16. Beau
Beau
Third period, UMass comes out like a team that’s been told the truth in their own locker room.
You can see it in the first shift — they’re faster, meaner, throwing bodies, the big pair pinching harder because down three at home against us is the kind of thing that ends up on a highlight reel they don’t want to be on.
O’Grady leans over the bench between whistles and says one word, “Smart,” which is O’Grady for don’t get cute, don’t get hurt, close it out the boring way, and I nod once and take it onto the ice.
We play it boring. Boring is a skill. We chip pucks deep and forecheck in waves and kill the clock in their end, and every time twenty-two comes looking for me I move the puck a half-second before he arrives, because I’ve spent the whole game learning his timing and now I’m spending it back on him.
He doesn’t like that. He tells me he doesn’t like that, in the language of the boards — calls me a soft little golden boy and worse, a whole monologue about my mother in there somewhere — and I let him say all of it, because a guy running his mouth is a guy not watching the play, and the puck’s already gone.
They get one back at twelve minutes — a scramble, a lucky bounce off a shin pad, their bench finally with something to stand up about. Three-one. The Nest gets tense the way a building gets tense when a lead that felt safe stops feeling safe.
I win the next faceoff.
I win it on purpose and with feeling, back to Theo, and we settle it down, and we run ninety seconds off the clock without giving them a sniff, and the tension bleeds back out of the building.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about being captain.
It’s not the goals. It’s the ninety boring seconds after the other team scores, the ones where you put your body between the game and the panic and you just — hold.
Until everyone remembers we’re fine. I’m good at the holding. I’ve been holding things my whole life.
With four minutes left twenty-two finally gets his shot at me — a late hit along the wall, after the whistle, a forearm that catches me high and drives the bad shoulder into the glass.
It goes through me like a current. White, total, the kind of pain that turns the lights off for a half-second. Fuck. My whole left side lights up and the rink goes to static at the edges.
I do not go down.
I want, more than I have wanted anything in a while, to go down — to drop to a knee and let my body do the thing it’s screaming to do — and I don’t, because nine hundred people are watching and two rows behind the bench is a woman who notices everything, and going down means a trainer, and a trainer means questions, and questions mean the thing I’ve kept for six months stops being mine.
So I straighten up. I find the ref. I get the penalty called — two minutes, roughing, twenty-two skating off to a chorus of boos — and I skate to the bench under my own power with my face arranged into nothing, and the only sound I make is breathing.
Cash leans in. “Beau.”
“Power play. Get out there.”
“Your shoulder—”
“Get out there, Cash.”
He goes. We score on the man advantage — Wyatt, off a feed from Theo, top corner — and that’s the dagger, four-one, and the building roars and the clock runs out and we’ve beaten UMass in our own barn in the first conference game that counted, and it’s a good night, it’s a genuinely good night, and I’m standing at center ice with my team piling in and my shoulder quietly screaming and I let myself, one time, look up into the seats.
She’s standing. Clapping. Not hiding it this time.
In the room after, O’Grady gives us the version of a good speech that he allows himself, which is three sentences and a nod, and the room’s loud and happy and somebody’s got music going, and I peel my gear off slow on the side away from the room, careful with the left arm, and get my shirt on before anyone can clock the shoulder, which is already going colors it shouldn’t.
Wyatt finds me by the showers. Doesn’t say anything about the arm. Just hands me a water and says, low, “That was a cheap hit.”
“It was.”
“You good?”
“I’m good.”
He looks at me a second — Wyatt’s version of pushing, which is just looking — and then lets it go, because he’s Wyatt, and because the room’s celebrating and you don’t take that from people. “She’s waiting,” he says instead. “Outside. Saw her and Margo in the lot.”
“Yeah?”
“Mm.” A small smile, the one he’s been doing all week, the one that means he’s worked something out and isn’t going to say it. “Go on, Cap.”
She’s in the lot with Margo and the cold, and she doesn’t do the thing girlfriends do at the bus — doesn’t run up, doesn’t drape. She waits until I get to her and then looks at me with the dry, level thing and says, “You got hit late.”
“I got hit late.”
