Chapter Two
Sammie
The morning tastes like peppermint and regret.
I wake to find the ribbon exactly where I left it—draped over the edge of the dresser, blue-black and quiet, like a question that slept without me and didn’t need my answer to exist. The room is dim, winter light stalled behind a sky the color of old paper.
December refuses to hurry, so everything moves through a slower hourglass: coffee drips thicker, heat climbs the vents grudgingly, and my heart takes its time admitting it never stopped running.
My phone is face down on the nightstand, as if I’m the kind of person who can silence what she craves by denying eye contact.
I don’t reach for it. I lie still and listen to the house around me make the soft domestic noises people mistake for safety—the baseboards popping, the fridge kicking on, the wind shouldering the windows.
I could stay like this for five more minutes and pretend I’m a woman with a mild life crisis.
Then I remember I’m me, and that pretending is a costume that never fits.
I flip the phone. The lock screen blooms with the day’s obligations like I planted them there and forgot a harvest was coming: call the auctioneer, confirm the DJ, finalize the seating chart, send the volunteers a schedule that doesn’t haunt them.
One notification hovers at the top like it belongs there.
No name. Just a number I know better than my own heartbeat.
Unknown: Don’t wear red today.
I stare at the words until they blur and then refocus onto something sharper than morning deserves.
He never calls himself anything. The number has lived in my phone since November, the week after the maze, under no name and every name.
I could block it. I could rename it DANGER and turn off alerts and pretend I sleep better when I amputate pieces of myself. I haven’t. I won’t.
I type and erase three responses before I say nothing at all and set the phone on my stomach like it might learn to breathe with me.
A line from last night plays in my head on a loop: breathing near wolves is an invitation.
In the half-light of my room, with the ribbon watching, I admit I am the girl who opens the door to her own hunger and doesn’t pretend she was forced.
The second text lands before my inhale is done.
Unknown: Wear what you want. I’ll live with it.
The contradiction is a knife turned flat—edge present, pressure gentled.
Consent threaded through control. He does this on purpose, the pull and release, the tether and the slack.
People say obsession is all grip, but the most dangerous kind is patient.
It lets you step back just far enough to believe you chose your distance.
My thumbs move like they belong to someone who’s slept.
Me: Why do you care what color I wear?
The dots appear, disappear. I imagine him in the unkind bathroom light at the rink or in his apartment with the kind of white walls athletes live between, thumbs low and deliberate, the rest of him a study in containment.
It’s both insane and true that I can see his hands when I read his messages.
I know what they feel like without having held them properly.
I know the weight of them on a railing, on a steering wheel, stealing heat from a glove.
I wonder what they would look like wrapped in velvet ribbon, and an electrical storm walks across my skin, no warning, no apology.
Unknown: Because I like the way blue looks when you pretend it isn’t for me.
I swallow hard enough to feel my pulse trip against the swallow.
I look at the ribbon, that strip of midnight left on my dresser like a promise and a dare, and I do the only thing that makes sense when sense is a fiction: I laugh, once, almost silent, like a person overhearing a secret about herself she was trying to keep.
Me: Stop leaving things.
The answer is instant, and it lands like breath on the nape of my neck.
Unknown: Tell me to.
I stare, fingers hovering. The point of a line is to either cross it or not. The point of me has always been messy.
Me: Don’t leave things where my father could find them.
There’s a long pause. The kind that makes your stomach mimic free fall. When the bubbles return, I hold my breath like it might convince time to behave.
Unknown: I’m not cruel, Samantha.
I close my eyes. The way he writes my name is a touch.
It pins me to the mattress—careful—so I can’t bolt from my own body.
I want to argue that obsession and cruelty are cousins; I want to admit I’ve never felt safer than when he is dangerous for me, not at me.
I do neither. I set the phone on my chest and try to memorize the ceiling cracks so my brain has something to hold that isn’t him.
By the time I’m dressed, the sky has brightened into a color optimists would call hope and I would call glare.
