Sully
Someone is trying to take my door off its hinges.
I know it's Cassidy before I open it because nobody else knocks like they're serving a warrant.
Sure enough, there she is in leggings and one of Trevor's old college hoodies she should have burned years ago, and she looks like she wants to put me through a wall.
“You absolute dick,” she says, shoving past me into the apartment.
“Good morning to you too.”
“Don't.” She spins around in the middle of my very empty living room. “Explain the photos.”
And there it is. I've been waiting for this since about seven this morning, when my phone started going off, and Bouch sent me a screenshot with nine crying-laughing emojis and the words ‘Busted.’
“It's not what it looks like,” I tell her.
“Oh, don't you dare.” She jabs a finger at me. “That is what men say when it's exactly what it looks like.”
“Cass …”
“You're dating her? Her? The one from the gala?” She's actually shaking. “You didn't say a word to anybody, you just turn up on a gossip site kissing some random.”
“It was a favor.”
“I’m sure it was,” she says, rolling her eyes at me.
I scrub my hands over my face. “At the auction she paid a stupid amount of money …”
“To try to get into your pants. It’s a tale as old as time.”
“No, it’s not like that,” I tell her. “Is she flirty? Yes, I won’t deny that. I also won’t deny she is hot, so the favor isn’t that much of a hardship.”
My sister rolls her eyes and folds her arms, she isn’t happy with me and I get it.
“A while ago, she called me and asked if I'd do her a favor. One dinner, somewhere public, and let a photographer get some shots of the two of us together.”
Cassidy blinks. “Why?”
“Because she's an influencer and it's good for her numbers.” I shrug. “And because her ex cheated on her and she wanted him to see her out with his favorite hockey player. That's it, that's the whole reason. She was very upfront about it.”
“And you said yes.”
“Of course, it was harmless. Plus, she gave a fortune to a charity I care about. Who's it hurting? No one, except maybe her ex.”
Cassidy’s face falls. “There was a photo of you kissing her.”
“There's a photo of her turning her face into mine outside a restaurant, while a guy with a camera stood across the street,” I say. “We made it look like it was a kiss, but we never kissed.”
She stares at me for a long moment. Then all the fight goes out of her at once, and she drops onto my couch and puts her face in her hands.
“You’re a fucking idiot.”
“I was helping someone. What was wrong with that?” I ask her.
“You really are thick. You realize who you are and that people are interested in who you date, right?”
I shrug. I’ve seen stuff about me in the past, but I don’t pay much attention to it because I’m not someone like Pierre, who is one of the main guys in the league.
“No one truly cares about what I’m up to,” I tell her.
“See, that is where you are wrong. People do care. It’s gone viral, and Em saw.”
Everything in me goes very still.
“She was scrolling this morning, and it came up on some gossip page. She pretended she was fine about it, but I didn’t believe her. She gave me this brave speech about how he’s single, he can do whatever he wants, but I can tell she’s hurt.”
My stomach drops through the floor. “How hurt?” I ask.
“She's jealous hurt, and she's trying so hard to be brave about it. She'd rather die than admit it to you or anyone.”
The woman I love is one floor down hurting over a photograph I didn’t even think anything of.
I am an idiot, Cass is right. I honestly didn’t think she would see it.
I fucked up. But she’s also jealous, which means she must feel something, right?
Which means all these months down there, she's been thinking about me, too, that it’s not one-sided.
“Don't.” Cassidy points at me. “Don't you dare smile.”
“I'm not smiling.” I’m totally smiling because there’s a tiny bit of hope that all is not lost between Ember and me.
“You are absolutely smiling, you psychopath.”
“Sorry, it's just … she's jealous.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t think …”
“I know, and she didn’t say out loud that she was, but I know her.” She throws a cushion at my head. “So go down there and fix it. Tell her the whole thing was staged. Tell her about the auction, tell her about the ex, all of it.”
“No.”
She stops. “What?”
“No.” I'm not smiling anymore. “Don't tell her, Cass. Please.”
“Are you actually insane?” she says, throwing up her hands.
I get up because I can't sit still for this conversation.
“Look at what she's done,” I say. “Not long ago, she couldn't get out of that apartment.
She couldn't get in an elevator. Now she's got a therapist and she's back at work.
She's eating, going to run club, and going out.
She's built herself back up from nothing, and she's done it on her own.
It's the bravest thing I've ever watched anybody do.”
“And?”
“So, if I go running down there to explain myself, what am I actually doing?” I turn to face her. “Forcing her to love me.”
Cassidy opens her mouth. Closes it again.
“She needs a life that's hers,” I say. “Not a life that's built around a man. I'm not going to take that from her because I love her.”
