The relief should be bigger than this, but it’s doing something weird. It’s sitting on top of something that is not relief, but I decide I’m not going to care.
Benson nudges me with his elbow. “You good?”
“Yeah.” Sharper than I meant it. I lift the beer. “I’m good.”
Stanley is grinning around his drink like a man who has been waiting his entire night for entertainment and just got it for free.
“Well, looks like you’re off my hook, Blue,” he says. “I thought you were going to be the second fucker to break Rule One.”
I roll my eyes. Stanley has been on Rule One since the day Benson started doing whatever the hell it is he’s doing with Lucy. Stanley acts like he wrote the rules personally. He didn’t. They’ve been written on the whiteboard in the kitchen since 2017, in Sharpie that has gone fuzzy at the edges from a hundred kitchen steam events, and the only thing Stanley has ever done is enforce them with a level of joy I find suspicious.
Rule One. No falling in love before the draft. Drafted players, applies until you sign your ELC. Undrafted, applies until graduation.
I am drafted. Fourth round. Two summers ago. The chirp from the kid tonight was that I was undrafted, which is the part that pissed me off — not the implication that I’m not going anywhere, which is fine, which is fair, which is more or less what I tell myself in the mirror — but the laziness of getting the basic fucking fact wrong. Look me up. I’m on the page. Fourth round. I’m not pretending I’m a first-rounder. I’m not pretending I’m going to be anybody’s franchise piece. I’m a power winger with a profile that scouts have a polite word for, which is projects as a bottom-six energy guy, and I have made my peace with what that means. Five years in the A. Maybe twenty NHL games on a call-up if I’m useful. Then I either stick on a fourth line somewhere or I go behind a bench in the OHL when I’m thirty-two, and either of those is a life I would shake hands with.
So Rule One does technically still apply to me. I signed my ELC, but I’m on college eligibility because of how the contract was structured, which is a paperwork situation I have explained to my mother eleven times, and she still does not understand. The point is, I am not allowed to fall in love. None of us are. It is, according to a long-graduated captain, none of us have ever met, acardinal sin against the Hawthorne House.
I have never been in danger of breaking Rule One.
I have made it my entire personality not to be in danger of breaking Rule One.
“Benson,” Gianna calls from across the room. “Come take a shot.”
He squeezes Lucy’s hip. He kisses her temple. Stanley makes a gagging noise. Benson flips him off without looking and walks with Lucy toward the kitchen. As he goes, he flicks his head at me —come— and I let myself, for the first time since she walked through the door, look at her.
She’s in a plain white tee, jeans that fit, and hair down, the way she has worn it since she was thirteen. Her arm is around a guy’s waist. His arm is around her shoulders. He is — I do the math, fast — three, maybe four inches taller than her. Which makes him five-eight, five-nine. Brown hair. Built like a guy who has been lifting for two years without a program. Shirt one size too tight in the chest, one size too loose in the gut. He’s laughing at something he just said. I notice that she’s not laughing. She’s doing the small, polite smile of a girl whose boyfriend has just told a joke she’s heard before.
Mila is behind them, and she sees me before I have fully turned my head. Her eyes lock on mine across the room, and her face does the exact thing it has been doing for seven years, which is the thing where it tells me, with complete clarity and zero room for misinterpretation, that she would push me down a flight of stairs if she thought she could get away with it.
I look back at the beer label.
That is the thing about Mila Brooks. Mila knows. Mila is the one person in the world who knows that for one night, when I was seventeen, I was not running. She is also the one person in the world who knows that for every morning since that night, I have been running again. She isn’t wrong to hate me. But I hate that she caught me looking.
“I’m going to start the fire,” I say to Benson.
I don’t wait for an answer, and I don’t look at Melly again.Melly and Mila.It’s a tale as old as time in my book. I push past Stanley, push past Benson, push out the back door, and the cold hits me in the chest like a body check.
The back of the house faces the alley and a strip of brown grass we don’t water, and a fire pit some guy three captains ago built out of pavers from Home Depot. It’s sturdier than it has any right to be. I have, over two years, become the unofficial keeper of it. I’m the one who keeps the long-stem matches in the kitchen drawer. I haul wood from the pile on the side of the house. I do it because somebody has to, and because doing it gets me out of every room I do not want to be in.
There are four guys out here already. A couple from the team, a couple I don’t know — friends-of-friends, the way every party here goes. They lift their beers at me when I come out. I lift mine back. Nobody talks to me.
I crouch and load the pit. I pull a copy ofArchitectural Digestfrom the stack on the back step, which is where Percy keeps them for reasons that are between him and his god, and I rip out a page about a kitchen in Connecticut. I crumple it. I shove it under the kindling. I rip another page. I crumple it. I shove it.
I flick the lighter. The paper catches. The kindling catches. The wood catches. I sit back on my heels and watch it.
My shoulder is killing me. I took a check in the second period that I should have seen coming and didn’t. A kid from Brea with about forty pounds on me caught me with my head turned, and I went into the boards with my arm under me at the angle you don’t want it at. I got up and skated to the bench and did not say anything because in this league, you just don’t. The trainer iced it after. I took two ibuprofens at home before the party started. I haven’t been able to lift my arm above my head without a wincesince the third period, and I keep forgetting and lifting it and being reminded.
I lift it now to push wood deeper into the pit, and I feel it grab.
Fuck.
I let the arm fall. I sit with it on my thigh. I stare at the fire and think about her. I let myself, for thirty seconds, because I am alone, because nobody is watching, because the fire is giving me permission to think about what I want for a minute. Turns out that it’s her right now.
She kept her word.
Two years ago, in a bed in the dark, Melly told me she was going to a community college first because Camden U was too expensive. She said it like she was apologizing for not being good enough, and I said, “You don’t have to apologize for that,” and she said, ”I’ll get there,” and if my memory serves me right, I told her, “You better.”
She got here.
