11. Beau
Beau
The Penalty Box is four blocks from Corbin, and we walk it in a loose pack, the team loud out front and the girls folded into the middle of us like they’ve always been there, which is a thing the Raven House does to people — absorbs them before anyone’s decided to.
I’m walking next to Sloane. There’s a gap between us, maybe a foot of cold September air, and I spend most of a block being aware of the gap.
On the ice I always know where I am in relation to everything — the boards, the puck, four teammates, five opponents, all of it mapped without thinking.
Right now I can’t figure out where I’m supposed to be in relation to one person walking beside me on a sidewalk, which is a new and stupid problem, and I notice I want to close the gap about half a second after I notice I’m not going to.
I file that. Add it to the list of things I’m apparently filing now.
“You’re quiet,” Sloane says.
“I’m always quiet after a game.”
“Cash said that’s called Captainy.”
“Cash talks too much.”
“Cash told me three separate stories on the walk over and two of them were about you.” She glances at me. “One involved a traffic cone. I’m choosing to believe it was exaggerated.”
“It was not exaggerated.”
“That’s worse.”
“It’s much worse.” And there it is — the first one tonight that just happens, no performance under it, and I feel the corner of my mouth go before I’ve decided to let it. She catches it. She looks back at the sidewalk like she didn’t.
The Penalty Box is exactly what it is and nothing it isn’t, which is the whole appeal.
Sticky floors. Low ceiling. Decades of Whitmore hockey on the walls — team photos gone yellow, a cracked stick signed by somebody who went pro in the nineties, a penalty box bench bolted up over the bar that nobody’s allowed to explain the provenance of.
Marco’s behind the bar, has been since before I got here, and he lifts two fingers at me when we come in, which is Marco for the usual and don’t make it weird.
The place is already half-full of the post-game crowd, and a cheer goes up when the team walks in, the cheap kind of cheer that means nothing and feels good anyway.
We’ve got a booth. We’ve always got a booth. It’s understood.
And then there's the seating problem.
I haven't thought about the seating problem until I'm standing at the edge of the booth looking at it, and now it's the only thing in the world.
And it's not just her anymore. It's her and three roommates, all of whom slid in while I was hanging up my coat, all of whom are now arranged around the table like a panel of judges who happen to be drinking milkshakes.
Margo's got the outside seat, because of course she does.
Margo Ashby runs a room the way O'Grady runs a bench — all warmth on top and total control underneath — and she's already smiling at me in a way that tells me nothing and sees everything.
Next to her, Wren, who plays for the women's team and watches me the way I watch tape, quiet, unhurried, filing it all somewhere.
June's tucked into the corner with a paperback turned face-down by her water, and when she glances up she gives me a small, real smile that doesn't cost her anything, which is somehow the one that makes me nervous.
And then Sloane, down on the far bench, one spot open beside her.
So. Where do I sit? Do I sit next to her?
Is sitting next to her too much, or is not sitting next to her the tell — the thing that makes Wren's eyes go a shade sharper and Margo's smile climb half a degree and the whole arrangement read as staged — and I'm standing there running it like a power play with two seconds on the clock, three women clocking every half-second I don't move, when Cash, who has the situational awareness of a heat-seeking missile and the subtlety of one too, plants a hand between my shoulder blades and shoves.
“Sit down, you absolute statue,” he mutters, low enough that only I catch it.
I go into the booth. Sloane’s already sliding in from the other end. We meet in the middle.
Our legs are touching.
Neither of us says anything about it.
Cash drops in across from us looking deeply pleased with himself, like he’s solved something, which he has, and which I am not going to thank him for ever. “There,” he says. “Cozy. Beckett, what are you drinking, it’s on Beau.”
“Is it?” I ask, a wry smile on my face.
“It’s the captain’s win, the captain buys. House rule.”
“That’s not a rule.”
“It’s a rule now. I just made it. That’s how rules fucking work, you say them and then they’re rules.” He’s looking at Sloane when he says it, grinning, and I watch her take his measure in about a second and a half and decide to play.
“Whiskey,” she says. “Neat. The good one, not the one you’d order.”
Cash puts a hand to his chest. “You don’t know what I’d order.”
