26 #2
“You paid ten grand for the lodge.”
“For two cabins.”
All four of them groaned.
“Stop saying that,” Rider told me.
“It’s relevant.”
“It has never once helped.”
Cade moved off the tailgate and stood in front of me. “Come have dinner, play pool, and watch Briggs lose at air hockey. You don’t have to sleep there, but be with us before tomorrow sneaks up and a different kind of stress piles on top of you.”
“I don’t lose at air hockey,” Briggs said.
“You were playing yourself.”
“And winning.”
Cade ignored him. “Give us a few hours, Ry.”
The offer didn’t contain a hidden argument. He wasn’t trying to put me in the same building as Charm so someone could orchestrate a conversation. He was offering me the lodge I’d rented and the family I’d invited before I let her absence make me abandon both.
“The girls stay next door?” I asked.
“All night.”
“No surprise conversations?”
“No.”
“And no one starts telling me I’m making the wrong choice after a few drinks.”
Cade’s eyes held mine. “Give us more fuckin credit. You’re done, and we know it.”
My chest resisted those words even while my head clung to them. I finished the beer and set the empty bottle inside the cooler.
“Fine.”
Briggs lifted both hands in victory. “Indoor pool.”
“I’m not swimming.”
“You haven’t seen the lights.”
“I’ve seen lights before.”
“Not like these.”
The players’ entrance opened behind us, and Coach stepped into the parking lot carrying a laptop bag. He stopped when he saw five hockey players gathered around an open cooler the night before scouts arrived. His stare moved across Cade, Easton, Rider, and Briggs before landing on me.
“Am I interrupting a support group?”
“Team-building exercise,” Briggs said.
“You don’t play for my team.”
“I support cross-organizational wellness.”
Coach looked at his swollen lip and then at my black eye. “What happened?”
“Hockey,” Briggs and I answered together.
Coach’s gaze flattened. “That answer would concern me less if Briggs played hockey here.”
“He trespassed,” I said.
“And Ryan responded with community outreach,” Briggs added.
Coach closed his eyes for one long second before pointing at the cooler. “How many beers?”
“One each,” Cade answered.
“Keep it that way.”
No one argued. Coach pointed at me next, and I straightened despite the pain pulling through my ribs.
“You ready for tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
His eyes moved over my face. “That wasn’t a casual question.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know what’s happening, Decker, and I don’t need the personal details. I need to know whether it follows you onto my ice tomorrow.”
“Everything follows me onto the ice.”
Coach’s jaw tightened.
“I’ve been playing since I was eight,” I continued. “Nothing in my life stays off the ice. I take it with me, and I use it.”
“This is the biggest game of your career.”
“I know.”
“Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Washington will all be watching.”
“I know who’s coming.”
“Then tell me you can control whatever this is.”
I looked through the glass doors behind him toward the tunnel leading to the rink.
The ice waited on the other side, holding every version of me I’d ever been: the hungry kid, the angry teenager, the foster placement no one expected to graduate, the KFU player people called dangerous because they didn’t understand how much discipline violence required, and the Frost left wing who’d built a future from everything meant to bury him.
Charm wouldn’t become the first wound strong enough to take that away.
“Nothing affects the ice the way people think it does,” I said. “Since I was eight, everything has fueled it.”
Coach studied me before giving a slow nod. “Make sure this fuels you forward. I don’t need you trying to put somebody through the boards because his jersey reminds you of whoever you’re pissed at.”
“Depends on the jersey.”
“Decker.”
“I’m ready.”
“Then hydrate, eat, and remember that one beer means one beer.”
Briggs tucked his bottle behind his back, and Coach looked directly at him.
“I can still see it.”
“I’m not playing tomorrow.”
“You’re a college athlete.”
“I’m on holiday.”
“You’re wearing my team’s sweatpants.”
Briggs looked down at the Frost logo on his thigh. “These were a gift.”
“He stole them,” I said.
Coach pointed toward the road. “All of you leave my parking lot before I decide tomorrow’s conditioning needs spectators.”
We scattered with all the dignity of teenagers caught behind a convenience store.
By the time we reached the lodge, darkness had settled across the resort. A soft glow shone behind the curtains of the second cabin, and I forced myself to keep walking without searching for Charm’s silhouette.
The main lodge smelled like the dinner Bliss and Aura had left warming in the oven before retreating next door. Containers filled the refrigerator, and a note sat on the counter in Bliss’s handwriting.
