38. Chapter Thirty-Eight
Aspen
My phone rings late on Sunday night, and it’s my father.
I stare at the screen and almost don’t answer it.
I know this call. I’ve taken a thousand versions of it — the check-in, the clipped did you handle it, the instruction wearing a question’s clothes.
I’m raw and wrecked. I have spent the whole weekend lying in the ruins of a thing I demolished on his word, and I do not have it in me tonight to be his soldier reporting in from the field. My thumb hovers over the screen.
I answer it because there’s no world where I don’t.
“Hi, Dad.”
And right away something’s off. Not wrong — different.
He doesn’t lead with anything. There’s a silence on the line, my father’s silence, except my father doesn’t do silence, my father fills a phone call the way he fills a bench.
The first thing I feel, stupidly, is fear. Something’s happened. Someone’s hurt.
“Stanley was here tonight,” he says.
The floor tips.
What?
“He flew in. Sat on my couch. Told me everything, Aspen.” A pause.
“The party. The arrangement. The whole — he told me it wasn’t real.
That you two faked it.” Another pause, and then his voice does a thing I have never once heard it do, which is waver.
“And then he took the worst of what I had to throw at him for it, and he asked me for my blessing. To go after you. The right way, he said. Out in the open. He had a red-eye to catch. He flew across half of the country and back in a single night to tell me the truth to my face.”
I can’t speak. The information is reordering the entire week as it lands — every piece sliding into a new place. His silence wasn’t him letting go. His silence was a man with a plan, on a plane.
“Dad—”
“Let me get this out, because I’m not good at it.
” And he does the thing Stanley did to me once, the let me get all the way through it.
I go quiet and let him. “That text I sent to you on Friday. I fired it off between periods. I wasn’t thinking.
I’d got a notion in my head about that kid making a mistake, and I made it your job to fix it.
And he told me tonight you had nothing to do with his decision.
That you didn’t talk him into a thing, that you weren’t the reason, that he chose it himself for his own reasons — smart ones, the kind I respect — and that you didn’t even know until it was done.
” A long breath, gone rough. “Which means I put a weight on you that was never yours to carry. I told you to go fix a thing you didn’t break.
And I think — Aspen, I think I’ve done that before.
More than once. I think I’ve been doing it your whole life. ”
And there it is. I thought he had grown blind to his own ways and that I would never have a conversation like this. It’s the thing I waited years to hear from my father and stopped believing would ever come. My chest feels the weight come off, and tears stream down my face without me realizing.
And then — because the sky is already falling, because there’s nothing left to protect, because Stanley flew across a country to tell the truth and the least I can do is tell one of my own — I say the thing I would never say out loud to my father.
“I ended things with him because of your text.”
He’s quiet.
“I thought because you said it, you were right. I didn’t want to be the reason he didn’t take the deal, and even after he told me that I wasn’t the reason, you got into my head.
I would never forgive myself if I were somehow the reason.
I didn’t stop to check whether you were right.
I never check whether you’re right, Dad.
I just do what you say, because doing what you say is the only way I’ve ever known how to make you—” My voice breaks straight through the middle.
“I’ve spent my whole life being exactly what you want.
The major. The job. All of it for you, and I can’t keep doing it.
I love you. But I can’t keep doing this to myself.
It’s been killing me for years, and I only just noticed. ”
I have never spoken to my father like this in my life. I brace for the clipped that’s enough, for the silence that means I’ve gone too far. It doesn’t come.
“I know. I know I did that. I learned it from my own old man, and I swore I’d be different, and I wasn’t.
And you turned out so — God, you turned out so capable, Aspen, that I let myself believe you didn’t need the soft stuff from me.
That was a lie I told because the soft stuff was always hard for me.
You deserved it anyway. You deserve it.” A breath. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
I clutch onto my shark stuffed animal and cry.
And we sit there, the two of us, both of us crying on a Sunday night, and the sky does not fall. It just opens.
We talk for a long time. Longer than we’ve ever talked in my life. It isn’t all fixed, but something has shifted that is never shifting back, and when we finally hang up, I’m sitting in the dark of my house, a different person than the one whose phone rang.
Free. That’s the word, and I turn it over carefully, because I’ve never gotten to hold it before.
The anchor-belief is gone — he said it himself, you weren’t the reason, it was his call, his own — Stanley took that wall down from the outside.
