I just watch him drive away, taillights painting a red streak through the rain.
———
Back inside, the rink is dead, the lights half out, the air still heavy with the ghosts of sweat and violence and everything we left on the ice.
I sit in the quiet, tape unspooling from my hands, and think about what it means to want something. Really want it.
I think about Ash, about Vincent, about the way even now, even after everything, the thing that scares me the most isn’t losing the game or the job or the locker room.
It’s the idea that he could say yes to someone else, and mean it.
I think about calling my mom, about telling her that I’m in love with a guy who can’t stop apologizing for taking up space.
I think about what she’d say, how she’d tell me that the only thing worse than not being wanted is pretending you don’t want at all.
I sit there, locker room empty, the city outside collapsing under the weight of itself, and I wonder how the hell I’m supposed to play it cool when the only thing I want is sitting in a car somewhere, probably staring at his phone, probably already replaying the day in his head and wondering where he went wrong.
The night settles in, thick and endless. I close my eyes, press my forehead to the cool metal of my locker, and promise myself that tomorrow, I’ll say what I need to say.
But tonight, all I can do is hold on and wait for the world to give me another shot.
———
The tunnel between the rink and the garage is the loneliest place in the city.
Everything echoes, footsteps, voices, the hollow click of your own tongue against the roof of your mouth. Ash is halfway down, hoodie up, backpack bouncing with each stride, when I call his name.
He stops, but doesn’t turn.
For a second I want to let him keep walking, just to see how far he’d get before he realized I’m not coming after him. But I don’t. I never do.
I jog to catch up, shoes slapping on the wet concrete. The cold out here is surgical; it strips all the sweat from your skin and leaves you raw underneath. I can see his breath fogging in the space between us.
I stop three paces short. Too close is dangerous, not close enough is worse.
“Hey,” I say, like I haven’t been waiting all night to get him alone.
He looks over his shoulder, eyebrows up, face already blanked out. He’s a fast learner.
“You leaving?” I say, because my brain is a dead zone and that’s all I’ve got.
“Yeah,” he says. “You too?”
We stand there, two mannequins in a department store window, perfectly dressed but so obviously fake you’d laugh if you saw us from the street.
I try to remember what I came here to say. But all I can see is the way Vincent Chen looked at him, the way Ash let himself be seen. The way the world tilted, just for a second, in someone else’s direction.
“That reporter,” I say, and my voice cracks, “seemed pretty into you.”
Ash shrugs, plays with the strap of his bag. “I get that a lot,” he says, but there’s no flex in it, just a brittle edge.
“Are you going to meet up with him?” I try to say it like I don’t care, like it’s a curiosity, but the words come out warped, sour.
He gives me a look, somewhere between “are you high” and “are you kidding.”
“No,” he says, and he says it twice, softer: “No.”
I should believe him. I should feel relief, or victory, or at least a flicker of smugness that I’m the one he texts in the middle of the night, the one who gets his best, worst, only self.
