42. Chapter Forty-Two
Aspen
I have watched Stanley Ermington skate my whole life.
From the good seats at the tournaments our fathers dragged us to.
From the third row at the glass all this season, phone in my hand, thumbs moving, typing him into reports for my father — the dangles, the grin, the whole golden-boy display aimed at the cheap seats.
I have watched this man skate more times than I can count, and not one of those times was mine.
I watched him because I was told to, because he was an assignment, an asset, a name in a report my father was reading.
Watch, don’t feel. Sort, don’t fall. Hold the whole thing at the exact arm’s length I held everything, and never once let myself just look.
Tonight I’m in the stands at a home game, my phone zipped in my bag, and I catch myself reaching for it anyway.
It’s reflex. A habit older than I’d like to admit to.
Stanley takes the puck behind his own net and my mind takes notes without asking — reading the gap, tracking the weak-side winger, he’s got a half-second before the forecheck and he always waits a half-second too long — the analyst groping for a phone that isn’t in my hand, ready to sort him into a spreadsheet.
And I stop.
I leave my phone in the bag. Because I’m not scouting an asset tonight, or pricing a risk, or holding one thing at arm’s length.
He isn’t my father’s investment, and he isn’t a name in a report.
For the first time in a whole life spent watching this exact man skate, I’m doing it because I want to, and nobody assigned me a second of it.
The phone stays in the bag. It’s staying there for good.
I’m not at the edge of things anymore, either.
I used to watch from the glass, from the box — close enough to study, far enough to stay safe.
Tonight I’m wedged into the family section between Gianna and Lucy, with Melly leaning across both of them to steal Gianna’s popcorn.
It’s loud and warm, and I belong here, out in the open, with nothing running underneath it.
That’s the part that still catches me. There’s nothing underneath it.
Gianna knows everything — got it out of Benson weeks ago, apologized to me twice, never mentioned it again.
Lucy knows everything; Lucy basically had it diagrammed before any of us did.
And it doesn’t matter, because there’s no lie left to protect, no face to hold straight, no second track running under the friendship.
They’re just my friends. Somewhere in the middle of the worst thing I ever did to myself, I accidentally got the one thing I never let myself have — and it turned out to have been real the whole time.
“He’s looking for you,” Gianna says, elbowing me, mouth full.
“He can’t see me. The lights are—”
“Number 11 is looking for you,” Lucy says, certain, not even glancing up from the ice.
My phone buzzes right before puck drop. My dad.
I brace for half a second out of pure muscle memory, and then I remember I don’t have to do that anymore. I open it.
Dad: Good luck tonight. Tell him to keep his feet moving in the third. He gets lazy when he’s up two.
I laugh out loud. Gianna gives me a look.
Bart Linwood, ladies and gentlemen — constitutionally incapable of sending a normal good luck, legally required to smuggle a coaching note inside it.
But it’s there underneath. The thing that was never there before, the warmth he’s finally figuring out how to say in the only dialect he’s got.
We’re not fixed. It doesn’t get fixed in a phone call or a month of better ones.
But he texts me now. Just to text me. And he means the thing under the hockey.
I write back.
Me: I’ll tell him. He says hi, by the way.
He hasn’t said hi. I just know it’ll make my dad do the gruff pleased thing he does when he can’t find the words for the soft stuff.
Dad: Good kid. Lazy in the third. Tell him.
I put the phone away, still smiling.
I sit back and watch my boyfriend play hockey.
The first time I saw him, every move was aimed outward — at the crowd, at the scouts, at the girl with the pen who refused to look impressed.
A show. The dangle fancier than it needed to be, the grin that knew it was being watched.
Armor, all of it, though I didn’t have the word for it yet.
The difference is that tonight, he just plays. Clean, hard, and joyful.
He scores in the second. The section comes apart around me. And in the middle of all that noise, he turns and finds me.
He gleams when his eyes land on me. And that’s exactly how I know this is going to last. He winks at me, and I shake my head with a growing smile on my face. He waits for it. I press a hand flat to my chest like I can keep it in.
Gianna says, “Oh my God, the two of you,” around a mouthful of popcorn, and I do not care even slightly.
I get the whole story of the rule from Lucy, at the second intermission, because Lucy has decided I need the full history now that I’m officially one of them.
