“And I’ve never been more awake in my life,” he says.
Cole laughs against my skin, the vibration traveling through my ribs. Dante’s circles slow. His breathing steadies. His hand stills on my stomach, the weight of it warm and settled.
“Thank you,” I say.
Both of them go still before I know which one of them I mean.
“For what?” Cole murmurs.
“For coming to the fourteenth floor.”
“You had the room. We were always coming to the fourteenth floor,” Dante says.
“Still.”
Smooth sheets stay too cool against my skin. Through the window, someone else’s city looks back. The three of us are onone king bed in a Marriott in Boston, the semifinal win still buried in their muscles, the championship game twelve hours away.
Dante falls asleep first, hand on my stomach, face turned toward Cole. Three minutes on a hotel mattress, and the man who measures rooms finally goes still.
Cole lasts another minute. His arm tightens once before it goes heavy. His mouth falls slightly open. The quiet snore he swears is fictional brushes against my shoulder.
I lie between them, awake, with the habit that predates them, predates this room, predates the name I chose and the name I buried.
My breathing starts its count. Four in. Four hold. Four out. It starts in the dark. One cycle. The bed holds. Two bodies hold.
The count stops at one.
One.
The wiring hums beneath my skin. The cycle that used to run eight times now runs once. The perimeter is clear. The door is locked. The two men beside me are breathing.
The city lights press against the window. Tomorrow Dante will lace his skates for the last time as a college player. Cole will take the ice in a building where four NHL teams are writing his name on clipboards. I will sit in the press section and write the story of two men I love playing the game that brought us together.
Chapter 34
Dante
Warmups start under lights bright enough to hum against my visor.
TD Garden is full. Sixteen thousand seats packed tight with sound, heat, and a crowd that knows exactly what it came to watch.
National Championship.
I take my first lap, and the ice holds firm beneath me. My blades bite clean. The cold comes up through my boots. My legs still carry the semifinal, Gio’s goal, and the celebration that emptied whatever we had left, but the heaviness has teeth now. Addison has spent four years teaching us to skate through the burn.
Cole slides into view on the second lap and matches my stride. His blades hit the ice in the same rhythm as mine. We havebeen skating together since we were sixteen, close enough for shoulder checks, shared ice, and six years of learning the exact space between his body and mine.
He bumps my shoulder, light.
I bump back.
We run the passing drill. The puck moves between our sticks, tape to tape, the sound sharp in the cold air. He feeds me a backhand, and I catch it without looking because I know where his backhand goes. I send it back through his skates, and he kicks it to his blade without breaking stride because he knows where my passes land.
The scouts on the press level are writing.
Clipboards and moving pens. Four NHL teams with personnel in the building, ready to turn the next sixty minutes into numbers, rankings, a name on a draft board. June sits one sheet of ice away.
My hand tightens around my stick before I make it stop.
