“Hey, kid.” He holds the gate open. Doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to.
I go through.
The crowd sees me before he does.
The roar shifts—changes pitch, changes quality, eighteen thousand people redirecting their postgame celebration to something else. And I feel it in my sternum before I understand what it means.
I step through the gate, onto the ice, and I don’t stop.
Beckett turns.
He finds me across the full, white width of the ice, under the arena lights, with his skates and his gear and all six-feet-however-many inches of him, and the expression on his face is open and unguarded and completely, devastatingly real. Relief and hope.
He skates toward me, meeting me as I struggle not to fall all the way to center ice. In one motion, he wraps his arms around my waist and scoops me up—just a few inches off the floor—and spins me so my back is to the empty rink and his face is right there, breath warm.
I look up at him. The arena lights are behind him, and I have to squint a little.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.” The underneath smile. The real one. “So,” he says, his voice low, just for me, beneath the noise. “The whole world’s waiting on an answer. What’s it gonna be, Hart?”
He sets me down then, but hello, no, he’s not getting away. Not this time. I grab the front of his jersey and pull him down to me.
His mouth meets mine, and the crowd goes absolutely insane, but I am barely aware of it. Barely aware of anything except this—the feel of his hand curling around my waist, the other around my neck, holding me to him, his lips devouring me.
And mine, kissing him back.
My arms slide around his shoulders, and my fingers curl into his hair. And suddenly, my feet leave the ground again. He picks me up, lifting me until he can look up into my eyes, my hair falling around us, blocking out the world. Just me and the Blue Line.
I pull away, just enough that my breath whispers against his lips. “I’ll think about it,” I say.
He laughs—the real laugh, the unguarded one that’s been inside me since an elevator in the dark—and pulls me back in, and the ice is cold and the lights are very bright and later has finally, completely, deliciously arrived.
And I’ve definitely found my happy ending.
The End
