11. Zach
ZACH
Jack Anderson is sitting across the aisle from me on the plane. Which is fine. He always sits there. I’ve been on dozens of these flights and I’ve never once thought about it. He sits there, I sit here, Rodriguez passes out before we’re off the ground. Normal.
Except now I’m looking at him and all I can see is her face. He’s her dad. The girl who I was definitely falling for is the daughter of the man sitting six feet from me right now.
My brain keeps taking every conversation I’ve had with Mackie and replaying them with subtitles I didn’t have before.
Especially one of the first conversations we had where she told me her dad has a no-hockey-players rule and I said, “I’m not really a hockey player, I’m a backup” and she replied, “you’re a hockey player, Zach, trust me. ”
I keep getting stuck on that. Trust me. Like she was trying to warn me and I was too busy being charmed by her to hear it.
“You good, kid?” Jack looks up from his book. “You look tense.”
“Just game-prepping.” The words sound normal but this is the thing about being a goalie, my brain is always on fire while things happen around me. Turns out the training to stay calm works in other situations too.
He gives me a look that I’m pretty sure translates to ‘all you goalies are actual nutjobs’ and goes back to his book.
I go back to staring at the blank screen of my phone and trying not to throw up.
Rodriguez shifts in his sleep next to me, his head sliding off his neck pillow and landing on my shoulder.
I don’t move him. Having his dead weight against my arm is weirdly grounding right now, a reminder that some things in my life are still normal and uncomplicated.
Later that night I’m lying on the bed in my hotel room staring at the ceiling. I’ve been running the same scenarios for two days, turning them over like game film, looking for the play that doesn’t end in a goal against.
I could end it. Walk away, minimize risk, protect the net. The smart move. The right move. I’ve been trained for this kind of discipline my entire life. Read the situation, make the call, commit.
Except I don’t want to. The gap between what I should do and what I want to do is so wide I could park a Zamboni in it.
I could tell Anderson. Sit him down, take whatever comes. Except he’s been here almost two decades and I’ve been here less than two years. If it comes down to him or me, it’s not going to be me. It’s never going to be me.
Or I could keep seeing her. Keep it quiet. Hope nobody finds out until... I don’t even know. Until when?
Every path costs something. I’ve run the angles six ways and every version says walk away.
I pick up my phone and FaceTime her.
Three rings. Four. I almost hang up because maybe this is the universe telling me to take the smart path, the one where I don’t risk everything, the one where I go back to being the quiet guy who keeps his head down and does his job.
She answers and she’s been crying. Her eyes are swollen, her nose is red, and she’s wearing a hoodie that’s definitely mine. She’s in bed, propped against her headboard, looking at me through the screen like she’s not sure I’m real.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.” Her voice is miserable. She sounds exactly like I feel.
“I’ve been thinking about this for two days.”
“Yeah.” She sniffs. “Me too.”
“I considered everything, Mackie. All the ways this can go. Ending it, telling your dad, keeping it a secret. There’s only three real options.”
She doesn’t say anything but her chin trembles as she watches me through the screen.
“And I’m not ending this.” Even as I say what I know is the completely wrong choice on paper, I feel an overwhelming sense of relief.
She makes a small sound, like someone punched the air out of her.
“Really?”
“Yeah, Mackie. I really like you. I really, really like you.”
She puts her hand over her mouth and I can’t tell if she’s laughing or crying, probably both.
“I really like you too.” She’s talking through her fingers. “I’ve really liked you for an embarrassingly long time and these last two days were the worst days of my life and I cried on my cat.”
“You cried on the cat that bit the plumber?”
“Mr. Noodles was very understanding about it.”
Suddenly we’re both laughing while I lie in a hotel room in a city I’ll forget by next week and she’s in her bed wearing my hoodie and none of it matters.
“So what do we do?” she asks. “Do we tell my dad?”
“No.”
“Zach—”
“Mackie, I’m a backup with zero leverage and your father is a nineteen-year veteran who the entire organization would go to war for. Which, fair. He’s earned that. But I’d like to make it through to actually becoming a starting goalie someday.”
“So we keep it a secret. For how long?”
“I don’t know. Until I’ve got enough of a foothold that it can’t destroy me. Until we figure out how to tell him the right way.” I rub my face. “I just know that telling him right now means losing everything. And I just got you back. I can’t lose everything in the same week.”
I can see her working through what I’m actually asking.
“Okay,” she says. “Secret.”
“You sure?”
“No. I hate it. I hate lying to my dad and I hate that you have to pretend you barely know me and I hate everything about it.” She wipes her eyes with the sleeve of my hoodie. “But I like you more than I hate the rest of it. So.”
“So.”
“When do you get back?” she asks.
“Sunday night.”
“Can I come over?”
“Yeah. Please.”
She exhales, and I hear the shakiness in it.
“Okay. Okay. And we should go on a real date. Not somewhere close. I’ll make a list of places where no one from the team would ever go—diners, dive bars, movie theaters where we can sit in the back.
There’s an arcade bar about forty minutes from downtown that—”
She stops mid-sentence and takes a breath.
“I’m really glad you called,” she says quietly.
“Me too.”
“I was scared you weren’t going to.”
“I know. I almost didn’t. I had this whole speech prepared about why ending it was the smart decision and I couldn’t get past the first sentence.”
“What was the first sentence?”
“‘Mackie, I’ve been thinking’—”
“God, that’s a terrible opener. If you’d started with that I would’ve hung up on you.”
“See? The universe knew.”
She laughs softly and plays with the hoodie strings. We sit there for a minute, just looking at each other through our screens, not saying anything. Her eyes are still swollen and her nose is still red and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“Okay,” she says. “I should let you sleep. You have a game tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
Neither of us hangs up.
“Zach.”
“Yeah?”
“Hang up the phone.”
“You hang up.”
“We’re not doing that. We’re not those people.” She laughs softly. “Goodnight. Eat something. Drink water.”
“Goodnight, Mack.”
She blows a kiss at the screen and hangs up before I can respond.
I stare at the ceiling for a long time after, my phone warm on my chest. It’s the first time in two days that the tightness behind my ribs has loosened enough for me to breathe.
And somewhere underneath the relief, a smaller, quieter voice whispers: you just chose the one thing you can't afford to lose.