And the other one, the older one, the living-for-his-approval, I just took down myself, from the inside, out loud, on a phone. Both walls. Down in the same hour.
And in the space where they stood, there’s only the simple thing left.
I want Stanley Ermington.
I’m the one who crashed it. I’m the one who has to reach.
I don’t wait. I put on shoes and don’t care what I look like. I walk out into the cold and walk three doors down.
Hawthorne House is lit up even on a Sunday night, and I stand on the porch I fled from once and make myself knock. It’s Benson who opens the door.
He takes one look at me and something in his face goes soft and knowing.
“He’s not here,” he says, before I can get a word out. “He’s on a red-eye. Won’t land till the middle of the night.” Then, reading whatever’s all over my face, “You should come in.”
They’re all there — Blue, Percy, and Rowan, scattered around the living room — and they all look up at me. Now I’m terrified of what I’m walking into.
And then Blue looks at me and says, “Oh, thank God, finally,” and it turns out they aren’t looking at me like an enemy at all. They’re looking at me like the last piece of a thing that’s been driving all of them up the wall.
“Wait for him,” Benson says.
“You guys don’t mind?” I ask. “It’s getting late.”
“Wait in his room,” Benson offers, pointing upstairs.
“His –– his room?”
The guys nod. “Yeah, don’t take the couch.”
Blue adds, “Sterm loves the couch, but you should go up to his room.”
“Yeah, go to his room. Have you talked to him?”
I shake my head.
The chatter of all four guys nods in agreement and says in their own words that I should definitely wait in his room for him.
So that is how I come to climb the stairs of Hawthorne House to a room I have never set foot in, while four hockey players downstairs try very hard to look like they aren’t watching me go.
His room is so him, it makes my chest ache. Tidier than I would have ever guessed — he hides his orderliness the way I hide my mess, it seems. A stick leaning in the corner. Gear. The smell of him on everything, all over the dark.
I sit on the edge of his bed, meaning to wait. I’m going to wait up, I tell myself. I’m going to be sitting here calm and composed when he walks in. I’m going to say the thing I came to say.
The week catches me all at once, and I lie back on his pillow, just for a second, just to rest my eyes, just for a minute.
I’m asleep before I’ve finished deciding not to be.
I wake to an alarm, in the dark, in a bed that isn’t mine and smells like him, and for one foggy second, I have no idea where I am.
Then I remember, and I reach over to kill the alarm and find the other side of the bed empty.
I look over the edge.
Stanley Ermington is stretched out on the hard floor of his own bedroom under one blanket, a balled-up hoodie for a pillow, blinking up at me in the dark.
“Hi,” I say, over the edge.
“Hi.”
“I’m sorry I took your bed.”
“Don’t be sorry.” His voice is morning-rough, and there’s no armor on it at all. “I’m just glad you were in it.”
I prop my chin on the edge of the mattress, looking down at him. “My dad called me last night.”
“Oh yeah?” he says, nonchalantly, like he didn’t cause it personally.
“Yeah.” I furrow my brows. “He said there was a crazy lunatic in his house last night.”
A slow grin starts up at me from the floor. “A lunatic, huh?”
“Mm.” I nod, grave. “Tall.”
“Tall.”
I shrug, playful, hands sketching a pair of shoulders in the air. “Muscular. Sort of a problem, physically, the whole — situation.”
“Sounds like a real piece of work.”
“Turned down the NHL, too.” I roll my eyes like it’s the most baffling thing I’ve ever heard. “For — I mean, who could possibly say why.” I look down at him and grin. “But that’s good news for me.”
He goes still, just slightly. “For you?”
“Oh, yeah.” I hold his eyes. “Big news, that one. For me.”
“Huh.”
“The lunatic told my dad the whole truth, too. To his face. Flew all the way out there to do it.” I tip my head. “He’s a real piece of work.” I nod. “Like you said.”
“And what are you?” he asks, quiet, looking up at me from the floor.
“Oh, I’m totally part of the problem.” I hold back my grin. “Showed up here last night, made myself right at home, and fell asleep in a strange man’s bed.”
The grin breaks wide open. “You did that, huh?”
“Oh yeah. I’m just as crazy as he is. Maybe worse.”
He stares up at me for a long moment. “So,” he says. “What do you say?”
I pretend to weigh it and shrug. “Good morning, Stanley the Cup.”
He shakes his head. “Try again, princess.”
“Get out of here.”
He smirks. “Try again.”