I bypass every red sweater in my closet not because he told me not to wear red, but because he told me I could.
I pull a navy turtleneck over my head—the exact shade of a sky that refuses to lighten—and tell myself it’s just warm, just practical, just nothing.
My hands linger at the dresser. The ribbon waits.
I loop it once around my wrist and tighten.
It slides out of the knot to lay against my pulse like it prefers the place where truth is loudest.
At the rink, the lobby smells like coffee, skate guards, and the metal taste of winter off people’s coats.
The garlands have settled into their roles and the bows are less obnoxious in the daylight, as if strings of lights can teach anything to behave.
I pass a cluster of kids bouncing in place while a mom wrestles with laces; their laughter ricochets off the high ceiling and lands in my chest with a sweetness I’m embarrassed to need.
December might be deadly in my head, but outside of it there are still small joys with chapped lips and chocolate moustaches.
“Storm Cats Christmas Gala,” the banner over the glass reads in block letters.
The font is festive against its will. I press my palm to the glass and imagine the room filled with people in velvet and sequins, everything glittering just enough to hide the ache under their wool coats.
I imagine him in a suit. I imagine not imagining. I fail.
The office greets me with an inbox that looks like a dare.
I empty it one RSVP at a time, alternating between yes, no, and the special box for people who think maybe means you owe them a favor later.
I call the florist and change the wreaths from symmetrical to not because perfection is a lie and I want the door to admit it before anyone steps through.
I text the DJ and ask for a playlist that doesn’t treat the evening like a supermarket aisle.
He replies with a snowman emoji and a thumbs-up, and I wonder what it’s like to live with uncomplicated thoughts.
Between calls, the phone lights up and I don’t look immediately. I let it glow like a lighthouse, pretending I’m a ship that never lost her way.
Unknown: West hallway. Two minutes.
My heart forgets time and then sprints to catch up.
The west hallway is the one between the maintenance closet and the pro shop, the one that never smells like popcorn or soap, only cold and quiet and rubber.
If my father is on the ice, his back will be to that hallway.
If the team is in a meeting, there will be a hush over everything, the rink holding its breath the way it does before a national anthem.
I type busy and erase it. I type no and delete the letter before it can take a shape. I type nothing, shove the ribbon deeper under my sleeve like it might behave if I can’t see it, and leave the office with a speed that would look like guilt if I had to explain it.
The west hallway is half shadows even in daylight.
One of the overhead lights has been out since last season; the maintenance guy swears it’s the ballast and then sighs like ballast is a personal insult.
My boots whisper over the matting, and I breathe like I’m hiding and hunting both.
I round the corner and stop because stopping is the only thing my body remembers how to do.
He’s there.
Helmet off. Hair damp and darker from the shower.
Hands in the pockets of a black team hoodie that makes his shoulders look like they were designed by a person who has never met moderation.
He doesn’t lean against the wall and he doesn’t cross his arms because casual is a costume he refuses.
He stands like a warning sign no one bothered to translate.
The part of me that should assess risks goes silent. The part of me that craves goes loud.
“Hi.” I say, and the tiny normal word sounds like it learned to stand on two legs in a house fire.
For a heartbeat he just looks at me, not moving, like the hallway is a narrow strip of ice and he’s waiting to see if I try to walk it or fall.
Then his mouth does the thing it does when he’s about to say something that will require my full attention—the half-lift, not quite a smile, more like a private agreement he intends to make public.
“You wore my sky.” He says, eyes dipping from my hair to my shoulder to the thin slice of navy at my throat and back up. The rasp in his voice turns the sentence into an abrasion. “Good morning, Samantha.”
My name in his mouth again. It should be illegal to like the way someone says something you’ve heard a thousand times. I swallow, and the ribbon presses a thumbprint into the soft skin inside my wrist like it wants to anchor me to the moment where I could still run.
“You can’t text me directions like you’re my GPS.” I say. I mean to sound flippant but land on breathlessness. “You can’t text me at all.”