Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Creed
Then . . .
Ten to nine, we call Liv—when it’s almost midnight in Connecticut.
Halston sets the phone against the champagne bucket so she can see both of us. The fire is low behind us. The suite is warm. Outside, Coal Harbour is black glass and scattered boat lights, wet snow dissolving against the windows before it can land.
My mouth still knows the shape of Hal’s.
That is not helpful.
Halston sits beside me on the couch, close enough that our shoulders nearly touch. The screen rings.
Once.
Twice.
Then Liv picks up, and finally her beautiful face appears.
She’s in her childhood bedroom in Greenwich, wearing green flannel pajamas.
Behind her, the room is teal and gray. There are framed photos on one wall, a shelf crowded with books and old ribbons, a white desk with a lamp shaped like a moon, and, absurdly, a small elliptical machine in the corner beside a set of hand weights, that makes the whole thing strange and crowded.
Then she smiles.
“You called,” she says, ecstatic.
Like she has been pretending not to wait for the phone and has failed at the exact second we appear.
“Happy almost New Year,” Halston says.
“I can’t believe you’re together and I’m not.” She pouts, then immediately looks embarrassed by the pout, which makes it worse. “It’s just . . . the new year, special and all that. What if I don’t spend the year with you because—”
“That’s a superstition,” Halston says, cutting in before she can build a full structure out of anxiety. “Don’t do that.”
Liv’s mouth closes.
Halston leans closer to the screen.
“We’ll be together all year,” he says. “In fact, I’m picking you up from the apartment on the second, and we’re heading to my place for at least a month.”
Liv crinkles her nose.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I don’t know if moving temporarily is a good idea.”
Halston doesn't react right away.
That is how I know he reacts.
His fingers shift against his knee, once, then stop.
“I have three bedrooms,” he says. “You’ll be spoiled, baby. Say yes.”
“I’m still thinking about it.”
“His roof is better than ours,” I remind her. “It has more than one chair.”
She smiles despite herself. “We’re not switching ‘for better.’”
“We’re switching ‘for practical,’” Halston says.
Liv gives him a look. “You say practical when you mean emotionally loaded but organized.”
“That is slander.”
“That is observation.”
His mouth almost curves. “If you don’t like it, I’ll move to your place and sleep on the couch.”
Liv goes still in the small, unmistakable way she does when someone offers more than she expected.
“You’d do that for us?” she asks.
Her voice is quieter now.
There it is.
The thing under the joke. Under the logistics. Under the roofs, rooms, schedules, and food orders. She doesn't need a floor plan. She needs to know whether this is a place she can leave and still be wanted. Whether we are asking her to come closer or quietly asking her to give something up.
Halston smiles, but it isn’t the polished one. It is smaller. More dangerous because it is true.
“Baby,” he says, “I’d do anything for you. Anything.”
The room loses air.
Not all of it.
Just enough that I feel the words land in my ribs.
Liv’s eyes water, but she refuses to let anything fall. That is very Liv. She will verbally eviscerate a man over punctuation, but tenderness has to catch her by surprise before she lets it show.
“Me too,” I say.
Her gaze moves to me.
I hold it.
“I’d do anything for you too,” I add.
Then Liv swallows and says, “I’d probably move to the other side of the world for you.”
Her voice tries for light.
It doesn't quite get there.
I point at the screen. “You heard that, babe. If they trade me to Finland, she’s coming with us.”
“Would they?” she asks, instantly suspicious. “I thought the teams were just Canada and the US.”
“They are,” I say. “But sometimes, if you can’t be in the league, you can find work in Europe. Fitz, my agent, told me once.”
Liv frowns like she has just discovered a new category of worry and is annoyed it exists.
Halston lifts one hand.
“We’ll cross that bridge if we need to,” he says.
He says it calmly, but his eyes cut to mine for half a second.
He heard it too. The shift. The way the joke almost became a plan. The way all three of us would move before admitting what moving would mean.
