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Lily looks more furious than embarrassed and stamps her foot like a little rabbit. “That’s private!”

“Not when you’re running with headphones in,” he growls out. He shakes her off, arms flexing like he wants to pick her up and toss her over his shoulder. She’d probably go flying halfway across the room. “You wanna run all by yourself? Wear the fucking hearing aids.”

“She’s fine.” I step down, a little reluctant to get in between them. Not because I’m scared of either of them, but because the energy between them is dangerously palpable. “She wears them all the time.”

I’m lying through my teeth. I didn’t even know she had a hearing problem.

Toren rolls his eyes at me and I catch sight of his bruised eye and butterfly tape across a cut there—one he didn’t have in practice.

“Sure, she does. And I’m a fucking saint,” he says, before taking his helmet in hand and storming out. Only, just at the doorway, he snaps his fingers at her, looking over his shoulder. “Wear them.”

Lily is angry—furious rather than hurt by anything the towering defenseman has done. But she watches him with a quiver in her lips as he leaves, like she wants to ask a million questions and beg him to stay all in one breath.

“You okay, Lily?” I ask, stepping toward her. My words seem to break the trance that Toren Kane’s presence put her in and she nods.

“I’m fine.”

She steps to the sofa to sit down. Her hand comes up to touch her right ear, before untucking her hair to hide it.

My chest squeezes. “Is there a reason you didn’t want to tell me about the hearing stuff?” I ask, settling myself at her left side.

“It’s embarrassing.”

“It’s really not.” I slump a little more comfortably. “You can’t hear out of one of your ears?”

She nods. “Since I was a kid.” She taps again on her right ear.

I want to ask her how Toren knew such an intimate detail, but I keep quiet.

The closest I get to broaching the subject is, “So you guys know each other well, huh?”

Lily bites her lip, thinks for a long while, but eventually nods. After his strangely impassioned reaction to her during the five minutes we dared to enter practice together, followed by this? Whatever is between them feels intense.

“It’s why I talk so loud,” she says suddenly. “At least, sometimes. People say I get loud, and I don’t know it. And if I ask you to say something over and over again, it’s . . . yeah. So, I’m sorry. I probably should’ve told you.”

She’s embarrassed, cheeks pale more than flushed—like this is some intimate secret she would’ve kept forever.

“I’m glad you told me,” I say, though she didn’t tell me. Not really. Her shoulders relax. “And Toren knows because . . .”

“We’re friends,” she blurts, before her eyebrows furrow together. “Or. Well . . . we were. It’s complicated, I think.”

If anyone can understand complicated, it’s me.

“I get it. You know, no one knows this but . . . Bennett? The big goalie? He and I dated before, freshman year.” The words are an offering, hard to push through my lips at first. I’ve never done girl talk before. But it feels like maybe Lily hasn’t either. “I was in love with him, and he loved me. But . . .” I clear my throat, “A lot of things happened, but it was mostly my fault. I hurt him a lot.”

At this, Lily nods. “So you had to leave.” She says the words with simplicity, as if that was a given. As if my actions make perfect sense.

“Yeah.”

“I bet that hurt you, too.”

The pain in my chest never eases, a permanent knife I refuse to withdraw. “It did.”

Lily nods slowly, chewing hard on her lip, her brow furrowed. “I had to do that once. And it hurt a lot . . .”

She touches her hand absentmindedly over her chest, rubbing lightly. “It still does,” she says, barely a whisper.

I nod. “I wasn’t ready to be with him, I think, back then. But . . . I am now. At least, I’m trying to be.”