Chapter 8
The First Real Date
She told Beck the rest of it on a quiet night in March, the parts she'd never fully explained to anyone outside her own family — what had actually happened in the two weeks after the funeral, before the silence set in for good.
"There was a meeting," she said. "At Grandma's house. About Poppi's will, the estate, all of it. My aunt accused my mother of stealing cash out of the house. Said it straight to her face, two weeks after we buried him."
"That's insane."
"It got worse. My aunt told my mother she wasn't Poppi's favorite because she deserved it — she said it because she was the worst one, and he'd always been embarrassed by her. Said it in front of Grandma, in front of the whole family, like it was something she'd been saving up for years."
Beck went quiet, waiting.
"My mom finally just — snapped. Told them to leave her out of everything, take it out of her share, sue her if they wanted. Said we were moving and they'd never see or hear from us again. And she meant it. She's kept that promise for two years now."
"What happened to the cousins?"
"That was the part that actually broke me.
" Tessa's voice caught. "My aunts pulled them out of the house that same day.
Told them they weren't allowed to talk to us anymore, ever.
There's a cousin, Leo, he was eight — the baby of the whole family, used to call me Tessa-bear because he couldn't say my name right when he was little.
He was screaming, hanging onto me, and his mom just — pried him off and told him to stop crying, that he didn't even know what he was crying about. "
"He did know, though. Kids always know."
"He knew exactly what he was losing. He just didn't have the words for it yet.
" She wiped her eyes. "I overheard my mom and grandma fight about it too, weeks later.
My mom finally told her the truth — that she'd spent her whole life being the family's shock absorber, standing in the middle of everyone else's fighting, and that without Poppi there to hold it together, she was done. Completely done."
"That's not a small thing to admit to your own mother."
"No. It wasn't." Tessa leaned into him. "I don't think any of it's ever going to heal, not really. I've made peace with that, mostly. But I don't think I'd ever said the whole thing out loud, start to finish, to anyone before tonight."
"Thank you for trusting me with it."
"Thank you for actually wanting to hear the ugly parts instead of just the parts that make me sound resilient." She closed her eyes, letting the weight of it finally settle instead of bracing against it. "That's rarer than you'd think."
? ? ?
He asked her properly a few days later, no group chat involved, no vague plans that could dissolve into a bar full of teammates — just a text that said can I take you to dinner Friday.
an actual date. just us and a reservation, apparently made a full week in advance, at the one real Italian restaurant in town that wasn't a chain.
He showed up at her dorm in a button-down that still had the fold creases from the package, visibly nervous in a way she'd never seen from him before, and it undid her a little, watching him fidget with his collar in her doorway like this mattered more to him than the arena crowds he skated in front of every weekend.
"You look really beautiful," he said, and then immediately looked like he wanted to say something smoother, gave up, and just repeated it. "Really beautiful, Tessa."
Dinner was slow and unhurried, candlelight and real tablecloths, the kind of restaurant where the bread came with good olive oil instead of butter packets, and somewhere between the appetizer and the pasta, the conversation drifted somewhere neither of them had gone before.
"Tell me about your family," she said. "The real version, not the highlight reel."
He was quiet for a moment, turning his water glass slowly on the tablecloth.
"It's small. Smaller than yours, even with everything that's happened to yours this year.
It's just my parents and me, really. No cousins.
Not one. My mom's an only child, my dad's the same, so there was never any extended family stuff growing up — no big Sunday dinners, no eleven cousins running around a backyard.
I used to be jealous of kids who complained about having too many cousins to keep straight.
I would have taken that problem in a heartbeat. "
"No siblings either?"
"No siblings either. Just me." He smiled, a little rueful.
"Honestly, the guys are the closest thing I've got to what you have.
Jax, the team, all of it. That's not a metaphor, by the way.
That's an actual, literal fact — those idiots are my family.
When my parents split, and things got quiet at both houses in different ways, the team was the one place that stayed loud and constant.
I think that's part of why I love it so much, more than just the hockey itself.
It's the only family I ever got to choose. "
"I'm sorry you didn't get cousins." She reached across the table for his hand. "For what it's worth, I think you'd have been a really good one. You already mother-hen Jax like it's a full-time job."
"I would have been an incredible cousin.
Organized, reliable, excellent at trivia.
" He squeezed her hand. "I used to make up cousins, actually, when I was really little.
Told my kindergarten teacher I had six of them.
