Chapter 16
Valentine's, Three Ways
Since none of them could afford an actual spring break trip, plane tickets and beach resorts firmly out of reach for a group of broke college students, Jax declared, with the full authority of someone who'd clearly been planning this for weeks without telling anyone, that the entire friend group was doing a "staycation" instead — one night at a rented lake house forty minutes from campus, all six hockey guys plus Tessa, Nina, and Toni crammed into a house meant, generously, for eight people.
"This is a fire hazard," Toni observed, watching three separate air mattresses get inflated simultaneously in the living room, extension cords running in every direction.
"This is a vibe," Jax corrected, already setting up a speaker system that seemed disproportionate to the size of the house.
It turned into one of the best nights of Tessa's entire freshman year, one she'd think back on for months afterward whenever she needed something warm to hold onto.
They grilled burgers on a rickety deck overlooking a half-frozen lake, the smoke curling up into the cold February air, and played a chaotic, wildly disputed game of charades that ended with two of the hockey players nearly in a real fight over whether Jax's interpretive dance had, in fact, been an accurate representation of "Titanic," a debate that raged on for a full twenty minutes with increasingly absurd evidence presented by both sides.
They stayed up until three in the morning around a fire pit someone had dragged out from the garage, Nina teaching everyone a card game from her grandmother that nobody fully understood the rules of but everyone insisted on playing four more times anyway, arguing about invented rules with total conviction.
Beck disappeared around midnight and came back holding two mugs of hot chocolate, settling beside her on the porch steps away from the noise of the fire, the cold air sharp and clean after the smoke.
"You good?" he asked, bumping his shoulder against hers, handing over one of the mugs.
"I'm so good." She meant it, fully, the words landing without any of the old reflexive bracing that used to follow a sentence like that, no automatic search for the catch hidden underneath.
"This is exactly what I needed. I forgot what it felt like to have this many people around who actually want me there, no auditioning required, no earning my seat twice. "
"They all adore you. You know that, right? Jax asked me last week if I was going to mess this up somehow, because apparently the group has decided you're 'too good for the group's collective reputation' and they need you to stick around specifically to balance the rest of us out, quote unquote."
She laughed, delighted, the sound carrying out over the dark lake. "That's the nicest thing anyone's ever threatened you with."
"Kingston hockey's version of a blessing, apparently.
" He wrapped an arm around her, pulling her against his side, both of them watching the fire crackle against the dark lake beyond it, the reflection of it wavering on the half-frozen water.
"I like this. All of it. The chaos, the noise, you fitting into it like you were always supposed to be here, like there was a specific gap shaped exactly like you that nobody noticed until you filled it. "
"Me too," she said, and meant that completely too, resting her head against his shoulder.
They fell asleep tangled together on a lumpy air mattress in a room with three other people snoring at various volumes, and Tessa thought, drifting off, that she couldn't remember the last time being surrounded by that much noise had felt like comfort instead of chaos, like safety instead of overwhelm.
It felt, she realized just before sleep took her fully, exactly like being home, in the truest sense of the word she'd relearned this year.
Home, she was starting to understand, wasn't a place.
It was a decision people kept making about you, over and over, whether you'd earned it that day or not.
? ? ?
Valentine's Day fell on a Wednesday, which meant it landed directly on top of their standing girls' night, and Tessa spent an anxious hour debating whether to cancel on Toni and Nina before Beck settled the question for her, entirely unprompted.
"You're not canceling girls' night for me," he said, when she brought it up, sounding almost offended on Toni and Nina's behalf, like the suggestion itself was a small betrayal of an important institution.
"Go. I've got practice until nine anyway, extra conditioning before the tournament.
I'll steal you after, once you've had your proper night. "
So she spent the first half of Valentine's Day exactly the way she'd spent every Wednesday since September — curled up on Toni's couch, a token box of drugstore chocolates split three ways with mathematical precision, Nina narrating a truly deranged dating show with the commitment of a sports commentator calling a championship game.
"To Tessa," Toni said, raising a glass of sparkling cider they'd bought specifically because Tessa still wasn't twenty-one, "who spent this exact night last year crying over a boy who didn't deserve a single one of her tears, and is now dating a boy who apparently rented out an entire ice rink to teach her to skate. "
"To growth," Nina agreed solemnly, clinking her glass against Tessa's with real ceremony. "And to me, for personally engineering roughly forty percent of this relationship through strategic, uncredited social pressure applied over the course of months."
"You did not."
