39. Chapter Thirty-Nine
Stanley
I got through Monday on two hours of floor-sleep and a grin that would not come off.
Morning skate was a write-off. I couldn’t hit the net, couldn’t hold the puck, kept drifting off the play because my head was miles from my body — upstairs in a bed I’d crept out of at six with a girl still asleep in it.
The boys saw straight through me in less than five minutes.
Blue asked what I was on. Percy looked at me for a minute straight and went back to his stretches.
And Benson just watched me float through a drill, the corner of his mouth going.
He said, “Good trip?” because Benson knows exactly where my head is today, and he has the decency to say it in two words on a bench.
I didn’t tell them the rest of my plan. Some things you don’t hand to a locker room.
Aspen got through her day, too. I know because she texted me once, midmorning — a single line: the lunatic let me sleep in his bed and stole my whole Monday, I can’t concentrate.
And I wrote back, till this afternoon, Linwood, and then I put the phone away before I said the rest of it over a text message instead of in person.
I went to my classes, did everything I was supposed to do, and now the day’s done. The world insisted on being Monday, and now it’s behind us. It’s finally showtime.
I’m nervous as hell. Nervous is honest. Nervous means it matters.
The house is empty, and it’s empty on purpose.
The boys cleared out after skate — afternoon classes, the rink, a whole shootout of excuses — but I know a setup when I’m standing in the middle of one, and the proof is the sticky note slapped on the coffee maker in Benson’s blocky hand: Gone till late.
Don’t be a coward about it. Under it, in Blue’s scrawl, use protection.
Under that, in what is unmistakably Rowan’s hand, clean the kitchen after.
Percy didn’t sign it. Percy never signs anything.
But there’s a single hockey stick drawn down in the corner that I’m choosing to read as a blessing.
They gave us the house. The same four idiots who herded her up to my room last night, who encouraged an insane plane trip, have collectively found somewhere else to be for the whole evening.
The brotherhood I stayed for, running the play from the bench.
I stand there holding their dumb, beautiful note, and I take a second to appreciate it. Then I get to work.
And the first thing I realize is that I can’t make a pie.
I have made exactly one pie in my life, and the truth is I didn’t make it — Rowan made it, and I carried it to a Connecticut dinner table and let a whole family believe these hands produced it.
Which, in hindsight, is so perfectly the entire shape of my situation that I want to lie down on the floor.
Fake pie. Real credit. A lie I served warm to people who loved me.
Not this time.
This time, I am making her the pie myself. With these two hands, which have never been trained for a single thing other than a hockey stick.
It’s not going as planned, so I text Rowan.
Me: The pumpkin pie recipe, Laurens. Please.
I’ve been begging this kid for the recipe for too long.
Rowan: It’s a family secret.
Me: You found it on the internet.
Rowan: Then Google it.
Shithole.
I Google it, find a recipe that looks simple enough, and figure it out. I pull out all the ingredients, follow the instructions, and it’s taking much longer than I anticipated, so I’m starting to sweat. I have no one else here with me, so this is all on me.
Me: Will you help me?
Rowan: No.
I take a deep breath and follow the recipe. What’s the worst that can happen?
She gets to the house a little after four as planned. The kitchen is wrecked. She stands in the kitchen doorway with her bag sliding off her shoulder, taking in the whole mess.
“What,” she says, “are you doing?”
“Making you a pie.” I gesture at the flour all over the counter and the dirty dishes that keep piling up. Rowan makes this look easy. It’s not. “It’s not going great. I want to be upfront about that.”
She looks at the pie. She looks at me. “You’re making me a pie.”
“I left you that little note that told you I would. I keep my promises, Linwood.”
Something moves across her face that isn’t disbelief, and she sets her bag down and crosses the wrecked kitchen toward me, and she says, quietly, “I still have the note.”
“You do?” I ask, surprised. That means it traveled with her.
She nods. “I kept telling myself I’d throw it out, but it’s in my room, leaning against my lamp because it was the one piece of proof I owned that any of it had been real.” She looks up at me. “I kept it through the entire week I spent swearing to myself it was never real.”
I put the pie in the oven before I can do anything stupid with my hands, and then I turn it on.
“You didn’t preheat the oven?” she asks.
“Preheat.” I look at the dial like it betrayed me, pull the temperature up on my phone, set it, hit start. “There. It’s cooking. Probably.”
She laughs softly, under her breath, and then the laugh runs out, and the kitchen goes quiet around it. The hum of the oven. Flour on every surface. Her, two feet away, reading me, while I can’t read one thing back.
I had a speech. I worked on it for days.
It’s gone — every word, the second she looks up at me — and what’s left underneath is the part I never figured out how to rehearse.
So I cross the last of the kitchen and take her hands in my disgusting flour-covered ones, and there’s a joke right at the tip of my tongue, but I leave it where it is.