“You’d order whatever’s loudest.” She doesn’t even pause. “Something with a name like an explosion. You strike me as a man who has, at least once, ordered a drink that was on fire.”
Wyatt, sliding in next to Cash, lets out a low whistle. Theo, folding himself into the end of the booth next to Margo like a deck chair being put away wrong, makes a sound that in another person would be a laugh.
“That was one time,” Cash says, “and it was a celebration, and the bartender said the shot wasn’t supposed to still be lit, so really that’s on him—”
“He set his own eyebrow on fire,” Wyatt says, mild, to Sloane. “Sophomore year. We have photos.”
“I would like to see the photos,” Sloane says.
“You’ll get the photos.”
“Wyatt,” Cash says, betrayed.
And just like that she’s in. I don’t know exactly how it happened — somewhere between the whiskey order and the eyebrow, it stopped being four guys and a stranger and became the booth, the usual booth, the usual noise, with three extra people in it who are keeping up fine.
Better than fine. Wyatt likes Sloane, I can tell, in the easy way Wyatt likes people he’s decided are okay.
Cash is delighted by her because she gives it back, and Cash respects nothing so much as a person who gives it back.
Theo hasn’t said a word.
Theo doesn’t say words to people he’s still deciding about. I know this. It took him a month to say a full sentence to Wyatt freshman year and Wyatt is the most likeable human alive.
Marco brings the drinks. Sloane's whiskey, the good one, because Marco doesn't get orders wrong.
Margo's got something pink with a sugared rim that she ordered without looking at a menu, like she's ordered it in this booth a hundred times before.
Wren's water, plus the beer she didn't order, because Marco's learned by now that she'll drink half of whoever's closest. June's tea, the same one every time, and Marco sets it down in front of her without asking, which gets him the same small real smile she gave me at the door.
My beer. Cash's thing that is, in fact, loud and slightly on fire-adjacent, which Sloane looks at, then looks at Cash, and says nothing, and the nothing is the funniest thing she could have done, and Cash knows it, and drinks it anyway out of spite.
The booth talks over itself. The win gets relitigated.
Wyatt talks through his own third-period shift like he's coaching it.
Cash tells the traffic cone story again, differently, in a version where he's more heroic and the cone is more sentient.
Margo heckles him on a detail from a version she heard in September, which means this story has a history, which means Cash has been telling it wrong on purpose for months.
Wren doesn't say much, but she's watching the table the way she watches a rink, clocking who's fast, who's stalling, who's about to say something that costs them.
June laughs at the parts that are actually funny and lets the rest go by, and every so often her eyes go somewhere past the booth, somewhere I don't follow, and then come back.
I keep half an ear on all of it and the other half on the fact that Sloane's leg is still against mine under the table and that she hasn't moved away from it, which I'm aware of in a low constant way, like a sound you can't stop hearing once you've heard it.
I put my arm along the back of the booth behind her.
It’s a thing you do. It’s a public thing, a we’re-together thing, the exact kind of move the whole arrangement requires, and I do it smoothly, like it’s nothing, and then I leave it there about four seconds longer than the move requires, and I’m aware of leaving it there, and I notice — late, the way I notice everything — that I don’t actually want to take it back.
She doesn’t lean into it. She doesn’t move away from it either.
We’re both pretending the arm is a strategy.
“So,” Cash says, leaning across the table at Sloane with the air of a man opening an investigation.
“How’d this happen? You two. Because I’ve known this guy three years and I’ve never once seen him —” he gestures at the general situation, the booth, the arm, her “— do a single thing he didn’t have to do, and now he’s reserving seats and buying whiskey, and I want the story. ”
This is the part we did not rehearse.
This is the part we did not rehearse at all, because we sealed the whole thing in a parking lot forty minutes ago and have discussed exactly zero of the logistics, and I feel the half-second of it open up — the place where two people who actually had a story would just tell it, smooth, overlapping, the way couples finish each other’s —
“The bookshop,” Sloane says.
And I say, at the same time, “My grandmother,” and we both stop, and Cash’s eyebrows go up, and I think here it goes, and then Sloane picks it up without missing a beat.