2. Mackie
MACKIE
I wake up and the first thing I think about is his mouth.
This is a problem, because his mouth was on mine last night and he knew exactly what he was doing when he kissed me back.
Which means the Puckaneers’ quiet, keeps-his-head-down, hardest-worker-on-the-roster backup goalie might secretly be a playboy who genuinely doesn’t care who I am and not the shy, sweet, guy I thought he was.
That bothers me more than it should and I kind of don’t want to think about him secretly leaving a string of girls in his wake.
I kind of just want to lie here and replay the part where he bit my lip and my knees stopped working for a second.
I’ve been watching Zach Almardon since he got called up to the Puckaneers almost two years ago.
I noticed him on the bench, not because he was loud or flashy, but because he was the complete opposite of both of those things.
He sat at the end watching everything, never complaining, and stayed on the ice after every practice longer than anyone else.
I started to look for him specifically. His head tracking the puck during games even though Luca’s in net.
The way his whole body goes tense when the play gets dangerous, leaning forward on the bench like he’s playing the game in his head.
I’ve pulled up his AHL tape on my laptop at night and watched how he moves in the crease, with small precise lateral shifts that are completely different from Luca’s big athletic sprawls.
I’d lie in bed afterward thinking about what his voice might sound like up close.
Now I know. It’s quiet and careful and he means every word that comes out of it and last night he said she’s done talking to you, man to some creep without raising his voice and then stood on a patio and told me he can’t sleep without noise because his brain runs his mistakes on a loop.
Then he kissed me like the world was ending and oh my God I am in so much trouble.
I grab my phone off the nightstand hoping he somehow figured out my number, which is delusional because I purposely didn’t give it to him.
Kara
you were quiet last night
you’re never quiet
what did you do
I FaceTime her immediately because this is not a text conversation, this is a face conversation, and she picks up on the second ring still in bed with her hair in a knot on top of her head, squinting at the screen.
“What did you do,” she says and from the halfway exasperated but halfway curious tone of her voice I know she’s already decided I’m an idiot and now she’s just waiting for the details.
“I kissed someone.”
“Who.”
“A guy. At the party.”
“Mackie. Who.”
I press my face into my pillow and say it into the fabric so it comes out muffled and hopefully inaudible.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that because you said it into a pillow like a child.”
I lift my face. “Almardon.”
For a moment I think the call glitched because she’s frozen on the screen. Nope, I’ve just shocked her into complete speechlessness and I know this silence. I’ve done something so spectacularly stupid that she needs a second to find words that won’t make me hang up.
“The goalie,” she says finally.
“The backup goalie.” As if the distinction matters. It doesn’t matter. If anything, it makes it worse because backup means expendable, which means this guy’s career could be over with a few conversations and the team wouldn’t even be losing their starter.
“On your dad’s team.”
“Yes.”
“Your dad. Jack Anderson. The man who lives in your house and has spent your entire life telling you that you’re not allowed to date hockey players.”
“I’m aware of who my father is, Kara.”
“Are you? Because it seems like you forgot last night somewhere between the appetizers and the tongue.”
“There weren’t appetizers. It was a bar.”
“Not the point, Mackie.”
She sits up in bed and I can see her shifting into the mode I think of as ‘Kara Court’: judge, jury, and best friend simultaneously, verdicts never gentle.
She’s been doing this since middle school.
She was the first person I called when I got my period, when I failed my driving test, when my dad thought he was getting traded from Seattle and I was going to have to leave behind every friend I’d ever had.
She’s the person I call when I’ve done something I can’t undo and need someone to help me figure out what comes next.
“Tell me everything,” she says.
So I tell her—the guy who’d been pestering me all night, then who grabbed my arm, Zach appearing out of nowhere with a beer and his arm over my shoulders like we knew each other, the way he completely intimidated that jerk without yelling but just stood there being tall and immovable.
The patio. The conversation about sleep and noise and mistakes.
And then how I grabbed his shirt and kissed him because I couldn’t stand the thought of walking away and spending the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t.
“And he knew,” Kara says. “He knew who you were when he kissed you.”
“Of course he knew. He’s on the team, Kara.
Everyone in that building knows who I am.
” This part I’m not even questioning. I grew up in the Puckaneers organization.
Hank, the security guard, has known me since I was twelve.
Dave, the equipment manager, taped my first mini stick.
I’m not some anonymous girl at a bar—I’m Jack Anderson’s daughter, and there’s no version of reality in which a guy on the team doesn’t know that.
“Okay so this guy knows that your dad would make sure he never played hockey again and he kissed you anyway.”
“I kissed him.”
“Did he kiss you back?”
I think about the way his hands found my waist and how he stepped into me and backed me against the table. “...Yes.”
“Then he kissed you anyway.” Kara pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them, settling in. “So what’s the plan?”
“I told him I’d see him around.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. You kissed your dad’s teammate, said I’ll see you around, and now you’re just going to—what? Run into him in the hallway at the arena and pretend nothing happened?”
“I haven’t thought that far ahead.”
“Clearly.” She’s got the expression that means she’s about to say something I don’t want to hear.
“Mackie, I’m asking you for real. What are you doing?
Because this isn’t some random guy. This is someone who sits on the same bench as your father every single game.
If this becomes a thing—if this becomes anything more than one kiss on a patio—you understand what that means, right? ”
“I know what it means.”
“It means lying to your dad. It means making this guy lie to your dad. It means every team dinner and every family skate and every single game, you’re both pretending.”
I know. I know all of it. I’ve been calculating the risk since I pulled back from his mouth and saw his face and realized that I’d just kissed someone my father trusts, someone who could lose everything if my dad decides that trust was misplaced.
And I should feel guilty about that, and I do, a little—but mostly I just want him again and the guilt isn’t bigger than that.
“And you still want to see him again,” Kara says.
“Yeah. I do.”
She looks at me for a long time, and I can tell she’s letting go of about fifteen warnings she wants to give me, storing them away for later when I’ll actually be ready to hear them instead of just arguing, because Kara knows me well enough to know that I don’t change course in the first twenty-four hours.
I change course at three weeks, or six weeks, or when things break. Not now.
“Then he’ll come find you,” she says. “And when he does, you need to figure out what this is before it gets complicated.”
“It’s already complicated.”
“No, babe. Right now it’s one kiss. Complicated is what comes after.”