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The room reacts to my face.
I move to my stall and shut the locker portion too fast, because these are men who make a living reading a fake shoulder in the neutral zone, and they read the truth right off my face like it's printed there.
Ryker's marker stops mid-word. "It's not the Cade half you keep it for."
Nobody chirps. That's how I know how bad it is. If it were a joke they'd be feasting. Instead the room stays quiet, and Aiden looks at me across it, careful, captain-careful. "How long, Hunter?"
"Doesn't matter."
Ryker breathes it out. "So, it's been her this whole time and you let us all think you were just a disaster."
"Drop it." The edge on it stops even Ryker.
Noah leans over from the next stall and sets a heavy hand on my shoulder, and asks the only merciful thing in the room. "Does she know?"
"No. And it stays that way. We've got a game."
“Requited love, that’s rough.” Mason walks over and pats my shoulder. “But living a lie is worse. Tell her.”
The building is a different beast for Boston tonight. The rivalry lives in the ice, older than any of us.
Black and gold pours over the boards for warmups and twenty thousand people find their hate and pour it down, and there at center ice is my best friend, and he finds me across the red line and doesn’t smile.
He's known something was off since the dinner. And tonight the schedule hands me to him for sixty minutes with nothing between us but a whistle and a rulebook.
Puck drops and it's war on the first shift.
His line against mine, a battle in the corner that has nothing to do with the puck, and Cade's always played smart and mean, but tonight there's an extra angry in every hit he lays on me, a message riding the shoulder he drives into my chest at the blue line.
I give it back. We forecheck like we're trying to end each other. The barn loves it.
Second period, tie game, the place shaking on its bolts. I steal one look I can't afford, up into the friends-and-family seats, and find her.
Margot, in a plain black coat, not wearing my number tonight, watching us try to skate through each other.
She looks in my direction and I drag my eyes back to the ice. You don't get to look at her from out here. Not tonight. Not in front of Cade.
Third period. Something has to give, and it gives on a puck dumped into the corner. I go in hard. Cade comes in harder. We both know the puck was never the point. We collide, we tangle, sticks and elbows and twenty years of history.
The whistle shrieks and the linesmen start swimming toward us, and for one second in the scrum his cage is an inch off mine and his voice comes low and ragged, only for me, under all that noise.
"The only way to get the truth out of you is on the ice. Tell me. That dinner…" He's got a fist twisted in my sweater and elbows me. "The way your face went dark when I said his name. I've been worried sick over it for days, man." His eyes are blown wide. "So tell me the truth. What is my sister to you?"
And I’m so tired. Tired of the mask and the deal and the lie I feed everyone including myself.
I've got thousands of people screaming and the one man I would still take a slapshot to the teeth is holding my jersey in his fist and begging me for the truth, and it just falls out of me. Quiet. Wrecked. The realest thing I own.
"I love her."
Cade goes still, every part of him stopping at once.
"I've loved her since we were kids, Cade. Since before I had the decency to be ashamed of it. We’re best friends. I didn’t want to lose you and her too. It was never the models, it was never any of them. It's been her the whole time."
The linesmen are on us, I can feel the hands coming. "But it isn't real for her. It's a job. She wants somebody else. She's never once looked at me the way I've spent my whole life looking at her."
The rage drains out of my best friend's face, and what floods in to take its place is worse, because it's grief, and some of it is for me.
Then, because he’s her brother and he loves her more than his own life and he has to know, he asks the one question that can burn down everything I have left.
