At the door, he pauses. “You ready?”
“No,” I say, and the honesty feels like clean cold air. “But I’m coming anyway.”
“Then we’re ready,” he says, and opens the world.
Triston
The morning makes people honest. Night lets you lie and call it magic. Morning turns the light on and asks you to speak plainly.
In her kitchen, with the coffee maker hissing and a draft sneaking under the door and the chip on her mug catching at her thumb, I fall in love again in ways I didn’t know had room left. Not the screaming kind. The quietlycatastrophic kind—the one where the idea of not protecting her dignity is suddenly more terrifying than a ruptured Achilles.
Wayne in daylight is every drill I ever hated: exacting, deceptively calm, uninterested in performance. He spoke like a man bargaining with his own ghost. I stood there and knew I could win him with arguments if I wanted to—bring in metrics and community service and the ways my jersey moves tickets. But I didn’t want a win. I wanted something that didn’t feel like theft. So I gave him the only currency that matters to men like him. I told him I would stand still. I told him I would not swing.
He didn’t bless me. Good. Blessings are for easy stories. He put a weight on my chest and asked whether I’d learned how to breathe through it. I have. I will. If it crushes me, it will not crush her. I’ll take the hit with a thank you.
When we walk out of the house, I see the porch light still burning in full day and think, that’s what this is: leaving a light on when it makes no sense, because someone you love could need help finding their way back even at noon.
I unlock the SUV and don’t let go of her hand until the seat belt makes me. She feeds the ribbon back under her cuff with the absentminded focus of a person setting a compass. On the road, I keep one eye on the street and one on the corner of her mouth that doesn’t know how not to tell the truth. She is afraid and luminous in equal measure. I have never been more grateful for pain in my own body; it teaches me what I can carry and still skate clean.
At a red light, I rest my hand on her knee and say, “With you,” because the sentence doesn’t need verbs to be true.
She answers without looking at me, just the smallest pressure of her hand over mine and a surrendered breath that sounds suspiciously like tomorrow.
The light turns green. I drive us toward the rink like it’s a church that will allow our sins and ask us to do wind sprints after.
Sammie
The rink smells the way it always does: a blend of ice and rubber and stories that ended badly and are still told like victories. The building doesn’t know it’s hosting a new shape of us today. It will learn.
I step through the doors and the staff looks up, looks away, looks back with the flicker people can’t control when they’re curious and kind. I nod at them like nothing in the world has changed. The trick is: everything has.
He veers toward the tunnel that feeds players into the cold. I peel off toward the offices where my lists live. We don’t touch. We don’t need to. On impulse, I stop and glance down the corridor we’ve taught as our weather vane. He is there, far away, a dark pillar at the seam of shadow and light. He lifts his hand to his chest for exactly one heartbeat and lets it fall. On my right, the gesture says, without words. Always.
I lift my wrist, brush two fingers over velvet, and go to work.
It is an ordinary morning. It is the kind that splits history.
And I, who used to count breaths like debts, take one that belongs to me, and then another, and then another, until oxygen feels like a language I was always meant to speak.
Chapter Twelve
Sammie
The week between Christmas and New Year’s is a strange animal—half holiday, half hangover, all liminal space. It smells like pine and leftover sugar and the kind of exhaustion that lets you tell the truth by accident. The city wears fairy lights like jewelry it forgot to take off. The rink keeps humming—kids’ clinics in the mornings, a charity skate that made the Zamboni driver cry, two practices where I didn’t have to avoid Triston’s eyes because avoiding isn’t who we are anymore.
Wayne has been… quiet. Not the sharp, surgical silence of a man collecting receipts—more like the wary stillness of someone learning a new map. He’s watching. I’m not performing for him. It feels like standing on my own legs for the first time after a long drive.
Tonight, there is no rink. No donors. No speeches. Just a house that belongs to a teammate with more square footage than taste, a backyard strung with lights, a speaker that believes in bass, and a dozen people who make a living colliding with large men on blades and somehow turn into golden retrievers around a bowl of chips.
“Come on,” Triston says, fingers laced with mine as we climb the front steps. “They’re already two and a half drinks in and will be insulted if we’re not there to witness the bad decisions.”
“You’re the captain,” I sniff, teasing. “Aren’t you morally obligated to limit bad decisions?”
“I’m morally obligated to confiscate keys and pour water,” he says, grinning. “The rest I will film for leverage in March.”
The door opens too fast, like someone’s been hovering. It’s Jamie, one of the defensemen, cheeks already flushed, wearing a sweater with a screaming moose in a party hat. “They’re here!” he bellows into the house, and I swear the living room lifts an inch off its foundation.
“SAM-MIE,” a chorus roars, and then I’m swallowed—hugged, spun, handed a plastic flute of something bubbly that tastes like joy dressed as irresponsibility. There’s glitter in the air. Someone’s dog is wearing a bow tie and stealing meatballs from the coffee table. The kitchen smells like nachos and fresh-baked cookies because the goalie’s wife treats everyone like strays who wandered in from the cold.