She believed me for almost a whole year before my mom had to correct the record at a parent-teacher conference. "
She laughed so hard she nearly knocked over her water glass, and he laughed too, delighted at having made her laugh that hard, and something about the whole evening — the candlelight, the careful honesty, a boy admitting he'd invented cousins out of loneliness at five years old — settled somewhere deep and permanent in her chest. He walked her back to her dorm afterward, taking the long way around without either of them mentioning it, and stopped at her door with both hands coming up to frame her face, the same way they had that very first night outside the party.
"Thank you for tonight," he said, quiet. "For real ones, not the group chat kind. I don't think I've ever wanted to do this — the actual, old-fashioned, pick-you-up-in-a-real-shirt kind of date — with anyone before you."
"Thank you for asking properly," she said, and kissed him before he could say anything else, slow and soft on her own doorstep, no audience, no bonfire, no eleven thousand strangers, just the two of them and a night that had felt, for the first time, entirely uncomplicated.
She floated back into her room afterward, and Nina, waiting up with a bowl of popcorn and zero shame about it, took one look at her face and shrieked.
"Tell me everything. Every single detail. Don't skip the boring parts, I want the boring parts too."
Tessa collapsed onto her bed, still smiling so hard her face ached, and told her everything — the button-down with the fold creases, the invented childhood cousins, the walk home, the doorstep kiss — and Nina listened to all of it with the rapt, delighted attention of someone getting to watch her best friend fall in love in real time, for what felt like the first time either of them could remember happening safely.
? ? ?
It happened on a quiet night in late January, the two of them tangled together in his bed long after the rest of the conversation had gone still, and Tessa found herself thinking about everything he'd told her about the adoption, about the folder his parents kept, about the specific, quiet ache of not knowing where he came from.
"Can I ask you something," she said, tracing a slow line along his chest, "and you can tell me if it's too much."
"Ask me anything."
"Do you ever feel like you're not sure you're allowed to take up space? Like belonging is something you have to keep earning instead of something you're just given, automatically, the way other people seem to get it?"
He went quiet for a long moment, and when he answered, his voice had dropped into something rawer than she'd ever heard from him.
"Every single day," he admitted. "I've never said that out loud to anyone before, not even my parents, not even Jax.
But yeah. Every day, some part of me is running a quiet calculation about whether I've done enough, been enough, to justify the space I'm taking up in someone's life.
It's exhausting, if I'm honest. I don't know how to turn it off. "
"I don't think you have to turn it off," she said, gentle.
"I think you just have to let people prove it wrong enough times that it starts to quiet down on its own.
That's what happened for me, a little, with you.
I spent a year assuming I had to earn every single scrap of love I got.
You just kept showing up anyway, no test, no scoreboard, until some of that old certainty finally started to crack. "
He pulled her closer, pressing his face into her hair, and when he spoke again his voice had gone thick with something he wasn't bothering to hide.
"I love you in a way that scares me a little," he said.
"Not because of you. Because I've never let myself feel this unguarded with anyone, and some old part of me keeps waiting for the moment it becomes too much, the moment I finally do something that makes you realize I'm not actually worth keeping. "
"I'm not going anywhere," she said, and meant it completely, framing his face in both her hands the way he always did with her.
"You don't have to earn this, Beck. Not with me.
I chose you already, and I'm choosing you again right now, and I'll keep choosing you tomorrow and the day after that, with no test attached, no scoreboard, no conditions.
That's what this is. That's the whole thing. "
What followed was slower and more unguarded than anything they'd shared before, both of them stripped down to something entirely honest, no performance left in either of them, just two people who had each spent years believing they had to earn the right to be loved completely, finally letting themselves be loved without condition instead.
He held her face the whole time like something precious, murmuring her name like a question he already knew the answer to, and when they finally slowed, tangled together and breathless, he pressed his forehead to hers and just breathed her in for a long moment before speaking.
"Thank you," he said, quiet, "for being the first person who ever made not knowing where I came from feel a little less like a wound and a little more like just a fact about my life. You didn't fix it. I don't think it's fixable. But you made it lighter to carry."
"That's what this is supposed to be," she said, tracing slow circles against his chest, both of them drifting toward sleep. "Not fixing each other. Just making the heavy things lighter to carry, together, for as long as we get to."
He fell asleep first, something she'd never once seen him do, always the one keeping watch, and Tessa lay awake a while longer just watching him breathe, thinking that this — this specific, unguarded, entirely mutual kind of loving — was worth every single wall it had taken both of them a lifetime to build and a single, unlikely year to finally bring down.
She had no idea how soon those walls would be tested by something neither of them saw coming.