Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Creed
Then . . .
I’m walking past the dry cleaner on Columbus that closes at seven and the deli that never closes. There’s a small church that always has its lights on, the one with red glass candles near the side entrance and a door people touch before they walk away.
Yet all I can think of is her text.
Verdict: I have a thing for that.
Livia Sabine Crane has gone three seconds, before considering yes, on a man in a suit drinking an old-fashioned at a hockey bar, and I’m about to meet him.
I should be amused.
I am amused.
That is not the whole of it.
Jealousy would be easier to understand. Jealousy would mean I want him gone. I don’t. That is the part I don’t know what to do with. I want to see what she sees. I want to know whether this man in the suit can hold her attention without trying to own it.
Maybe worse, I want to know if he can hold mine too.
I push open the door of the Brewers Table.
The bar is loud. Warm air, beer, fried food, wet wool, someone’s cologne losing badly to the room.
James sees me first and raises his chin in greeting.
Two of my teammates are at a high-top by the window—Marco, hair still damp from the shower at MSG, and Reeves, a kid in his first weeks in the league who is still figuring out which postgame customs apply to him and which ones will get him chirped for the rest of the season.
They wave.
I wave back.
I don’t go over.
Not now.
I spot them at the bar.
Livia and the new guy.
Liv is on the stool she always takes—three from the end, with her back to a sight line that doesn’t include the TV but does include the door, which is how she sits so she can see me come in.
She’s wearing my away jersey.
She wore the home jersey two nights ago. She has, for reasons she hasn’t explained, decided that wearing my jersey at the Brewers Table during games is a new tradition.
Probably it’s a joke, because she doesn’t like hockey.
Probably.
The jersey is too big on her. The sleeves cover half her hands, and the name across her back does something to me I'm not going to examine in a bar with a rookie watching me from twenty feet away.
Next to her is the man who has to be Halston Saint Claire.
He is in a suit. Charcoal. Slim cut. Open at the collar—no tie—with the easy exhaustion of a man who has been in a suit since early morning and has stopped thinking about being in it.
He has dark hair, almost black under the bar lights, a little too long at the front.
Clean jaw. Beautiful mouth. Eyes that look like they notice exits before entrances.
He is handsome in a way that irritates me for half a second because it is not lazy beauty. It has structure. Discipline. Control. There is something contained in him, something locked behind the politeness, and it makes the room around him feel more attentive.
Fuck.
I understand why she texted me.
He is laughing.
Livia is laughing too.
They have leaned slightly toward each other on the stools. Not close enough to be obvious. Close enough that their bodies have started making small decisions before either of them has said them out loud.
Livia sees me first.
She lifts her chin.
She doesn’t wave. She does the small, almost-imperceptible smile that is her version of waving. Her version of I’m happy you’re here.
The smile lands in my chest before I can guard against it.
Then Halston notices her noticing me.
He turns.
That is the first time I see his face from the front.
He does the math in maybe two seconds.
The math is: this is the guy she’s been texting.
His face does something interesting when the math finishes.
It doesn’t close. It doesn’t sour. It settles.
Almost grateful. As if he has been wondering for the last hour whether the girl he’s been having the best conversation of his month with belongs to a story he won’t be allowed inside, and then he realizes the story might have a door.
That should not hit me the way it does.
It does.
I cross the bar.
Every step toward them feels louder than the room. The lights over the bottles are too bright. The floor is sticky near the service end. Someone shouts at the TV. The bar keeps moving around us, but the space between the three of us has started to draw itself in clean lines.
I get to Livia’s stool and put my hand on the back of it.
Livia’s eyes stay on mine, bright with trouble.
“Creed,” she says, voice mock-formal. “This is Halston. Halston, this is Creed.”
Halston puts out his hand.
“Halston Saint Claire.”
I take it.
His grip is good. Warm. Precise without trying to prove anything. He holds my eyes for one beat longer than the handshake requires, and there is a small current in that extra second.
Recognition, maybe.
Or curiosity with better manners.
“Creed Lafontaine.”
“I know.” He smiles. “I’ve been told.”
“Have you?”
He glances at the screen, then back at me. “We watched you play.” His smile shifts, a little drier. “Then she told me all about you within the last forty minutes. With considerable detail.”
I look at Livia.
“Considerable detail,” I say to her.
She looks into her glass and shrugs. “He asked.”
“Did he?”
“I’m fluent in all things Creed.”
All things Creed.
She says it lightly. Carelessly. Like she has not just placed something small and private on the bar between us and let Halston see it.
But Halston sees it.
His gaze moves from her to me, quick and careful, then back to her. He is not embarrassed by the sentence. He is interested in what it means.
I lean my hip against the bar. I look at Halston. I let the corner of my mouth do what it wants.
“So . . . are you sharing the hottie, Liv?” I say, probably as a joke, because I really can’t understand where we’re standing, then add, “or am I cutting in?”
The air changes.
Not loudly.
Just enough.
I see three things happen to Halston Saint Claire’s face in the same second.
The first is surprise—not at the hottie, which he is clearly used to receiving in various forms, but at the cutting in. That part gives him information about me, and I watch him take it in.
The second is amusement at the question itself. Because the question is a good question, delivered well, and Halston is, I’m beginning to see, a man who appreciates a good question.