“Urgh, you are impossible, frustrating, and annoying and all the other words. I don’t get it. You love her, don’t you?” she yells at me.
“Yes.”
“Then tell her.”
“I told her once, and she didn’t choose me. If I ask her again, I’m not sure I could handle her rejecting me again,” I confess to my sister.
“Oh.” She’s taken aback by my answer. “You’re scared.”
“Of course, I’m scared,” I tell her. “Look, we’re going to the playoffs. I need to concentrate on that. We have a chance at winning the cup, Cass, that is my focus.”
Her eyes narrow. “You’re right, the cup is your priority.”
I let out a long breath. She gets it. “I promise after we win the cup, I will take my chance then.”
“Okay. I can live with that. Shake on it,” she says, holding out her hand. I take it and shake on it.
“So, no interfering until after the cup. Can you promise me that?” I ask her.
She rolls her eyes. “Fine.”
And then she flips me off and heads back downstairs.
The playoffs start, and the world shrinks down to one thing. That's the beautiful part about this time of year. Everything else goes quiet. No noise, no thinking, just muscle memory and the next shift, the next game.
Sleep, eat, tape, ice, repeat.
We finish top of the conference, which means the first round gives us the second wild card.
They come in with nothing to lose and play us dirty for it.
Best of seven, and we close them out in six.
Bouch takes a cross-check to the back of the head in game three and comes back for game four with a grille on his helmet and unhinged eyes.
Nelly crushes it in game five, making forty-one saves.
When the horn goes, he just skates to the bench like he's finished a morning skate, absolute machine.
Second round is a war. It's the team that came out of the other side of our division, and they know us inside out, because when you play a division rival twice a year for a decade, there are no secrets left.
Seven games. We drop the first two at home, and with home ice, that's supposed to be the death of you.
The city writes us off, and Emmett comes into the room after game two and doesn't yell, doesn't say anything for a solid minute, and then tells us very quietly that he isn't done playing hockey with us yet, and that's the whole speech.
We take four of the next five. Fish blocks a slapshot with his ankle in game six and plays the rest of the game on it.
I take a puck to the face in game seven and lose a tooth I wasn't especially attached to.
Jo tapes me up on the bench, tells me I'm an idiot, and sends me back out.
Everyone has stopped shaving, we all look a mess, but it’s the ritual you do during playoffs.
Conference Final, the last two teams standing in the East, and the city loses its mind.
There are flags on cars, and kids in Mavericks jerseys on every corner.
There's a bar down the road from my building that's put my face in the window, which is deeply weird, and Bouch has taken about nine hundred photos of it.
We take it in five.
After the horn goes in that fifth game, I stand on the ice in a sold-out arena with the noise coming down on us like weather, and I look up at the family box, and they're all there, all of them, Harper with Bastien on her hip, Issy with her hand on her bump, Collette screaming her lungs out, and Ember smiling down at me. She’s been at every single home game, and I swear I can hear her calling out my name among the crowd.
She's there, in the box, in an old Mavericks shirt with her hands over her mouth, and Cassidy's got an arm around her, crying and laughing at the same time.
They wheel the conference trophy out onto the carpet, and Emmett does what every captain who's ever wanted the real thing does. He looks at it, nods at it, and he does not lay one finger on it. None of us do because we know about the curse. We line up and skate past it like it isn't there.
We’re four wins from the thing I've wanted since I was a kid stacking pucks against a garage door in Wisconsin, and I made a promise to my sister and to myself, and I'm holding to it.
Win the cup.
Then I'll go and get her.
The Final is the longest two weeks of my life. We take game one at home in overtime, and I have never been so tired and so awake at the same time. Bouch scores it, of all people, off his own shin, and spends the entire post-game interview claiming he meant it.
We lose game two, badly, four-one. The room afterward is silent, and that scares me more than shouting would.
Game three is a grind. We win it two-nothing, with Nelly working overtime. By the end of it, three of us can't lift our arms above our shoulders. Game four, they beat us in double overtime, and I have to sit on the bench afterward for ten minutes before I can get my skates off.
Two-two.
Best of three now.
Game five at home, and the building is unbearable. Emmett scores in the first, Fish adds one in the second, and we hang on through a third period that feels like it takes nine years off my life.
Game six in their barn, one win away, they come out like men who know they're finished and don't care. They beat us in regulation, and the flight home is grim.
Which brings us here. Game seven. On our ice. Everything I have ever wanted, everything any of us have ever wanted, one game.
The morning of, I wake up at five and can't get back to sleep, so I sit on my couch in my half-empty apartment and look at the wall for a while.
My phone buzzes.
Cassidy: Good luck today. Love you. Go win the thing.
I put the phone down and go and get my bag.
One game.
Then everything else.