31
Rude.
Kylie
I’m standing with my stupid popcorn bag under my arm, watching a grown man wrap his arms around Nash, who is wider than he is, and it’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.
Wade says something into his ear. Nash doesn’t say anything back for a second, and then he pats his dad twice on the back, and they come apart.
Nash’s face does something quick, there and gone, and his hand goes to his side.
He took a hundred hits tonight. He went into the boards so hard in the first period that Paige screamed.
He got cross-checked and cross-checked somebody and sat in a box and got grabbed by the jersey by a man in a black jacket in front of a thousand people.
So if Nash Kennebeck is standing in a lobby with a sore rib and a bad attitude, I’m not going to push.
“So,” Wade says to me. “Kylie. You a hockey person?”
“I’m learning.” I hold up my popcorn. “I know what a center is. I know what icing is now, because Koda explained it four times.”
“That’s more than his mother ever learned.” He grins. He has the same mouth as Nash, which is a weird thing to notice about somebody’s father. “You know he used to sleep in his shoulder pads?”
“Dad.”
“Six years old. Wouldn’t take them off. He’d get in bed in them with his mouthguard in.”
“Mouthguard in?”
“Mouthguard in. I’d go in at ten at night, and there he’d be, flat on his back, pads on, staring at the ceiling like he had a game in the morning.” He’s laughing at his own story before he gets to the end of it. “Which he did not. It was a Tuesday.”
Nash won’t look at me. He’s standing there with his bag on his shoulder, and I’m going to think about six-year-old Nash sleeping in his mouthguard for the rest of my life.
“What are you guys doing?” Wade says to him. “Team thing? You want food?”
“There’s a thing at the rink,” Nash says. “Then I don’t know.”
“I’ll come to the thing for twenty minutes,” Wade says, “and then I’m going to bed, because I’m fifty-one and I drove five hours today.”
He doesn’t ask me anything, and that’s okay, because I’m going out with the girls. “Well,” I say, “it was so nice to meet you. Truly. Because of the mouthguard.”
Wade shakes my hand again like we’re closing a deal.
At the rail, I had butter on my fingers and wasn’t paying attention.
This time I am. The middle of his palm doesn’t feel like a hand.
It’s smooth and shiny and tight, like the skin was pulled over it and shrink-wrapped, and there’s a ridge where it meets the normal skin at the base of his thumb.
When he lets go, I glance down, and the back of his wrist has the same shine, pale and slick, disappearing up into his jacket sleeve. Some kind of burn, old and healed.
“Kylie,” he says warmly. “Pleasure.”
“Bye,” I say to Nash.
He doesn’t say anything.
I’m at the doors when I look back. Wade has his hand on the back of Nash’s neck again, talking, steering him toward the cookie table, and Nash is nodding. He’s exhausted. He just played a hockey game, his dad drove five hours, and his coach grabbed him in front of everybody.
By the time I get back to Corvin, Kenzie is already in my room, cross-legged on my bed, talking to Tessa, who is answering in full sentences, which I note. Paige walks in a minute later in a tiny top and immediately looks at Tessa. “You should come out with us.”
Tessa looks at me for rescue, then down. “No. Thanks, though.”
Paige watches her, and I already know what Paige is thinking.
“Tessa’s a homebody,” I say cheerfully. “She’d rather curl up with a good book.”
Tessa gives me a tiny grateful look.
Paige nods like she understands, and everybody in the room knows she doesn’t.
“There’s a thing on Preston,” Kenzie says. “The house with the porch. It’s somebody’s roommate’s boyfriend, or something. Everybody’s going. We won.”
“We won,” Bianca says to the mirror as she comes in. “Did you play?”
“I screamed for two hours, Bianca. My throat hurts.”
Paige checks herself in the mirror. Kenzie glances down at her own outfit. “Hot, yeah?” Paige says, adjusting.
“You’ll be cold,” Bianca says.
Paige rolls her eyes. “He’s not going to be there. They have a thing at the rink. So it’s not about him. This is a piece of fabric, and I look good in it.”
“You do look good in it,” I say.
I still don’t know what actually happened Thursday.
All I’ve gotten is busy, and then on Friday, he’s a child, and at the game, she screamed louder than anybody when Koda scored and then said she was screaming for the team.
Kenzie knows something. I can tell by the way she doesn’t look up from her phone whenever it comes up.
Bianca does my eyeliner. I change twice.
The first thing makes me look like I’m going to a funeral, according to Paige, and the second makes me look like I’m going to a different, better funeral, according to Kenzie, so I put on the good jeans and the black top with the neckline and my boots, and Bianca does my hair in the hallway.