“It looked like it landed wrong.”
“It landed fine.”
She looks at me a beat longer than the answer earns — the noticing look, the one that’s catalogued the clipboard and the shoulder and the half-second I came up slow in the first — and I watch her decide, again, not to push it.
She just files it, the way I file her, and I think about how we’ve built a whole relationship, fake and otherwise, out of two people deciding not to ask each other the question.
“Good game,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“You were —” she pauses, and lands it dry “— adequate.”
“Adequate.”
“Don’t let it go to your head, Sorensen. There’s a UMass defenseman who’d give you a much lower review.”
And I laugh, the shoulder be damned, because she watched the whole thing and clocked twenty-two and is needling me about it in a parking lot, and there is no part of my body or my well-managed life that is behaving correctly around this woman, and I’ve stopped pretending to myself that it is.
Here’s what the week does.
The week does the thing weeks do when you stop noticing you’re in them — it fills up with small stuff, and the small stuff is the part that gets you.
I start bringing her coffee. This is not on the schedule.
There is no rule that requires me to know Sloane Beckett gets out of Advanced Scene Study at three-forty on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and there is definitely no rule that requires me to be standing outside Hartwell when she does with a chai from the Roastery — the good one, cinnamon, the order I now know cold because Mormor told me once and I never forgot it.
But on the days I don’t have class fourth period I find myself walking to the arts building anyway, and I find myself with a chai in my hand, and I find myself leaning on the brick by the door like a guy with a reason to be there, and when she comes out and sees me her face does a thing she tries to shut down and can’t quite, and that thing is worth the walk.
“This is rule seven,” she says the first time, taking the cup. “There’s nobody here. This is textbook rule seven.”
“There’s a guy by the bike rack. He counts as an audience.”
“He’s on the phone. He’s not watching us.”
“He might look over.”
“You’re a menace,” she says, and drinks the chai, and doesn’t give it back, and we walk.
I do it Wednesday too. And the Thursday.
By the end of the week she’s stopped citing rule seven and just takes the cup, and I’ve stopped pretending the guy by the bike rack is why I’m there, and neither of us mentions that the rule’s become a thing we both walk past on the way to something we’re not naming.
The girls start coming to the Raven House.
That’s the other thing the week does. It starts with Wren — she and Cash have whatever they have, the thing that runs on mutual insult and would absolutely take a bullet for the other person — and Wren brings June, and June brings a book and reads it on our couch like she’s done it her whole life, and Margo arrives like weather and reorganizes the kitchen and tells Theo his cooking would be better if he “committed to a flavor,” and Theo, who has not taken culinary feedback from a living soul in three years, adjusts the dish.
I watch him do it. I don’t say anything.
You don’t point at it when Theo does something human; you just let it happen.
And Sloane’s there in the middle of it, on my couch, in my house, in the warm chaos of the place I love most in the world, and it stops being strange to see her there sometime around the third night, which is its own kind of alarming.
She fits. She fits the way a thing fits when it was always going to.
Sunday she ends up in the kitchen with Wyatt arguing about a book they’ve both read, and Wyatt’s got that warm steady attention turned all the way up, and she’s giving it back, dry and fast, and I stand in my own doorway watching my fake girlfriend get folded into my real family and I think, this is going to be a problem when it ends.
When it ends. I keep saying that to myself like it’s scheduled.
And then there’s the Evan thing.
I hear about it secondhand, which is the only reason Evan’s still walking around with all his teeth.
Tuesday, apparently — Sloane coming out of Hartwell, me not there because I had class, and Evan was waiting.
Not aggressive, by the account I get. The reasonable version, the one that’s worse.
Can we talk, just five minutes, I think you owe me that.
And before Sloane had to spend a single unit of the composure she spends too much of, Margo — who has apparently appointed herself a one-woman security detail and was walking out two steps behind — got between them and, in the version I hear, said something so precise and so quietly devastating that Evan left without finishing his sentence.
I get the story from Cash, who got it from Wren, who got it from Margo, who I’d bet money edited her own dialogue to sound cooler, though knowing Margo it doesn’t need editing.
“What’d she say?” I ask Cash.