Chapter 3
The Boys
The text came in on a Wednesday afternoon while Tessa was sitting in the library pretending to read a chapter she'd already reread twice without absorbing a word of it.
Beck: a bunch of us are going to the penalty box friday. you and nina should come. no pressure, just figured I'd ask instead of hoping you'd magically show up
She stared at it for a long moment, the old instinct rising up automatically — say no, it's safer to say no, wanting to go is exactly the kind of thing that gets you hurt — before she made herself type back something that didn't fully agree but didn't close the door either.
Tessa: I'll think about it
Beck: that's a very diplomatic non-answer. I respect the strategy
Tessa: I learned from the best. you're the one who never asks me to hang out directly, remember
Beck: touché. okay, direct ask then: I would like it very much if you came out with us friday. is that better
She showed Nina the text that night, half expecting her to talk her out of overthinking it, and instead got an enthusiastic yes before she'd even finished the sentence.
"We're going," Nina said, already pulling up her closet on her phone to plan an outfit. "This isn't a discussion, Tessa. This is a boy who texted you an actual direct invitation after weeks of doing the slow patient thing. You do not leave a boy like that on read."
"I didn't say I wanted to leave him on read."
"You were building toward a polite decline, I could see it happening in real time on your face. Not tonight. We're going."
Tessa spent the next two days in a low, persistent state of nervous anticipation she didn't fully know what to do with, checking her phone more than she wanted to admit, rereading his texts, trying to figure out what a night like this was actually supposed to mean.
She would spend years, later, trying to explain to people what it felt like to be asked for so gently.
Like he'd left the door open instead of knocking it down.
? ? ?
Jax cornered him in the locker room a few days after the bar invitation went out, waiting until the rest of the team had cleared out before he said anything, which was how Beck knew it was actually serious.
"You planned that whole night," Jax said, not a question. "The invite. The seat. You had Marcus save her a spot before she even walked in."
"So?"
"So you've never planned a single thing for a girl in the two years I've lived with you. You show up, you're charming, you leave when you feel like it. That's the whole operation. This is a different operation."
Beck laced his skates without answering right away, taking his time with it, the way he did when he wasn't ready to say something out loud yet.
"I don't know what's happening," he finally admitted, quiet, none of his usual ease in it.
"I keep telling myself to back off. I've told myself that probably ten times this week alone.
And then she'll say something completely ordinary, some dumb joke about hockey stats, and I just — I don't want to back off.
At all. It's honestly a little terrifying. "
"Terrifying how?"
"Terrifying because I've spent two years making sure nobody could ever get close enough to actually matter.
That was the whole point of the reputation, if I'm being honest with you for once instead of doing the bit.
It's not that I liked breaking hearts. I just didn't want anyone breaking mine, so I made sure nothing ever got serious enough to have the option.
" He looked up at Jax, something rawer in his expression than Jax had seen from him in years.
"She's not giving me the option to keep it casual.
She's not trying to, either, that's the thing.
She's just being herself, completely unguarded about some of it, and it's making me want things I told myself a long time ago I didn't want. "
"That's not a bad thing, man."
"It's terrifying is what it is. What if I'm not actually built for this?
I've spent my whole life with this quiet, low-grade fear that I'm not the kind of person people keep, permanently, all the way through, no matter how good things are.
I don't know where that fear comes from, exactly.
Maybe it's obvious where it comes from. I've spent so long being the guy who leaves first, before anyone gets the chance to prove that fear right, that I don't actually know if I know how to be the guy who stays and trusts it'll hold. "
Jax sat down on the bench beside him, uncharacteristically serious.
"You know what tells me you're not actually going to mess this up?
You're sitting here worried about it. Guys who are actually going to sabotage a good thing don't lie awake agonizing over the possibility first. That worry is the whole tell, Beck.
" Beck didn't answer, but something in his shoulders loosened slightly, some of the tension bleeding out of them.
"For what it's worth," Jax added, standing to head out, "I like this version of you. The scared one. It's a lot more human than the one who used to leave parties with a different girl every two weeks and act like it didn't cost him anything."
"It did cost me something. I just didn't let myself notice for a long time."
"Yeah. I know." Jax clapped him on the shoulder on his way out. "Don't blow it being scared of your own dad's mistakes instead of actually making your own. Those are different things too."
Beck sat alone in the locker room a long while after that, turning the conversation over, and thought, for the first time in longer than he could remember, that maybe the reputation he'd built so carefully wasn't actually protecting him from anything.
Maybe it had just been keeping him from this — whatever this was, whatever it was turning into, terrifying and unfamiliar and, if he let himself admit it, the best thing that had happened to him in years.
? ? ?
Tessa's first real exposure to Beck's friend group happened that Friday, when Nina dragged her to a downtown bar called The Penalty Box that half the Kingston hockey team had claimed as unofficial headquarters.
"I did not agree to this," Tessa hissed, as Nina steered her through the door.
"You very much agreed to this."
Beck spotted them within ninety seconds, already grinning, crossing the room with the easy confidence of someone who never had to wonder if he'd be welcome anywhere.
"You came," he said, delighted.
"Nina made a very compelling case."
"I'll take it. Come meet everyone."
Everyone turned out to be a loud table of six guys, and Tessa braced herself for being examined by strangers who already knew exactly who she was to Beck.
"So you're Backpack Girl," said Jax, Beck's roommate, sliding over to make room. "Legendary. He talked about you for three straight days before he even got your number."
