Chapter Three
Sammie
December has a way of carving the day into clean little blocks you can stack neatly and lie to yourself about.
Morning: emails, vendor calls, checklists.
Afternoon: skate drive, donor follow-ups, press release edits.
Evening: rinse, repeat, breathe, pretend.
But obsession is a spill, and it runs into every block no matter how tall you try to build.
Seven days until the gala. I wake to the hiss of the radiator, the hush of snow deciding us, and a text already waiting like a glass of water I’m afraid to drink.
Unknown: Don’t let anyone touch your wrist today.
My breath catches on nothing. It would be easy—healthy, even—to reply with a boundary. Stop. It would be saner to say, You don’t own me. But he didn’t tell me what to wear. He didn’t bark an order. He placed a velvet rope in my path and asked if I wanted to feel it.
Me: Why?
Unknown: Because I will think about it all day.
Unknown: And you’ll think about me thinking about it.
I cross the room and lift last night’s ribbon from the dresser. It’s cool; it always is at first. I loop it twice, gently—not a knot, more like a promise—and let the tails trail into my cuff. My pulse taps it like Morse code only I can read.
At the rink, the day springs open like an overstuffed closet—everything tumbling at me at once.
Two volunteers called out sick. The auctioneer wants assurance that the microphone won’t squeal this year.
The florist texts a picture of asymmetrical wreaths and asks, like this?
A local reporter wants a “human angle” for the gala brief and leans forward too eagerly when I mention kids who skate on scholarship.
By eleven, I’ve said we’re so grateful six times and let me check on that twelve, and I haven’t thought about him in almost twenty minutes. It feels like cheating on myself.
“Breathe,” I tell my reflection in the office window. She looks like a woman who is doing her job and absolutely nothing else. She looks like a liar.
“Bethany?” the team manager calls, then corrects, “Samantha?” She slips into the office with a clipboard and a hurried grin. “Donor walk-through at noon. Pierce Langley asked if you could show him the silent auction layout yourself. He’s ‘a visual person.’”
Langley. I know the name—tech money, always smiling like he’s about to apologize for being rich and might tip you instead.
He gave big last year; Dad likes him because he doesn’t pretend to know hockey when he doesn’t.
Safe, my brain supplies, as if safety were a flavor I’ve ever learned to stay hungry for.
“I’ll take him,” I say, and I hear how brave I sound when the task is a hallway and a man who is not the one who texts me instructions that feel like mercy and knives.
Pierce arrives ten minutes early with snow still kissing the shoulders of his coat and enthusiasm that might be real. He has that charming tactic down—the eye contact that lingers, the soft laugh, the hands he keeps open at his sides like he’s proving he’s not holding a weapon.
“This is impressive,” he says, as we walk through the lobby. “You run this?”
“I do,” I say, unsure whether to put pride in it or humility. I split the difference. “With a lot of help.”
We pause at the table where the player baskets will be. Last year’s chaos flashes through me: wives bidding each other up with the fever of women who know exactly what they want in a man’s hoodie and are willing to pay for it. Pierce laughs when I tell him the story, then sobers a beat too late.
“Will the captain’s basket be here?” he asks lightly, as if it’s nothing. As if saying captain around me doesn’t turn my vein into a wire.
“It will,” I say, voice steady, pulse not. “Signed stick, practice jersey, a private skate.”
“Nice.” He leans closer; the ribbon on my wrist warms like a brand under the cuff. “You’re good at this, you know. Making people want to give.”
“I’m good at lining up tables,” I deflect, less coy than cowardly. “The giving is theirs.”
He grins. “You’re good at not taking credit.”
He means it kindly. It lands like a trick question.
We move through the space while I talk floor plans and flow and how to keep the check-in line from feeling like purgatory.
He listens like the right kind of donor—attentive, curious, ready to say yes if you make the choice easy.
He reaches out once, to squeeze my elbow when I joke about the sound system that likes to die at exactly the wrong moment, and every muscle I own bolts upright under my sweater.
“Sorry,” he says instantly, hands up. “I touch when I’m excited. I’ll keep them to myself.”
“It’s okay,” I lie; it is not. It wasn’t his fault. It was the wrong man’s hands in the right place, and my body didn’t know how to forgive either of us.
When Pierce leaves—promising an extra auction item, a getaway package in a “ridiculously cozy” mountain cabin I can already see making the wives feral—I sit on the edge of the check-in table and stare at my wrist, hot under a ribbon we both know belongs to someone who didn’t earn it with a smile.
