Page 90 of Cherry Picking

The lights drop for the introductions and come back up, and then they’re playing.

I’m still working past the basics, but even I can tell it’s ugly. The puck won’t settle. Chicago clogs up the middle, and the Kings keep flinging it down the ice and chasing after it, and the man behind us groans every time they give it away.

Lily narrates for me in a low, dry stream. “That’s icing. That’s a bad change. Bellan’s going to lose his mind on the bench—watch.” Two seconds later, a red-faced man in a suit is indeed screaming something at the boys as they file past him. “There he goes. He hates this. Sloppy. He’d rather lose clean than win like this.”

The horn ends the first with nobody ahead, and Lily uses the intermission to teach me about the shift chart, which I retain for roughly the length of the Zamboni’s first lap.

Duval stands on his head in the second, throwing himself across the front of the net to rob a Chicago player with a pad I don’t see move until it’s already there, and the whole building comes up off its seats.

I come up with them, screaming into the noise. Lily grabs my arm, laughing. For a stretch, I forget I’m a stranger here. I forget the plane tomorrow. I forget Vegas waiting for me at the other end of it.

Briggs hits a post in the third that has me on my feet before it clangs wide. He’s spent most of the night down in the corners with his shoulder into somebody, digging the puck out and skating it back the other way.

“That’s the version Bellan wants,” Lily says, nodding at him. “No flash. He’s playing scared tonight, though. Look how tight he’s holding his stick.”

I file it away without knowing what to do with it.

They win it 2–1 on a goal from Augie with four minutes left. I have a wonderful time, though Lily argues it was closer to a heart attack than a game, and that Bellan will make them pay for the sloppiness in Monday’s video review.

“Come on.” Lily’s already up, gathering coats. “I’ll get you back toward the family room. They take forever, but he’ll come find you when he’s done.”

She walks me through the guts of the building, down a cinder-block hall that smells of rubber and cold. When the noise thins behind us, we find a cluster of people waiting—wives, a couple of kids gone boneless with sleep on their parents’ shoulders.

There’s a TV bolted high in the corner running the post-game feed, sound turned low, a panel of suited men breaking down the third period.

I’m still floating, all lit up, half rehearsing how I’ll describe Duval’s save to Murphy when I get home. It was so much more intense in person.

Then the feed cuts from the desk to a live shot of the hallway I came from—the scrum, the shuffle, a PR voice off camera saying two more, guys, two more. And there’s Briggs at the center of it all.

There’s a towel slung around his neck, sweat tracking down his jaw. Yesterday, he’d had me bent over his bathroom counter, my palms flat on the cold stone. I’d watched the same slick trail run down his throat in the mirror while he drove into me from behind.

Even now, I can’t seem to get the image out of my head.

“What was working against Chicago’s forecheck in the third?” a reporter asks.

“Uh, yeah, I think we just simplified. First forty, we’re trying to make a play at our own blue line, and they’re eating us alive on it.” He shifts the towel on his neck. “Third period, we got pucks behind their D and made them turn around, and that’s a lot less fun for them. Credit Duval, though. He keeps us in that game in the second.”

“Can you comment on the reports about your late brother and your former fiancée, Ophelia Andrews?”

Every part of me goes cold at once.

I don’t hear his answer. I don’t need to. I know exactly what his face is doing right now on the other side of that wall—the stillness I’ve learned to read across a hundred phone calls, the door swinging shut behind his eyes.

The thing he told me on my porch in the dark, the thing he’s been carrying in secret for so long. It isn’t his anymore. It’s out there now, and I have no idea what happens next.

CHAPTER 26

BRIGGS

We didn’t talk about it before Evie got on a plane back to Vegas. We didn’t have time to. I spent the rest of the night fielding calls from Ted and refreshing a story that had my brother’s name in the headline.

That’s what he had been chasing me for all weekend. A beat reporter had gotten it from somewhere, and Ted caught wind Friday that the story was coming. He’d been trying to warn me while I was showing Evie my city, pretending my life was an easy thing to slot her into.

I should’ve picked up the damn phone.

Evie took it like a champ, though. She booked herself a flight and left me to handle it alone, because that’s what I told her I needed. She stood in my kitchen with her bag already packed and asked if I wanted her to stay.

I said no. The word came out before I could weigh it, and I watched it land on her face and settle in there. Maybe I did want her to stay, after all. But it doesn’t matter now. It’s too much to put on someone I’ve only known for a handful of months.