“It IS like that. I’m running a clandestine baking operation so that a professional hockey team can have superstitious snacks and my own father will eat one tomorrow and compliment YOU.” She closes the oven door with a bang. “I love you so much but this is BANANAS.”
Rodriguez grabs two cookies off the cooling rack on his way out. “Production tax,” he says, and shoves one whole into his mouth. Juliette hugs Mackie and follows him and I hear them laughing as the elevator doors close.
“Barrett’s going to take at least three,” she says. “I can tell. He’s a secret cookie person.”
“You can tell.”
“I have instincts.”
The apartment is quiet. Mackie is leaning against the counter looking exhausted and proud.
“Fifty-two cookies,” she says, smiling. “This is the most romantic thing I’ve ever done and nobody will ever know.”
She’s got flour on her cheek and chocolate on her thumb. She’s been up since six, and she’ll be up again at dawn. She did all of this for a team that will thank me tomorrow.
I pull her in and hold on. When she moves to deal with the mess, I catch her hip.
My hand comes down on her ass. It's not hard but not an accident either. It’s been on my mind since the night on the couch when my hand landed on her thigh and she made that needy gasp. She doesn’t flinch. She pushes back.
“Again.”
I do it harder. The sound she makes is the same one from the couch and she turns in my arms and pulls me down into a kiss that tastes like chocolate and sea salt and I stop thinking about cookies.
30
MACKIE
We wonRound 2 in five games and Zach was incredible in all of them. I baked almost two hundred and fifty cookies across nine days. My father ate at least four of them while praising his starting goalie’s unexpected baking talent. Somewhere in the middle of all that, we advanced to the conference finals, and everything should feel amazing right now.
It doesn’t.
Zach brings it up on a Tuesday. We’re in his apartment after a morning skate. He’s sitting on the kitchen counter eating leftover pasta straight from the container and I’m on his couch with my laptop pretending to work on a piece about the Puckaneers’ defensive system for the school paper when he says, “We should tell your dad before Game 1.”
I don’t look up. My fingers keep moving on the keyboard even though I stopped understanding the words I was typing three seconds ago. “That’s in two days.”
“I know when it is.”
“So you want to tell my father—who just helped this team make the conference finals—that his goalie has beensleeping with his daughter for eight months. Two days before the biggest series of the season.”
“I want to stop lying to his face every day.” He puts the bowl down. “Mackie, I sat next to him on the plane yesterday. For three hours. He showed me pictures of a fishing trip he wants to take this summer. He asked if I wanted to come. He asked me if I wanted to go fishing with him and his family and I said ‘that sounds great, Jack’ while your text thread was open on my phone under my leg.”
“Okay, well don’t sit next to him on the plane anymore.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I know it’s not the point.” I close my laptop with a snap and the sound is sharp in his quiet apartment. “I know what the point is. You’ve been making the point for three weeks.”
He’s quiet for a second. When he talks again his voice is careful in that way that means he’s been sitting on this longer than I thought. “I can’t keep doing the thing where I look at him and pretend I don’t go home to his daughter every night. It’s eating me alive. I feel like I’m going to slip and say something and it’ll come out wrong and he’ll find out sideways instead of from us and that’s worse. That’s so much worse than just telling him.”
He’s right. I know he’s right. I’ve known he’s been right for weeks, but I keep finding new ways to not deal with it. Dealing with it means sitting across from my father and watching his face change. I have played that scene in my head four hundred times and it never goes well. Not once. In the BEST version he’s quiet and disappointed and doesn’t look at me for a week. In the worst version he murders Zach.
“After the conference finals,” I say. “We finish this series and then we tell him. In the window before the Cup Finals start”
“You said after the regular season.”
“I know.”
“Then you said after Round 1.”