Liv looks between us through the screen.
Then, in the way only she can, she lifts her chin and changes the law.
“It’s midnight,” she says. “I am, technically, the first person you both are kissing in the New Year, by phone.”
Halston tilts his head. “Is that the rule?”
“I just made it the rule.”
“Convenient.”
“Efficient,” she corrects. “I learned from you. I told you. I’m a quick study.”
I laugh.
Halston’s mouth curves, and the sight of it beside me, directed at her, after his mouth has been on mine less than an hour ago, does something to me I don't have the language for yet.
It doesn't split the feeling.
It gathers it.
Liv lifts the screen toward her face and kisses the camera. The screen briefly fills with her mouth and a small, soft sound. Then she pulls back, laughing at herself.
My body reacts like she kissed me.
Which is ridiculous.
Which is true.
“Both of you,” she says. “On the record.”
“On the record,” I say.
“On the record,” Halston says.
She looks at us. Both of us. The phone is wide enough that she can see Halston in his sweater on the left and me in my jacket on the right, with a half-inch of fireplace between us in the background.
Her smile softens.
The humor leaves her face first.
Then the nerves.
What remains is the girl from the roof, the woman at the bar, the person who has somehow become the room both of us keep walking toward.
“I wish I was there,” she says.
The sentence is simple.
It hurts.
I lean forward. “You are.”
She rolls her eyes, but there is no force in it. “That is an athlete’s answer.”
“It’s as honest as it can get.”
Halston’s shoulder brushes mine.
This time, neither of us moves away.
Liv sees it.
Of course, she sees it.
Her gaze drops to that small contact, then returns to our faces. A microsecond. A quiet intake. The first understanding is that the night has not only changed because of her absence, but because something between us has moved while she was not in the room.
Her mouth trembles once, then steadies into something brave. Not a smile. Not quite.
“Did you kiss him?” she asks.
The question is soft, but not frightened.
Halston’s body goes very quiet beside mine.
I look at him.
He looks at me.
There are ways to answer that. There are ways to make it less than it was. There are ways to pretend this is too new to say out loud, that naming it might put pressure on something still learning how to breathe.
None of those ways belong to us.
“Yes,” I say.
“Oh,” she says, and the word comes out with a smile tucked inside it. “Good.”
Halston leans toward the phone, voice low. “Not instead of you.”
“I know,” she whispers. “Actually, I’m glad that finally happened. I was beginning to think that it may not be at all, which worried me.”
I lift our joined hands and press my mouth to his knuckles, where Liv can see. “We were waiting for the right time.”
“You always do,” she states.
Halston’s thumb moves once against mine. “Not everyone is impulsive, baby.”
“I seize the day,” she argues.
“You interrogate the day,” I say. “Then you reorganize it.”
“That is not the point.”
“It is frequently the point,” Halston says.
Liv narrows her eyes at both of us through the screen. “I am being emotionally supportive, and you are both attacking my process.”
“You asked whether we kissed,” I remind her.
“Because I support kissing,” she says, then lifts her chin. “I am very progressive.”
Halston’s mouth curves. “A visionary.”
“Exactly.”
The laughter that moves through me is quiet, but it loosens something I didn’t know I was holding.
Liv looks at our hands again, at Halston’s fingers against mine, at my mouth still close to his knuckles.
Her smile softens.
“I’m happy,” she says. “Not in a magnanimous way, before either of you says something irritating. I mean it. I’m happy.”
The room stills in a different way.
Not tense.
Full.
Halston’s hand tightens around mine.
“For us?” he asks.
Liv’s eyes move from him to me.
“For us,” she says. “All three. This means that we’ll be happy—and together.”
“She means forever,” I warned him.
“Probably always,” Halston says, and the smile that follows is small, dangerous too composed for what he has just admitted. “I can live with that. We’ll just have to wait and see if we can stand each other when we move in together.”