My phone buzzes. I don’t look right away. I let it vibrate once more, like an animal pawing the door.
Unknown: Thank you.
Me: For what?
Unknown: For stepping back before he touched you.
Unknown: For remembering.
Unknown: For cruelty I didn’t deserve this morning when I told you not to wear red. I’m working on leaving your choices alone. I need your help.
The admission empties me of something heavy. I look down the rink toward the bench, to the spot where I’ve seen him fold into himself when the cameras try to read under his skin. There’s nothing there now—just the echo of skates and the Zamboni driver singing off-key to a country song.
Me: I didn’t step back for you.
Me: I stepped back for me.
Unknown: That’s why I thanked you.
I could live on that for hours.
Dad finds me in the office tapping a pen against the seating chart like the pen is going to give up a better arrangement if I shake it hard enough. He looks tired in a way that makes me want to fix the weather and the last five years.
“You with me?” he asks.
“Always,” I say, because sometimes the truth and the comfort line up.
“VIP table,” he says, and taps the chart. “I want you at it.”
He doesn’t have to say why: a sweet-faced event coordinator makes donors feel safe without making them feel handled. And if I’m at the VIP table, I’m not at the players’ table. If I’m not at the players’ table, I’m not near a man who can empty me with a glance.
“Okay,” I say, and I write my own name next to donors who will never text me a rule I want to follow. Dad nods like a general who found his formation.
As he turns to go, he hesitates, hand on the door, then says without looking at me, “You can say no to men who don’t understand the word.”
I could act offended. I could demand to know what he thinks he knows. Instead I say, simply, “I can. I will.”
He nods once. We both pretend we’re talking about donors.
By late afternoon, the rink air tastes like tired and peppermint.
I walk the west hallway because I’m weak or brave or both.
It’s empty. Of course it is. The hum is still there, though—the ballast, the memory, the part of me that knows I can make a cathedral out of any shadow if I stand still long enough.
In the lobby, a cardboard box sits on the check-in table with my name written in black marker in a hand that could belong to anyone who learned to write before phones made us lazy. I freeze. The ribbon presses a chime against my wrist.
I open the box. Navy knit gloves. Simple. Warm. Elegant in the way useful things are when you’re cold. There’s a note tucked into one finger, small and stubborn.
I shouldn’t smile. I do. I slip one glove on and let my fingers recognize care as something that doesn’t have to be an argument.
I put the other glove back in the box and close it, tucking it under the table like it belongs to no one yet. My phone buzzes.
Unknown: Don’t thank me.
Unknown: Or do. I’ll keep it.
I type Thank you anyway, because I grew up in a house where gratitude was said out loud even when it hurt.
When I finally leave for the night, the gloves sit in my coat pocket like a secret I’m allowed to enjoy. Snow is doing that gentle theatrical thing it does when it wants you to forgive everything. I walk to my car and let the cold pinprick my cheeks. My phone lights.
Unknown: Tonight. Don’t answer if not.
Unknown: Walk around the back of the building after closing. The door by the north exit will be unlocked. Ten minutes only. No one will see. If you don’t come, I won’t text again tonight.
I stop walking. It’s a simple sentence—if you don’t come, I won’t text again tonight—and it feels like a hand to my throat that isn’t choking, just reminding me of air.
Me: If this is about control, I’m out.
Unknown: It’s about permission.
Unknown: Yours.
The snow decides for me. Or I decide for myself. I don’t know which story I’ll tell later. I text one word.
Me: Ten.
I drive home in a silence so thick I could cut it with one of his plain white cards. I shower, I change into clothes that feel like no story, not yet. And then I go back.
The north exit is the quietest part of the building—no cameras, just a heavy door the staff uses when the need for a smoke or a scream hits too hard. The metal is cold under my palm. The door opens like it didn’t need a key because some doors respect certainty.
Inside, the hallway is dim and close and private. My breath makes a pale cloud in the air. He steps out of the shadow like he’s been listening to my footsteps since forever.
Helmetless. Barehanded. No hoodie this time—just a dark long-sleeve, sleeves pushed to his forearms like he’s about to do work he cares about. His eyes do the sweep they always do—my mouth, my throat, the wrist under my cuff—and then they come back to where they live: my face.
“Hi,” he says. Just that. Like he came to visit my name and everything else was extra.