I am wearing fuzzy socks the color of a very pleased flamingo.
I am wearing, more pertinently, a hoodie that is large enough to wear me. Crimson. Soft to the point of suspicion, the kind of soft that means it has been washed at least four hundred times by an owner who knew what he was doing. The cuffs flop past my fingertips. The hem hits my mid-thigh. The drawstrings hang ina way that means I will, at some point this morning, accidentally take an eye out.
I lift the collar to my nose.
Yep.
Burnt orange. Cinnamon sugar. Espresso. The faint warm musk of a man who has clearly worn this exact garment through approximately every emotional milestone of his early twenties, and the smell of him is buried so deep in the fleece that no laundry detergent has had the courage to evict it. The scent crawls into my chest and does the thing I am, with mounting and reluctant scientific certainty, having to admit it does. The little drum of anxiety that has been beating beneath my sternum since I crossed customs slows by a measurable degree. My shoulders, which I had not realized were up around my ears, come down half an inch.
Matteo Santori’s hoodie is, apparently, a pharmaceutical.
This is medically interesting and I will not be reporting it to him.
How either the hoodie or the socks ended up on my person between two and five in the morning is a forensic mystery I am not equipped to solve at this hour. I have a suspicion. The suspicion has hazel eyes and an enthusiastic relationship with fabric and a documented inability to leave anything cold alone. I am putting it down for later examination.
Right now, I have work to do.
Because the cold light truth of five in the morning, the truth I have been waking up to since I was sixteen, is that I lucked into this. Yesterday’s scrimmage was a tryout, and I performed at it, and three men I have known for one calendar day moved heaven and a storage room to keep me on the roster. That buys me precisely zero days of coasting. Whatever I have to prove on the ice from this morning forward will be proved by me, alone,in front of a coaching staff that has at least two voices openly hoping I fail.
I get up. I move quietly. I gather what I need.
The hallway is sleeping. I can hear the soft tide of breath behind two of the doors I pass, and I do not let myself wonder whose. The bathroom in our sector wing is enormous and disgustingly well-appointed, all white subway tile and a frosted-glass shower stall, and someone — Rémi, my new theory says Rémi for all small unannounced kindnesses — has stocked the counter with a folded grey towel, an unopened bar of unscented soap, and a brand-new toothbrush still in its packaging. I do not deserve the toothbrush. I use it anyway.
The shower is hot. The shampoo on the rack smells of bergamot and cedar and almost certainly belongs to Jude. I borrow it without his permission and forgive myself instantly.
Twenty minutes later I am dressed and damp and reasonable. Oversized black t-shirt. Joggers. Hair pulled into a wet bun. The flamingo socks have been retired to the laundry on principle. The crimson hoodie has, with a precision I refuse to look at, ended up back on my body, because the alternative was leaving it folded on a chair, which was psychologically not on offer.
I look at myself in the bathroom mirror.
Job board today. Thrift store this weekend. You will need more than four shirts to make it through this term and you cannot touch the savings until you have to. You will go down to that kitchen, you will eat a banana like an adult, and you will be on the ice by six-thirty looking like a goalie.
Easy. Step by step. The way every morning of my entire goaltending life has gone.
I open the door.
The back staircase is narrow and unlit and creaks at the third tread, which I clock and avoid. The shared common room isempty and dark, the curtains still drawn, the coffee table cleared of last night’s magazines. Rémi’s candles on the mantel have burned themselves quietly down to nubs in the night. The whole space smells faintly of cooled cinnamon and someone’s sleep, and I move through it the way a goalie moves through a strange rink, light on the balls of her feet, taking inventory.
The kitchen at the back of the house is unlit, too, except for the soft amber glow of the under-cabinet lights someone has left on a timer.
And someone is standing in it.
I freeze in the doorway.
He has his back to me. Tall, broad, unmistakable. The shoulders alone are an address. He is in his black coach’s jacket and dark jeans and the kind of expensive low boots that say a man takes his early mornings seriously, and he is doing what I have, on hundreds of mornings in my life, watched him do: making coffee from scratch in someone else’s kitchen, in the dark, like he owns the lease.
The scent of him reaches me a heartbeat after my eyes do.
Cedarwood. Black coffee. Winter whiskey and leather and the bracing snap of snow on wool. The scent I have, against every act of will I have ever signed, carried in some private inner pocket of my chest for five years. The one my body still misfiles, on contact, under the headingsafe.
Of course.
Of course this is how the morning starts.
Because this was the principle when he coached me back home. Coach Declan was always nearby, always in the kitchen, always at the rink ten minutes before anyone needed him there, always parked with quiet attention at the edge of the room like a guardian angel who refused to wear the wings. He looked after us. He looked after me. He was the steady weather of my entire teenage athletic life. And then, with no warning and no note, hepoofed. Walked clean out of my life on a Wednesday and did not come back.
And the part I will never confess to anyone, the part I keep buried under the basement floor of my own personality, is that the leaving hurt. It hurt the way a structural beam hurts when you cut it out of a house overnight. The house stood. The girl in it relearned how to stand without it. But the slope of every wall has been one degree wrong ever since.
I do not turn around and walk back upstairs. That would be retreat. I do not own a retreat gear and I am not going to install one for him.
