“That goal was sick,” I said. “Goalie had no idea.”
“Had a real good setup.” Soren's grin was in his voice even though I wasn't looking at him. “Someone walked the puck right into my wheelhouse and then tried not to take any credit for it.”
“Someone did all the work and you got the goal. Story of my life.”
He laughed, loose and easy, and for a minute it felt like any other night we'd spent out here. But then the quiet stretched, and I noticed what I'd been noticing all week without being able to pin down. Soren was present. But there was a distance in him that hadn't been there before, some space he was holding open that I didn't know how to cross.
“You nervous about graduation?” I asked.
“Nah.” He said it too fast. “I mean, yeah, obviously. But it's just graduation. Show up, don't trip on the gown, done.”
“Your parents coming?”
A pause. Just a beat too long. “My mom is. Dad's got work.”
I didn't push. I'd learned early that pushing Soren about his family was the fastest way to get a joke and a subject change, and I didn't want either. I waited, the way I sometimes did, hoping the silence would do what I couldn't. But tonight he didn't fill it.
“What about you?” he asked instead. “Big Kincaid family dinner?”
“Probably. My mom's been planning it for weeks.” I shrugged. “It'll be fine. A lot, maybe.”
“Yeah, well.” There was an edge under the easy delivery. “That's what you get for being the golden child. Perfect grades, perfect hockey career, perfect family. You've got it all lined up, Kincaid. Honestly a little disgusting how together you are.”
“I'm not that together.”
“You are, though.” His voice went quieter. “You always have been. It's one of the things I—” He stopped. Laughed it off in that way he had, like he was collecting himself mid-sentence and deciding not to go there. “Never mind. Ignore me.”
I looked at him then. He was staring up at the sky, jaw relaxed, expression unreadable in the dark, and he looked like someone who'd already made a decision and was waiting out the clock.
I looked back at the stars.
“You remember when you started calling me Rook?” I asked, mostly because I needed to hear him say my name in a way that didn't feel like goodbye.
He tilted his head toward me, eyebrows up. “Random question.”
“Just thinking about it.”
He was quiet for a second. Then he smiled. “Freshman year. You were so fucking serious all the time, like you had to prove you belonged on varsity even though everyone already knew youwere good. And you moved on the ice like a chess piece. All straight lines, no wasted motion.” He paused. “Rook just fit.”
“Chess piece,” I repeated.
“That, and you were impossible to move once you'd decided on a position. Stubborn as hell.” He bumped his shoulder against mine. “Still are.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“I'm not stubborn, I'm persistent. There's a difference.”
“There really isn't.”
He laughed again, and for a minute it was good. It was us. The rhythm we'd had since freshman year, the shorthand we'd built without meaning to. And then, without any announcement, Soren shifted, tipped sideways, and rested his head on my shoulder.
I went still.
Not because it was strange. We'd been in each other's space for three years, elbows and shoulders and crashing into each other on the ice. But this was different.
I didn't move. Didn't say anything. Just let him stay there and stared at the sky and tried to act like my heart wasn't doing something complicated behind my ribs.
“That one's Orion,” Soren said after a while, lifting one hand to point vaguely upward. “The three stars in a row.”