The whole campus is loud. People in the quad in Woodbury hoodies are yelling at other people in Woodbury hoodies. Somebody is playing music out of a car. It’s freezing. I don’t have a coat, again, and I don’t care.
The house on Preston has a porch with a couch on it that should not be outside, a screen door that doesn’t latch, and about a hundred people.
It’s warm the way it gets when the windows are sweating.
There are speakers in the front room, and the kitchen has a table with a handle of something and four two-liters and a kid with a Sharpie writing everybody’s name on their cup, which is the most organized thing I’ve ever seen at a college party.
“Kylie,” the Sharpie kid says. “K-Y-L-E-E?”
“No.” He writes it wrong anyway.
The girl from my lab is here, and we scream at each other.
A guy I’ve never spoken to tells me he saw me at the game.
Bianca finds people from her floor, and we end up in the front room dancing, and it turns out Bianca can actually dance, which she has been hiding from us, while Kenzie can’t and doesn’t care.
I dance until my hair sticks to my neck.
I drink one drink and then make myself a weaker one.
Somebody spills something, and there’s a big cheer.
My lab partner’s friend shows me a picture of his dog, and I look at it for four minutes and tell him it’s the best dog I’ve ever seen, and I mean it.
Then Bianca grabs my arm and says, “Oh, no,” in a delighted way, and I follow her eyes. Hockey guys in the kitchen doorway, six or seven of them, taking up the whole frame the way they do, with Koda in the middle laughing at something with his hood down.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Paige says.
And behind Koda, half turned away, holding a cup he isn’t drinking out of, is Nash.
I smile before I do anything else. I feel my own face do it, and I’m already moving to go over, because that’s what happens when I see him now.
He sees me and lifts his chin from across the room.
Then he turns back to Rafe and says something, and Rafe says something back, and they keep talking.
I stand in the middle of the party with my drink in my hand.
What the fuck was that?
Then I stop myself. He’s with his team. They just played a game, they won, and they’ve been at a thing with everybody’s parents all night, and his dad’s in town.
And he’s not my boyfriend.
We’re at a party. I came with my friends, and he came with his, and this is exactly how it’s supposed to work.
“What the fuck are they doing here?” Paige says, and Kenzie looks like she’s afraid to speak. “Fuck this,” Paige says. “Let’s dance.”
So we dance, and somewhere in there, the hockey guys move from the doorway into the kitchen, and later into the back hall by the stairs, and at some point, somebody props the back door open, and I know he’s outside without checking.
Then he’s back in. I can hear his voice behind me over the music, and I don’t turn around, but I know exactly where he is.
“He’s coming over,” Kenzie says quickly to Paige.
“No.” Paige turns around and physically puts her entire back to him. “No. Nope.”
“Paige—”
“I said no.”
Koda is about eight feet away, and he stops. You can see him get it. His face does a whole thing, and then he backs away like a guy backing away from a fence with a dog behind it.
Paige turns back around. “Where’d he go?”
“He left.”
“He left?”
“He heard you say no,” Kenzie says.
“Fucking bastard.”
I look at Kenzie and don’t ask.
For the next forty-five minutes, Paige narrates everything.
Koda is in the kitchen. Koda is talking to people.
Koda is laughing. Koda is playing a game at the kitchen table with a ping-pong ball, and a girl is standing near that table, not with him, in no way with him, just a girl who exists in the same kitchen, and Paige watches him like a hawk.
“He’s having a jolly good time, isn’t he?”
“Good for him,” Kenzie says.
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yours. Obviously. I’m just saying you told him not to come over.”
“I didn’t tell him to go stand over there and have fun.”
I laugh. “You’re being insane.”
“I’m so much worse than insane, Kylie,” Paige says, and drinks the rest of my drink, and goes to the bathroom with Bianca.
Kenzie leans over. “She waited outside his building for like an hour on Thursday. That’s all I know. That’s all I’m saying.” Then Paige is back, and she’s completely fine. She’s having a great time, she doesn’t care at all, and every ten seconds, her eyes go to the kitchen door.
I last until one-thirty. Nash is in the back hall by the stairs with Rafe and two guys I don’t know, leaning on the wall with one foot up on the baseboard, and he watches me the whole way over.
“Are you going to say hi to me?” I ask.
Nash glances at me. “I did.”
“You nodded at me.” I almost laugh. “That’s not saying hi.”
“It worked. You saw it.”
One of the guys snorts into his cup.
“Nobody asked you,” Nash says, and the three of them drift away, and he’s staring at me.