“Temporary,” Liv says immediately.
“It could be permanent,” Halston argues.
“I live blocks away from school,” she says, glaring at the screen. “You’re not taking that away from me easily.”
Halston’s smile widens by a fraction. “We’ll cross that bridge—”
“We’re not,” she interrupts. “You don’t have anything that will convince me.”
“I recall you liking my mouth, Liv,” he offers.
Liv’s eyes go wide for half a second before she gets control of her face. “That is unfair evidence.”
“He has a good mouth,” I add, because I have just kissed it and I'm not interested in pretending otherwise.
Halston turns his head toward me.
Slowly.
The look he gives me is calm enough to be legal and hot enough to be a crime.
“Careful, Lafontaine.”
“Not feeling careful.”
“No,” he says, gaze dropping to my mouth before returning to mine. “I noticed. And I could show you what my mouth can do to your body.”
On the screen, Liv makes a sound that is half laugh, half protest. “I am right here.”
“We know,” Halston says. “I don’t mind you seeing—I’d actually enjoy giving you a show.”
The way he says it doesn't cool anything down.
It makes it worse.
Liv’s cheeks flush. “You can't weaponize eye contact through a phone call.”
“I absolutely can,” Halston says.
“He can,” I tell her. “It’s unsettling.”
“It’s effective,” Halston corrects.
Liv points at the screen. “Both of you are getting smug.”
“Baby,” I say, “we’re barely getting started.”
Her lips part.
Halston sees it.
I see it.
For one second, the distance between Vancouver and Greenwich feels like a technicality nobody at the phone company has been brave enough to solve.
Halston’s thumb moves against mine, slow enough that I know he means for her to notice.
She does.
Her gaze drops to our joined hands, then lifts again.
“And neither one of you,” Halston says, voice lower now, cleaner, “have experienced what my mouth can do when I stop being polite.”
I forgot to blink.
The fire moves behind us with a quiet crackle, and the suite feels suddenly too warm, too private, too far from her.
“Halston,” Liv says.
Not a warning.
Not really.
More like she has found the edge of something and wants him to know she is looking down.
“Yes, baby?”
“You are becoming a problem.”
His mouth curves.
“I was hoping for a solution.”
I laugh, low and rough, because fuck, he is good.
Liv presses her fingers to her lips, trying to hide her smile and failing. “This is exactly why I can’t move in with you permanently.”
“Because I’m persuasive?” Halston asks.
“Because you’re impossible.”
“Those are often related.”
I lift our joined hands and kiss his knuckles again, slower this time, because I want to see what it does to both of them.
Halston’s breath catches.
Liv goes quiet.
There.
That little silence.
Want.
Shared, immediate, stunned by itself.
“Temporary,” she says again, but her voice has lost the argument.
Halston looks at her through the screen, his fingers tightening around mine.
“For now,” he says.
I look at Liv.
Then at him.
Then back to her.
“For now,” I agree.
Liv exhales, soft and shaky, then lifts her chin like she can put dignity back on by force. “I hate both of you.”
“No, you don’t,” Halston says.
“No,” she admits, eyes warm on the screen. “I really don’t.”
Halston laughs softly, but his eyes stay on the screen, on her face, on the place where her mouth has gone quiet.
For a second, the three of us only look at one another, and the silence feels less like distance than a promise we are not ready to say out loud.
Liv opens her mouth, maybe to make another joke, maybe to say something that would ruin us in the best possible way.
But she doesn’t get the chance.
A knock lands on her bedroom door.
Liv freezes.
Halston’s hand tightens around mine.
“Livia?” a woman calls from the other side.
Liv looks at us through the screen, all the color draining from her face.
Then she whispers, “That’s my mother. I have to go, but we’ll talk about your mouth the next time we’re together.”
“It’s a promise,” Hal winks, and I hope that I get to experience his tongue before I have to travel to California for my next game.