Page 52

"You laughed," he says.

"You were laughing at me."

"You laughed, Owen. I've never heard you laugh. Not once. Not in a whole month."

He's so close. I can see the sweat drying at his temple, and a tiny scar on his chin that I've never noticed, and the place where his lower lip is chapped from the cold.

I don't decide to do it.

I don't think about it at all. I reach up with one gloved hand and pull him down by the collar of his jersey and kiss him.

It's clumsy. My glove's still on. His helmet bumps my forehead. His mouth is cold from the rink and warm underneath, and for one second he doesn't move at all, and then he does. He kisses me back. His hand comes down flat on my chest, right over my heart, the same place it was in the stairwell. He makes a small sound against my mouth, surprised and soft.

Every part of me lights up at once.

Then I hear it. What I'm doing. What it means. It crashes down on me like I've gone through the ice.

I let go of his jersey. I push myself up. I get my skates under me somehow, and my knee screams, and I don't care.

"Owen—" he says.

I don't look at him. I skate to the gate. I take off my skates on the bench with my hands shaking so hard I can barely get the laces undone. I shove my feet into my shoes without tying them. I grab my bag.

He's still kneeling on the ice where I left him. I can see him in the corner of my eye. He hasn't moved.

"Lock up," I say, and my voice doesn't sound like mine. "Keys go on Gus's bench."

I throw the keys on the bench beside the gate. They skid off the end and land on the rubber floor.

I don't pick them up. I walk out.

The side door slams behind me. The parking lot's empty except for my truck and his car. It's cold, the first real cold of the year, and my breath comes out in white clouds, fast and uneven, like I've just come off the ice after a long shift.

I get in the truck. I don't start it.

I sit there in the dark and touch my mouth with the back of my hand. I can still feel it. I can still feel all of it.

In twelve years, I never once kissed my wife like that.

Chapter Twelve

RÉMY

The keys are still on the floor when I finally get off the ice.

I don't know how long I kneel there. Long enough that my knees go numb through my pants. Long enough that the lights over the dark half of the rink click off on some kind of timer, and the whole place gets dimmer, and I'm alone in a little island of light in the middle of all that white.

He kissed me.

Owen Hale pulled me down by my jersey and kissed me like he'd been holding his breath for a month, and then he ran.

I pick up the keys. I lock the doors the way he told me. I put the keys on Gus's bench, and Gus looks up from the stick in his vise and takes his headphones off. They weren't even plugged into anything. The cord's just hanging there.

"Everything all right, kid?"

"Yeah," I say. "We were doing drills."

"Uh-huh," Gus says. "Drive safe."