"JAKE—"
He tossed the phone back. I looked at the screen, stomach dropping.
Hog:Come to dinner? Evan's making a casserole. Not sure if edible
"I'm going to kill you."
"Right after you hug me." Jake stretched. "And you were going to invite him anyway. I just saved you twenty minutes of agonizing."
My phone buzzed again.
Rhett:I'm bringing the kids by the Gardens. Post-game high-fives. We'll be there in 5.
Rhett:Then dinner sounds good.
"He's coming here," I said, voice coming out strangled. "With kids. In five minutes."
Evan looked up from his carefully organized gear bag. "Then you should probably shower."
I showered faster than I ever had in my life—barely long enough to rinse off the worst of the sweat and gear smell. WhenI emerged, still toweling my hair, half the team had already cleared out. Jake and Evan hung behind, along with Pickle.
The locker room door opened, and I heard them before I saw them—high-pitched voices echoing off the concrete and the shuffle of small feet in winter boots.
Rhett appeared first, holding the door. He was wearing his usual flannel—dark green this time, sleeves rolled up to show his forearms. The veins stood out, and I swallowed hard. He wore a Storm beanie I'd never seen before, and when he looked up and caught my eye, he smiled.
It wasn't his polite contractor smile. It was the real one. The one that made my pulse pound against my ribs harder than Kellner's punch had.
Behind him came a flood of kids, all wearing mismatched hockey gear and expressions of pure awe. There, in the middle of the chaos, was Mika Mackenzie—tiny, fierce, with a gap-toothed grin and a hockey stick almost as tall as she was.
She saw me and froze. Her eyes went wide. She took three steps backward.
Shit.
I'd seen that look before. It was the one where a kid realized that the guy who taught them to chain-stitch was the same guy who'd just punched someone hard enough to draw blood. He was a guy with split knuckles and a bruise blooming purple-black across his cheekbone.
Mika slipped partway behind Rhett like I was a bear that might charge if she made eye contact. The ice pack slipped from my side, hitting the floor with a wet smack.
"Hey, Mika," I said. My voice was too loud, and I tried again, softer. "Good to see you."
She didn't respond. She pressed closer to Rhett, making herself smaller.
I glanced at him. He watched me with a calm expression. One hand came down to rest on Mika's shoulder, steady and grounding. "She was so excited in the truck," he said quietly. "Talked the whole way about showing you the scarf she finished."
"I'd love to see it." I crouched down slowly. My ribs protested, but I ignored them. I was now closer to her height—still bigger, but less looming. "I bet you nailed that border pattern. The tricky one."
Mika didn't move.
My hands were shaking slightly, so I shoved them into my pockets. In the right one was a half-finished project I'd been working on between periods—a tiny blue whale. "I'm working on something too. Wanna see?"
Nothing.
Pickle appeared at my elbow, crouching beside me. "Is that a whale? That's so cool! I didn't know whales could be blue. Wait—are whales actually blue? Or is that just what we call them?"
"Some of them are," I said, not taking my eyes off Mika. "Blue whales. Biggest animal on the planet."
"Bigger than you?" Pickle asked, and I could've kissed him for the setup.
"Way bigger. I'm just a guy who plays hockey and makes tiny animals. Nothing scary about that."
