25. Ryan #3
“I did not make eyes—” I stopped myself because I probably was making eyes at her. I couldn’t keep my fucking eyes off her when she was around.
I turned to Cole.
Cole shrugged with zero remorse. “It was extremely funny.”
“Okay but here’s the thing.” Danny, one of the younger wingers, leaned forward with barely contained energy. “Callahan’s sister? That’s—I mean—we all know the rule, right? That’s the rule.”
“Which rule,” I said flatly. I knew which fucking rule. Stupid fucking sister rule.
“The rule. You don’t—” Danny made a wide arm gesture that was apparently meant to encompass the entire situation. “It’s like a founding principle.”
“You’re twenty-one.”
“The rule is ageless.”
“You don’t even have a sister.”
“Doesn’t matter. The rule is—”
“The rule,” Theo said, finally turning around and interrupting, his arms crossed, “exists because most people cannot handle it. Not because it’s impossible.
” He looked at me steadily. “The question is whether you handled it.” He looked at me with little in his expression, more like he was waiting for confirmation of what he already knew. What everyone in the locker room knew.
“I did not handle it well,” I said.
“Obviously,” Theo said. “We played like shit today.”
“Thank you, Theo.”
“I’m not criticizing. I’m observing.”
“There’s a difference?” Cole asked.
“Yes. One is helpful.”
“So,” Cole said, turning back to me, “when you say seeing each other since October—you mean really seeing each other.”
“Yes.”
“Like—”
“Cole.”
“I’m just clarifying the scope of the situation.”
“The scope,” I said, “is that it’s real. It’s been real since the beginning of the season. Griffin found out Friday night and it went badly and now we’re here.” I gestured at the locker room, the morning, the general catastrophe of the past week. “That’s the scope.”
Cole was quiet for a moment. “Does she know how real it is?”
“She knows.” I fixed my eyes on my skates. “She knows everything except—” I stopped.
“Except what,” Danny said.
“Except the part I haven’t said yet.” I looked up. “And I’m not saying it here to you before I say it to her.”
“Saying what?” Danny pressed.
Cole looked at him with a pointed stare. “Danny.”
“I’m just asking—”
“He’s not going to tell you. Read the room.”
“I’m reading the room, it seems like—”
“Danny.” This was Eli. Loudly and with finality, from across the room. Danny stopped talking immediately.
Eli looked at me. “She knows you’re going to fix it?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
Kasperi, twenty-two, Finnish, and apparently constitutionally incapable of reading a room, spoke up from three stalls down. “So we played like garbage because the captain and the goalie are in a fight about his sister?”
The locker room held its breath.
I turned to face him with the quiet, complete stillness I used when something needed to land and needed to stick.
“She’s not just his sister,” I said.
Kasperi went back to his gear with considerable focus.
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Cole said, “Okay,” quietly, the performance fully gone. “So it’s like that.”
“It’s like that.”
Cole nodded slowly. “I called it in October, for the record.”
“You called it in September,” Eli said with a gruff chuckle.
“I did call it in September,” Cole agreed.
“I just didn’t say anything because it wasn’t my business.
” He paused. “It’s a little bit my business now since I had to stand on that ice while Calloway told us all to get our heads out of our asses.
” He said it without rancor. Just fact, the way we talked to each other.
“Go fix it with Griffin tonight. And then—” He stopped. “What’s the plan with Maren?”
“Go tell her what I should have told her weeks ago.”
“Which is?” he asked like he didn’t know.
I looked at him.
“Right,” Cole said. “Still not saying it here.”
“Still not saying it here.”
“Fair enough.” Cole stood up and clapped me once on the shoulder, Cole looked at his skates, then back at me. “The order matters. Griffin first, then her.”
“I know the order.” These guys had become my friends, even though I’d lied to them, and they seemed to care about me, about Maren.
“Do you? Because you’ve been sitting in your skates for fifteen minutes. And you’ve got a lot to do tonight.”
I reached down and finally started unlacing.
I pulled the second skate off and set it down.
I thought about Maren in her car last night. About the text she hadn’t responded to. How she chose to come back even when she was furious, because that was who she was. I had spent five months watching her be that person and it was past time to be the same one back.
I got up and grabbed my towel.
Behind me, Cole said something to Danny that made the younger player laugh, and then Theo said something in French to Eli, and the locker room came back to life.
The irreplaceable noise of people who had been through something together and were going to keep going through it.
I stood under the hot water and thought about what I was going to say to Griffin Callahan in less than a few hours.
I’d figure it out on the way over.
I always figured it out.