10. Sloane #2
He wins another faceoff — I’ve lost count — and feeds it back to a defenseman in a motion so quick I’d have missed it if I weren’t watching him specifically, and the play develops up the ice and ends in a goal that the building comes apart over, and through all of it I’m watching the way he doesn’t celebrate so much as reset, already gliding back toward the dot, already thinking about the next one.
There’s something about a person who’s good at a thing and quiet about being good at it.
I know exactly what it is and I’m not going to name it.
The first line change comes midway through the second.
Beau comes off, Cash and Theo with him, and Wyatt’s group goes on — the freshmen, Wyatt shepherding them, and you can feel the game change texture the second the first line sits down, the slight loosening, the other team finally getting to breathe.
Beau drops onto the bench directly below us, pulls his helmet half off, says something to the guy beside him that makes the guy laugh.
And then he looks up.
Right at me. Like he knew exactly where I was the whole time, which — given the seats — he did.
He smiles.
It’s not the one-cornered almost-smile from the bookshop.
It’s the whole thing, unguarded, surprised out of him a little, the smile of a person who looked up to check something was true and found out it was.
And my face — my treacherous, formerly reliable face, the one that did nothing in the doorway of Evan’s bedroom, the one I have spent twenty years training to be a closed door — my face goes hot.
Visibly. A full blush, the kind you can’t pull back, while a boy in a hockey jersey looks at me from a bench with sweat in his hair and ice melting off his shoulders.
I look at the scoreboard like it’s interesting.
Margo, beside me, says nothing, which is how I know she saw the whole thing. Margo not commenting is louder than Margo commenting. I will be hearing about this for the rest of my natural life.
The second line change brings them back.
Beau, Cash, Theo, over the boards in a clean rotation, and the game tightens back into the shape it had before — Whitmore reasserting the fact of itself, the other team back to negotiating.
Beau wins the faceoff. Of course he does.
By now I’m taking a private, irrational satisfaction in it, like it’s a thing he’s doing for me specifically.
The third period is a formality. Whitmore is up by four and playing like a team that knows it, loose and fast and a little theatrical now, Cash attempting things that have no business working and that mostly work.
The crowd’s given up on suspense and switched to pure enjoyment.
Margo’s on her feet for most of it. Wren’s still coaching, quieter now, mostly to herself.
June has, at some point, put her book entirely away, which from June is the equivalent of a standing ovation.
When the final buzzer goes, the building comes undone.
It’s an exhibition. It doesn’t count for anything.
Wren is right about that, and the camera crew and the broadcast slot and the graphics package will all be deployed again next week for a women’s game that won’t get them, and that’s a real and unfair thing.
And also: there is something in a room full of people losing their minds in unison that gets into your chest whether you authorized it or not.
The noise. The stamping. Margo screaming next to me with her whole body.
I’m on my feet and I didn’t decide to be.
Down on the ice, the team’s doing the thing, sticks up, gathering at their goalie.
Beau peels off toward the bench, toward the tunnel, helmet off now, hair a disaster, and on his way he looks up into the stands and finds me — second time, no hunting required — and tips his head toward the tunnel. Come closer.
I make my way down to the rail. The crowd’s thinning around me, flowing toward the exits.
He stops below me, breathing hard, grinning, close enough that I have to lean down a little over the rail to hear him over the noise.
“Thirty minutes,” he says. “Showers, Coach talks, the whole thing. Will you wait?”
“For thirty minutes?”
“On the dot.” He swipes a forearm across his hairline. “The team’s going to The Penalty Box after. You and your girls should come.”
I look at him for a second — the flush of the win on him, the easy openness, the fact that he asked twice now, will you wait, like the answer mattered.
“Okay,” I say.
His grin does something. He nods once, the way I’ve seen him nod, like he’s confirming a play. Then he’s gone, down the tunnel, swallowed by his team.
He comes out at exactly thirty minutes.
I know because I checked, which I will not be telling anyone.
The parking lot’s half-full of dispersing crowd and idling cars, the night gone properly cold now, and the girls and I are clustered near the edge of it — and I realize, as Beau ambles out of the arena in dark jeans and damp hair and that jacket, that the rest of the team has materialized too.
Cash, loud, already telling a story. Wyatt, easy, hands in his pockets.
Theo, scowling at the middle distance like it owes him money.
And Margo has noticed. Margo has very noticed, and has rearranged her posture accordingly.
Beau finds me across the lot.
I walk to him. A few steps away from everyone, enough for the noise to drop, enough for it to be just us in the cold with our breath showing.
“Good game,” I tell him. “You’re —” I land on the true thing, which is shorter than the polite thing. “You’re very good.”
“I know.” But he says it without the cockiness it should carry, almost wry, like he’s letting me hear that he knows I already knew.
A beat passes. The lot empties around the edges of us.
“You made a decision,” he says. Not a question.
He’s looking at me steadily, and there’s something underneath the steadiness, something that’s been waiting since Tuesday, and I think — distantly, the way you notice weather — that I like that he doesn’t dress it up.
He just asks the real thing and lets it sit.
I’ve known my answer for days. I knew it on the sofa with Margo, I knew it before that, on the sidewalk when he said I’m offering to be the thing and meant it.
The knowing isn’t new. The saying is the only hard part, and saying hard things in complete sentences while looking at the person is the one thing I’ve always been able to do.
“I’m in,” I say. “But I have rules.”
He chuckles — low, and real, the kind that gets surprised out of him. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.” Then, glancing past me at the gathered team, the waiting cars, the cold: “Can we discuss rules later?”
I look back at my friends. June’s saying something to Wren. Margo’s pretending not to watch me and watching me. And the team’s right there in the mix of them, Cash mid-anecdote, Wyatt laughing, the whole loud warm crowd of them folding my people in like it’s nothing.
I look back at Beau.
“Later,” I agree.
“Good.” That whole-thing smile again, the unguarded one. “Now let’s go celebrate.”
“It was an exhibition game.”
“Don’t be a party pooper, Beckett.”
And he turns toward the others, toward the noise and the cold and The Penalty Box and whatever this is that I have just, in a complete sentence, while looking at him, agreed to.
I let out a breath I watch leave me in the cold air.
I have no idea what I’m getting myself into.