The third is a slow, controlled look at me. Specific. Assessing without being cold. A man adjusting his estimate.
Then he laughs.
It’s a good laugh. Low. Brief. Rare enough to feel like he has given the room something he didn’t mean to give away.
Livia, sweetly, says, “We always share.”
Halston’s laugh fades.
He turns his head toward her.
Very quietly, like he is trying out a sentence to see if it belongs in his mouth, he says, “We?”
The word shouldn’t do anything.
It does.
Livia tilts her head at him. “Our roof. Books. Good taste in art.” She pauses and smiles at him, not coy, not careless. Just Livia, standing on the edge of a thing and pretending she isn’t looking down. “Friends, maybe? Or we could share more.”
For a second, I don’t know what to do with my hands.
That doesn't happen to me often.
I have known Livia for weeks now. We talk about the men we find attractive.
The women we think I might like, but who, in the end, don’t make it past theory.
We share a lot, more than I expected to share with anyone this fast. We talk around desire as if it is a table we both keep bumping into in the dark.
But this is different.
This is not hypothetical. This is not a joke sent across the roof with the bridge between us and consequences miles away. This is Livia wearing my jersey, sitting between me and a beautiful man in a charcoal suit, saying ‘we’ with her face open enough that I know she is scared too.
My mind doesn't blow apart.
Halston looks at her. Then at me. Then back at her.
“So you’d share me,” he says.
His voice is soft, but there is nothing weak in it.
“That a problem, Saint Claire?” Livia asks.
Then she shakes her head immediately. Because she hears herself; because underneath the bravery, she is still nineteen and careful with people when it matters.
“More like, would you be offended by it? I—we wouldn’t force it, of course.”
There she is.
Brave enough to open the door. Tender enough to panic, she opened it too hard.
Halston watches her for a second longer.
I watch him watch her.
Something in his face changes when he looks at Livia. It isn’t hunger, though there is that too. It’s attention. Total, quiet attention, like she has given him a sentence and he intends to understand every word before answering.
Then he looks at me.
His eyes meet mine.
The bar noise thins out.
For one second, I can see it clearly: he is not asking if I am a threat. He is asking if I am included.
I don't look away.
“No,” he says.
It is the simplest no I have heard a man deliver in my adult life.
No, not offended.
No, not a problem.
No, don’t close the door yet.
Livia’s hand moves on her glass. One small motion. Her fingers touch the condensation, then still.
I wonder if she knows she is holding her breath.
I wonder if I am.
James sets a beer down in front of me without asking what I want.
“On the house,” he says. “Good game.”
The normal interruption should break the moment.
It doesn’t.
It proves the world is still there, that men can keep pouring drinks while something irreversible begins three stools from the service well.
I take the beer.
“Thanks.” Then look at Halston. “We’re in the friends stage. As in getting slowly to know each other so . . . you’ll catch up fast.”
And then, for good measure, I wink at him.
I sit on the empty stool to Livia’s other side.
Livia between us. Halston on her right. Me on her left.
Three at a bar.
It should feel like nothing.
A seating arrangement. A joke. A postgame drink with a girl I can’t stop texting and a man I met two minutes ago.
It doesn't feel like nothing.
Livia’s knee bumps mine beneath the bar.
She freezes for half a second.
I don’t move away.
Halston notices.
He notices everything.
His mouth curves at the corner, barely there, and he turns his old-fashioned on the bar with two fingers.
“So,” Halston says, looking between us, “does this sharing arrangement come with rules?”
Livia opens her mouth.
Closes it.
For once, no immediate answer.
I take a drink of beer to give us all one second.
It tastes cold and ordinary.
Nothing else does.
“We’re new to the arrangement,” I say. “As I mentioned, we’re in the early stages.”
Halston’s eyes move to mine.
“Good,” he says.
Livia looks from him to me.
“Good?”
Halston lifts one shoulder, elegant even in a hockey bar, even with James shouting at someone about closing a tab. “Then no one has had time to ruin it with bad policy.”
Livia laughs.
I do too.
Not because it is that funny.
Because it lets the pressure release without disappearing.
Because his delivery is perfect.
Because Livia’s laugh is relieved.
Because I like him.
That thought arrives cleanly.
I like the way he looks at her. I like the way he looks at me. I like that he heard the shape of the offer and didn’t make it smaller, so he could be less afraid of it.
Fuck.
James walks by and points at Livia’s glass. “Another Sprite?”
“Yes, please,” she says, then looks at us with all the dignity of a woman wearing my jersey while sitting between two men she has just possibly invited into a shared emotional crisis. “Hydration is important.”
“Vital,” I say. “You should also add water.”
Halston nods. “Foundational.”
She narrows her eyes. “Don't gang up on me this early.”
“This early,” Halston repeats.
His gaze comes to me.
I hear the question under it.
Early implies later.
Livia hears it too.
Her face warms, but she doesn't look away from either of us. That might be the bravest thing I have seen all night.
I lift my beer.
“To hydration,” I say.
Livia rolls her eyes, but she lifts her Sprite.
Halston lifts his old-fashioned.
The glasses meet softly.
No one says what we are really toasting.
Not yet.
The three of us drink.
And the bar, somehow, becomes the first place I ever understand what a beginning feels like before it has a name.