but I can’t be sure he's wrong, and I don’t want to be a thing you have to weigh, so I’m taking myself off the board. ”
“Your dad—” He’s shaking his head, and the worst part, the part that is going to live in me forever, is that he’s reaching for me, still, even now. “Aspen, slow down, I don’t — what does your dad have to do with anything? I had a good night. I won. I came straight here to—”
“I know you did.” And my voice cracks, right there, the one place it cracks, and I hate it.
“I know. That’s the whole problem. You’re so good, Stanley.
You’re so good. And I’m not going to be the thing standing in front of it.
” I make myself say the rest. “We’re done.
The fake thing, the real thing, all of it. It’s over.”
“You don’t mean that, Linwood. Whatever your dad is saying, we can talk about it. I know you. You don’t—”
“It doesn’t matter.” And that’s the truest thing I’ve said all night, the thing that breaks me to say, because it has never once mattered what I want. The only thing that matters is that I don’t make myself a variable. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry. Please take the offer, Stanley. This is your future.”
And I walk away.
I walk away from the only thing I have ever chosen with my own two hands, and I don’t look back.
This time, he doesn’t chase.