Food is ready. Eat before you begin making terrible male decisions.
Beneath it, Aura had added another line.
This includes you, Easton Wade.
Easton read the note and pulled out his phone.
“You’re not calling her,” Rider said.
“I’m texting.”
“You had an ugly fight three hours ago.”
“Exactly. That means the sex will be fire.”
“Maybe use punctuation.”
Easton gave him a look. “I know how to text my woman.”
“You once sent her ‘K’ after she wrote three paragraphs.”
“That was before my personal growth.”
Cade picked up the note and ran his thumb over Bliss’s handwriting. The fight still sat inside his face, but love remained there too, stubborn enough to survive one bad night. He took a picture of the note before folding it into his pocket, and none of us commented on it.
We ate at the kitchen island and avoided discussing Charm.
Rider told us about one of his professors accusing him of submitting an assignment written by someone else because the paper contained semicolons.
Briggs argued that semicolons were inherently suspicious.
Easton insisted no hockey player should be judged by punctuation, and Cade nearly choked when Rider admitted the paper actually had been written by someone else because he’d paid a tutor to type what he dictated.
By the time we moved downstairs, I had eaten enough food to satisfy Coach and drunk enough beer to stop feeling the edges of my body.
Briggs challenged Rider to air hockey, and Rider destroyed him. Briggs demanded a rematch, claimed the table was angled, then lost again by six points.
“The puck is biased,” he said.
“It’s plastic,” Rider answered.
“Exactly. Unregulated.”
Cade and Easton started a pool game while I sat at the bar with a glass of tequila and watched my friends turn the basement into the trip I’d intended to give them. The alcohol loosened something inside me without making any part of Charm disappear. She remained beneath every laugh.
When Easton missed an easy shot, I remembered Charm bending over this table in a dress while I stood behind her and showed her how to hold the cue. The memory had never happened, but I’d pictured it so clearly while booking the lodge that it felt stolen anyway.
I drank while Cade scratched and Rider told him Bliss had ruined his hand-eye coordination. The master suite waited upstairs, filled with every plan I’d been stupid enough to make, and I drank again.
Briggs shoved an air-hockey paddle into my hand and demanded that I restore his honor. I beat Rider by one point, lost to Easton, then accused the table of racism when Cade beat me twice.
“It’s black,” Cade said.
“Internalized oppression.”
Rider nearly fell against the wall laughing.
The tequila kept coming. Cade made me drink water between shots, and Easton pushed a plate of food toward me whenever I stopped moving.
They knew exactly how reckless it was to get drunk before the most important game of my life, but they also knew my ego, El Cuchillo was going to do whatever the fuck he wanted tonight.
Their choices were to leave me alone with it or stay close enough to make sure I didn’t do something worse.
Briggs stayed beside me without hovering, watching me closely enough to step in if he needed to.
Rider cut up hard enough to keep the room from sinking every time my silence lasted too long.
Cade monitored the water, Easton monitored the food, and none of them let me disappear upstairs or stumble outside alone.
They supported me without asking me to feel better or pretending they could control me.
I didn’t forget Charm for a second. I let myself get drunk enough that remembering her became blurry around the edges.
I was fucked up, depressed, and pissed off beneath music loud enough to shake the floor, but I wasn’t alone inside any of it.
Sometime after midnight, my bladder forced me off the barstool. The floor shifted beneath my feet.
Briggs looked over from the pool table. “Need assistance?”
“I’m going to piss.”
“I repeat the question.”
“I’ll drown you in the color-changing pool.”
“That sounded rehearsed.”
I gave him the middle finger and continued down the hallway. One shoulder caught against the wall when my knee protested, but I corrected my balance and found the bathroom without giving Briggs the satisfaction of helping me.
After taking care of business, I washed my hands and stared at myself in the mirror. The bruise beneath my eye had turned nearly black. My hair stuck out beneath my backward cap, and exhaustion and alcohol had softened the focus of my stare without touching the cold behind it.
Charm had loved this face. She’d loved the tattoos, the anger, the Spanish, and the Chicano bad boy her father would never approve of, so long as loving me remained something she could do behind a locked door.
Whatever feelings she had for me had always come with conditions, and I’d been too fucking gone for her to see them until her father forced her to choose.
I shut off the bathroom light and stepped into the hallway.