I knew of it.
That the Hawthorne House had rules. Written on a whiteboard in the kitchen. It was the law of the land. And rule one — rule one, top of the board — was no falling in love before the draft.
Lucy pulls out her phone, shows me a photo, and I have to bite down on my lip. The whiteboard. Rule one, scratched clean out, and underneath it, in what is unmistakably Rowan’s handwriting: RULE ONE (REVISED): don’t get caught fake-dating the coach’s daughter. Too late. RIP Ermington.
“They’re insufferable about it,” Lucy says, glowing. “Benson’s taking full credit. He says the whole thing was his master plan. He keeps calling it ‘the operation.’”
And it was, a little. I think about the four of them clearing out of their own house, twice.
Benson herding me up the stairs to wait in Stanley’s room.
The family-section seats that Lucy absolutely arranged.
The plane trip that every one of them signed off on.
A whole brotherhood quietly running a play to get their idiot golden boy the one thing he ever picked for himself, and collecting their victory lap now, smug and proud.
The golden kid who was never going to fall. Fallen. Proud of it. Nothing left to perform.
Late in the third period, Stanley keeps his feet moving, because I texted him at the first intermission that his favorite coach in the world says he gets lazy up two, and he texted back a single skull.
And I notice that the fear isn’t there. The thing that ran my entire adult life, the low constant hum of brace, watch, get out before it gets taken from you, the analyst posted at the back of every room I was ever happy in, waiting to be proven right that happiness is just a setup with a longer fuse.
I’m sitting in the same section where I came apart a few weeks ago, where I sat among these exact girls and lied with my whole face while my chest caved in, and I check for it the way you check a sore tooth with your tongue.
It’s gone.
There’s just the game, and the cold, and the noise, and him, and me, here, unafraid.
I don’t make a thing of it. I notice it, and let it be true, and go back to watching.
There’s a whole season still in front of him.
The team’s good — good enough that people have started talking about a possible championship this year, good enough that Benson ends every practice now with “let’s win us a natty” like it’s a settled matter, and maybe it is.
They’re skating toward something, all of them, and Stanley’s at the dead center of it, and none of it’s decided yet, which is the best part of it.
And in the spring, there’s the rest — the signing, the league, the future with his own name on it, on his own timeline, the when of it finally his to call. He isn’t giving anything up. He never was. He’s just taking it in the order he chose.
And me — I’ve been thinking, lately, about what I want.
Not the major I picked because it kept me near my father, not the job I took because it dropped me into his orbit.
What I want. For me. Now that wanting things for myself isn’t a foreign language.
I don’t have the answer yet, and for the first time in my life that doesn’t frighten me.
It’s mine to work out. I’ve got time. None of its tied off.
That’s how I know all of it is real. Real things don’t resolve. They just keep going.
The final horn. They win their home game.
And I stand in the family section, in the roar of it, and watch Stanley Ermington come off the ice — helmet off, hair a catastrophe, grinning up into the stands — and he is right at home.
Playing hockey. Winner’s high. Looking up at me to make sure I’m watching.
And there’s no report, and there’s no show. Just him, finding me through the glass the way he always finds me now, and me, finding him right back, nothing in between, both of us finally only here.
He mouths something at me. I’m fairly sure it’s Linwood.
I mouth back the only thing that fits — the thing his whole ridiculous family started, and I am apparently stuck with for life: Cup.
He clutches his chest like I’ve put one through him. Then he points at me, then at the tunnel, then holds up his phone and taps it. I dig mine out, and there’s already a text waiting, sent from the bench because he is exactly the kind of lunatic who texts a girl from his own bench.
Cup: Pie at my place after? Been practicing. Still bad. Come anyway. I have whipped cream.
I look down at him on the ice — this boy I held at arm’s length and fell for in spite of every wall I ever built, the one real thing I let myself choose — and I take a picture of him grinning up at me in his gear, to keep next to the other one.
The one of him and the doomed pie that’s been my lock screen for a week now.
Then I text him back.
Me: Obviously. Princess.
And I watch him laugh, all the way across the ice — that laugh, the one I could pick out of any crowd in the world now — and I think about how he’s spent a whole season counting mine, like they were the only score that ever mattered to him.
He can stop counting them.
I’m not going anywhere.
The End.
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