"I absolutely did. Who do you think told Beck's roommate you thought he was cute back in September? You'd still be pining silently to this very day without my direct intervention, we both know it."
Tessa laughed so hard she nearly choked on a chocolate, and felt, not for the first time, a wave of gratitude so intense it nearly knocked the wind out of her — for Nina, who'd crossed states to keep a promise nobody would have blamed her for breaking, for Toni, who'd never once let her disappear into her own grief no matter how deep it got, for the specific, unglamorous magic of ordinary Wednesdays spent with people who loved her without conditions attached, without a single calculation of return on investment.
Beck showed up at nine thirty exactly as promised, knocking on Toni's door with a single, slightly wilted flower he'd clearly bought at the last minute from the campus convenience store on his way over, looking sheepish about the state of it.
"I know it's not much," he said, holding it out. "Practice ran late and the good flower place downtown was already closed by the time I—"
"It's perfect," she said, and meant it, because it wasn't really about the flower at all.
It was about the fact that he'd shown up anyway, on a night she'd spent surrounded by people who loved her unconditionally, adding himself to that list rather than asking her to choose between them, understanding without being told that her Wednesday night wasn't his to interrupt or compete with.
"Your sister and Nina are terrifying, by the way," he said, once they were alone, walking back toward his dorm through the cold February night, hand warm around hers.
"Nina gave me a whole speech last week about her 'due diligence.
' I've never been more thoroughly vetted in my entire life, and I've been recruited by two different college hockey programs."
"They love you. That's just what it looks like when they love someone."
"I love them too, weirdly, given how terrifying they are. I've never had anyone interrogate my intentions that thoroughly before, and it was oddly touching, once I got past being nervous about it."
She squeezed his hand, thinking about how different this Valentine's Day was from the last one — not because the day itself mattered so much in the abstract, but because of everything it now represented.
A year ago, she'd had a boy who made her feel chosen right up until the moment he didn't, and a family fracturing in real time behind her, unraveling faster than she could process it.
Now she had a boy who showed up at nine thirty with a wilted flower after a grueling practice, and a sister and a best friend who'd built her an entire chosen family in a state four hundred miles from the one that used to be whole.
She didn't need the old house rebuilt. She had this one now, and it was enough.
More than enough, actually, if she let herself really sit with it.
She didn't know yet how quickly enough was about to be tested.
? ? ?
She found it by accident one afternoon in February, reaching into the pocket of the jacket she'd left at his apartment and only just gotten back — a folded scrap of paper, his handwriting, cramped and slightly slanted, clearly written in a hurry and tucked away for her to find whenever she happened to reach into that pocket next.
Tessa — in case you're having one of those days where the old voice gets loud: you are the best thing that has happened to me since I learned to skate.
I think about you constantly. Your laugh is my favorite sound in any arena, any kitchen, anywhere.
I don't know how to say this without sounding insane, so I'm just going to say it plainly — I think I'm going to love you for a very long time. Maybe all of them. — B
She read it four times, standing frozen in her dorm room, and then sat down hard on her bed and cried, the good kind, the kind that came from being loved so specifically and so patiently that it undid something old and defended in her chest. She texted him a photo of the note with a single line:
Tessa: found this. you're an idiot. I love it
Beck: I forgot I even wrote that. I stuck a few of those in random places months ago. figured you'd find them eventually
Tessa: A FEW. how many are there
Beck: that's classified information. you'll find them when you find them
She found three more over the following month — one tucked into a book he'd lent her, one folded into the pocket of a hoodie of his she'd claimed as her own, one taped to the inside of a coffee cup lid he'd handed her outside her lecture hall, each one short, each one devastatingly specific, each one landing somewhere in her chest she hadn't fully finished repairing.
your hands are my favorite thing to hold, specifically, out of every pair of hands that exist
I used to think love was supposed to be loud. you taught me it's actually mostly quiet. thank you for that
if you're reading this, I'm probably thinking about you right now. statistically likely
She kept every single one in the same drawer as her grandfather's old records, a small, growing collection of proof that she'd chosen right this time, and told Nina about it that night, both of them curled up on Tessa's bed passing the notes back and forth like something precious.
"He's going to make me insane," Nina said, wiping her eyes unashamedly. "In the best way. I'm furious on your behalf that I don't have a boy leaving me secret notes in random pockets. Jax better step it up."
"He will," Tessa said, smiling down at the newest note, already looking forward to the next unexpected place she'd find one. "Give him time. He's watching, taking notes. Probably literally."