“I made you a pie,” I say.
She nods once. “You did.”
“It’s going to be terrible.”
“It’s going to be so bad,” she agrees, gently.
“I made it anyway. With my own two hands. No Rowan.” I look at her.
“I’m no good at the saying-it part, Linwood.
Never have been. I’m better at the doing, and the doing is about to come out of that oven looking like a crime scene.
” I flash her a smirk. “But I did all of it on purpose. The plane. The pie. You. None of it got picked for me. I picked it.”
She goes very still.
“My whole life got chosen for me. You know that better than anyone.” I let my voice stay plain. I don’t dress it up. “You’re the one thing in it that’s mine, because I’m the one who picked it. I pick you, Aspen.”
She plays with my fingers and says, “That’s a lot of pressure to put on a girl you’ve known your whole life.”
“Yeah, well.” I let the grin come back. “That was the speech. Days of work. You’re welcome.”
Her eyes go bright, and she blinks at me like she’s mad about it, like I tricked her into feeling something on a Monday. She’s not laughing it off. She’s covering, and she’s letting me watch her cover, which from Aspen Linwood is the whole entire thing.
“So,” I say. “You gonna leave me hanging? I’ve got flour in places flour should never be.”
She fists my disgusting shirt. “Yes,” she says. “Obviously yes — you absolute lunatic, it’s been yes for days.” She looks at my mouth. “I just didn’t think you were ever going to pick me on purpose.”
“Well.” I put my hand over hers on my chest. “I did. And I’d do it again every day, and I’m extremely smug about it, so.”
“There he is.”
I grin. “He never left.”
I grab my phone and hit replay on a YouTube video. The song blasts loudly on the house speakers. She throws her head back and lets out my favorite sound in the entire world when the song starts playing.
“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun?” she asks with a big smile as I start dancing. “Are you serious, Ermington? This is your favorite song?”
I grin, swaying my shoulders. “I’m not gonna hide you from the world.”
She raises an eyebrow. “What if I want you to?”
And there it is — light, fast, gone again, the way she says the things she means most.
I stop swaying and don’t make a joke out of this. I’ve gotten good at staying quiet. I pull her in, her arms looping around my neck, and touch my forehead to hers.
“Tell me what’s on your mind, Linwood.”
Her lips part as she watches me closely. It takes her a moment to say it, but finally she says, “Promise me that I’m not the reason you’re not signing early.”
“You’re not,” I whisper. “I swear it.”
She kisses me, quick, and pulls back just far enough to look in my eyes. “When you leave––”
“You’re coming with me.” It’s out before I’ve thought about it, like it’s already decided. I watch it land on her, watch her go still, and realize what I just said. “I mean — God. Not like that. I’d really like it if you came with me, Aspen. When you’re ready. If you want to.”
Her eyes do something I can’t read, glassy and quick.
“You don’t have to give up anything for me,” I say, quieter now, because the cocky version’s not the one that’s true. “But I’m in this for real. I’m not planning on letting you go.”
She asks, “And if you change your mind about me?” It comes out small, but it’s loud to my ears. It’s the whole fear in one question. “Promise you’ll let me down easy.”
I shake my head slowly, because I’m not going to fight her fear, I’m just going to outlast it.
“I’m not going to let you down at all,” I say.
That’s the part she doesn’t believe yet, and that’s okay.
“I’ll prove it to you.” I tuck her hair back.
“I’ve never done this before, Aspen. It scares me too. But I want you with me.”
She’s quiet. Then her mouth tips into something that isn’t fear. “I’d have to be part of the team, then,” she says, “if I’m coming with you. I’ll have my degree. I have experience. I don’t do anything halfway, Ermington.”
And there she is — my analyst, already building the spreadsheet, already finding her own way.
“That,” I say, “sounds like an absolute dream.”
We smile at each other as the oven timer goes off. I release her and pull out the pie. She walks over to the stove and looks at it.
“It’s not bad.”
I look at her, and we both laugh at how generous she’s being because the pie is fucking horrible.
I turn down the music, and we try the pie.
It is appalling. The crust has managed to come out both raw and burnt, an achievement I didn’t realize was possible, and the pumpkin is like soup.
What the fuck happened? Aspen takes one bite, and her whole face does something heroic, trying to be kind about it.
“It’s—”
“Shit,” I say.
She covers her mouth and swallows. “I won’t take another bite, but––”
I force myself to swallow the bite.
She sets the fork down.
I couldn’t tell you who moves first. I’d like to say it was me, but the truth is we just find each other.
I kiss her like I’ve got the rest of my life to do it — because, God willing, I’m about to spend it finding out.
She kisses me back like she’s been dying to get her hands on me. I push back, proving to her that I want this more. So much fucking more.