“Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised,” Mom says as I start up the oak steps. “I love your sister but she does not fear anything. Including the Lord, unfortunately. She needs you to keep an eye on her.”
“I’d never let anything bad happen to Aspen,” I reply like I always do because it’s the truth. Of course my version of bad and my mother’s are not the same thing at all.
“See you bright and early, honey,” she calls after me.
I take the stairs to the attic, which are tucked into the wall just past my parents’ bedroom. I close the door behind me and don’t bother to turn on the lights. I cross the room, tripping over all the crap I never pick up and drop backwards onto the bed. I stare up at the ceiling and tug my phone out of my back pocket and text him.
Abbott:Had fun. Hope you did too.
Fuck, was that a weird thing to say? Am I poking a sleeping bear of trouble? Because he acted perfectly fine afterward. Declan acted like… it was no big deal. He acted like he wanted it. Oh God, I hope he wanted it. The idea that I might have somehow forced him or tricked him into kissing me, without really meaning to, makes me want to puke.
I leave my phone face down on my shirt and press both my palms to my forehead and close my eyes. I don’t care what the Bible says. I like boys. I know this. And I know in my heart that no matter what anyone says, I’m not a bad person because of it. I’m not going to hell. But if I made Declan do something he didn’t want to do, then I deserve to go there.
And life will be hell on earth if he pulls away from me. If we aren’t close after this. If… my phone chirps with a text alert. I grab it fast but my panicked fingers fumble it and I drop it, narrowly missing my face. I snatch it up from where it lands next to my left cheek and look at the screen, my heart in my throat.
Declan:Good times. Talk tomorrow.
That’s it. That’s all I get. So I end up spending half the night trying to decode that simple message in my over-active, suddenly pessimistic mind. He hates me. It was a mistake. I’m an idiot. He’s going to tell his parents. He’s going to tell mine. I’m going to be disowned, but even worse, I’m going to lose his friendship.
Our text messages over the next two days are lame. I mean, funny and normal but that feels lame now. I want more from him. A reaction. Some words that tell me what he’s thinking about our make-out session. But I don’t get anything like that and my training schedule is conflicting with his work schedule for the moment so I can’t even see him in person. Sunday I’m at the rink doing drills even though I’m completely exhausted. In the summer Mom and Dad let me skip church if I say it’s for training, so I always train on Sundays now.
“You hungover?” Trevor, my workout buddy, asks me. When I shake my head he adds, “You got a girlfriend?”
I snap my head up. “What?”
He shrugs. “You’ve looked stressed all week. Couldn’t decide if it was girls or booze that was causing it.”
“Neither,” I reply and sigh. “Sometimes I’m just fucking tired.”
Tired of life. Tired of stressing. Tired of the weight of everyone else’s expectations.
“Well fuck you then.” Trevor grins. “Because you tired is still better than me at one hundred percent.”
“Fuck off.” I smile at the compliment anyway. “You can’t compare defensemen and forwards.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m supposed to be able to score more than a defenseman.” Trevor laughs and gives me a shove, but he’s as exhausted and weak from hunger as I am so it’s gentle.
And that’s when I see him. Declan. Up in the concrete bleachers. This rink, my practice rink, is almost an hour by bus from Ocean Pines. Declan’s parents don’t lend him a car often because they usually need it. So if he borrowed the car to come see me, that’s a big deal. But when my eyes lock with his, he looks away abruptly and stands up.
He looks so fucking hot as he walks towards the stairs. He’s in jeans and a plain white t-shirt. Well, plain except for the words Hawkins Lobster Shack over his right pec. It’s a tiny red blob from here but I know what it says. His head is tipped downward, making his chiseled cheekbones prominent in the glint of the harsh fluorescents above our head. He hasn’t shaved, which is unlike him, and I wonder what the stubble would feel like under my palm. His cheek was smooth when we kissed.
“Trev, I’ll meet you in the locker room.” I turn without waiting for an answer, tug off my helmet, and walk back the length of the bleachers, toward where Declan is now coming down the stairs. I’m blocking his path by the time he gets to the bottom one.
“What are you doing here?” I ask with a smile because I’m so damn happy to see him.
“Nothing,” he spits out. His word is like rocks dropping between us. He’s still got his eyes cast downward.
“Since when do you do nothing at an ice rink?” I ask. “On a Sunday morning. How did your mom let you skip church?”
“Because I lied and said I was sick,” Declan replies. It doesn’t surprise me. We’ve both said and done a lot of things to worm our way out of spending our Sundays in that stuffy old box of a building listening to threats and lectures. “Then I borrowed my dad’s truck because he’s at the restaurant. And I came here.”
“So you came to see me?” I ask and then keep the questions rolling without giving him a chance to answer. I’m so happy he’s here but also still really panicked because something is off. “I’m just gonna shower and then head out. Can you drive me home?”
“With him?”
Declan finally lifts his eyes to mine. He looks… hurt. My heart feels like it’s had a skate blade shoved into it for a minute. “Who?”
“That guy you’re all… smiling and laughing with. Do you want me to drive him home too? Do you usually drive home together?”