"I did not talk about her for three days."
"You did. You made me watch her Instagram story like tape review."
Tessa laughed before she could stop herself, surprised by the sound of her own laugh, easy and unguarded.
The guys weren't performing for her. They ribbed Beck relentlessly, pulled Nina into an argument about hot dogs within minutes, made room at the table without any production, the specific ease of people who'd already decided she belonged there.
"Okay, but your power play is broken," Tessa said, cutting into a lull in the conversation, apropos of nothing, and the whole table turned to stare at her.
"You guys collapse the zone too early. I watched the tape from Thursday.
You had two full seconds where nobody was covering the point and it cost you the whole possession. "
Silence for a beat. Then Jax leaned forward, delighted.
"Wait. Did you just critique our power play. Unprompted. At a bar."
"I watch the games. I read the stats. It's genuinely broken, I'm not being dramatic about it."
"Beck." Jax turned to him, grinning ear to ear. "Where did you find this one. I need her contact info independent of you. I want her opinion on our penalty kill too."
"She's not consulting for the team, Jax."
"She should be. She's better than our actual assistant coach." Jax pointed a fry at her, impressed. "I like her. She's staying. Officially. Team vote, unanimous, effective immediately."
Beck didn't leave her side all night, one hand resting at the small of her back whenever they stood, light and constant.
"See," he said quietly, his mouth close enough to her ear that his breath stirred her hair, "this is my whole life. Loud, ridiculous, zero filter. Figured you should know what you're getting into."
She shivered, and it had nothing to do with the temperature of the bar.
"I don't know what I'm getting into," she admitted. "I don't even know what this is yet."
"We don't have to know yet," he murmured. "I'm just glad you're here."
Nina, three drinks in by then, had abandoned the table entirely in favor of the small dance floor near the jukebox, spinning with two of Beck's teammates in a way that was more enthusiasm than actual coordination, laughing loud enough to carry over the music.
"I think I need to get her home," Tessa said, around eleven thirty, watching Nina nearly topple off a barstool she'd apparently decided to dance on top of. "She's had a lot, and I don't love the idea of her navigating stairs in this state."
"I'll come with you," Beck said immediately, already reaching for his jacket. "Make sure you both get back okay."
"You don't have to do that. It's a five-minute walk, we'll be fine."
"I know I don't have to. I want to."
"Beck." She put a hand on his arm, gentle. "I've got her. I promise. Stay, have fun with your friends. I'll text you when we're back safe."
He looked like he wanted to argue, some protective instinct clearly warring with respecting what she'd actually asked for, and in the end he let the second thing win, though not without visible reluctance.
"Text me the second you're inside," he said. "I mean it. Otherwise I'm going to sit here worrying instead of enjoying literally anything about the rest of this night."
He walked her to the door anyway, just the two of them for one suspended minute while Nina swayed happily against the doorframe, and something in the air between them went suddenly, impossibly quiet, the noise of the bar falling away behind them.
He reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, slow, deliberate, his fingers grazing the shell of her ear, her jaw, lingering there a half second longer than the gesture required.
She felt her whole body go still, breath caught somewhere behind her ribs, and for one dizzy, suspended moment she was certain he was going to kiss her, could feel the space between them closing by degrees, his eyes dropping to her mouth and staying there.
He didn't. He stopped himself an inch away, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his breath, and pressed his forehead to hers instead, just briefly, both of them breathing like they'd run somewhere.
"Not tonight," he said, quiet, almost to himself. "Not like this. When it happens, I want you sure. Not three drinks deep at eleven at night."
"That's annoyingly considerate of you."
"I contain multitudes," he said, and the words came out rougher than he probably meant them to, and he stepped back before either of them could change their minds, jaw tight, hands shoved into his pockets like he didn't trust them not to reach for her again.
She thought about that inch of space the entire walk home, her whole body still humming with it, Nina's laughter barely registering over the sound of her own pulse.
She got Nina back to the dorm in one piece, mostly upright, giggling the entire walk about something involving Jax's dance moves, and had barely gotten her settled into bed with a glass of water and a trash can positioned nearby on principle when her phone rang.
"We're home," she said, answering on the second ring, smiling before she'd even said hello.
"I know, you texted, I saw it," Beck said, and she could hear the noise of the bar still going behind him. "I just wanted to actually hear your voice and make sure. Texts lie sometimes. Voices don't, as much."
"We're completely fine. Nina's already asleep, actually, mid-sentence, very impressive."
"Good." A pause, warmer. "I had a really good night, by the way. In case that wasn't obvious from the hand-on-your-back situation I apparently couldn't stop doing."
"I noticed," she said, smiling into the phone, alone in the dark of her dorm room. "I liked it. In case that wasn't obvious from the fact that I didn't ask you to stop."
"Noted," he said, something warm and pleased in his voice. "Goodnight, Tessa."
"Goodnight, Beck."
She lay awake a long while after hanging up, and thought that whatever this was building toward, she wasn't going to be able to stop it even if some old, frightened part of her still wanted to try.
"He's got a good group," Nina mumbled sleepily from her bed, apparently not quite as unconscious as she'd seemed. "That matters more than people think. You can tell a lot about a guy from who he chooses to surround himself with, what kind of energy he lets close."
"Go to sleep, Nina."
"Noted for the record," Nina said, already snoring by the end of the sentence.