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"Now I want you," I say. "More than anything. More than the Cup."

He doesn't say anything. He just looks at me with his whole face open, like I've given him something enormous, and I suppose I have.

After a while, we get up. We put on boots and coats and walk down through the snow to the dock, and we walk out to the end of it, where my father and I set the last board eighteen years ago. The lake's frozen all the way across. There's nobody for two miles in any direction.

He takes my hand.

Out here, in the open, under the sky, with nobody watching. I've never held anybody's hand outside. Not even Laurel's, not really.

I don't let go.

Chapter Eighteen

RÉMY

Nashville in January is cold and gray and damp, and Cody Varga has shaved off the mustache.

I notice it in warmups. He's skating lazy circles on his side of the red line, and he looks up and catches me looking, and he smiles and rubs his bare upper lip with one gloved finger, like we're sharing a joke.

"He shaved," I say to Sorel.

"So?"

"So he's had that mustache since he was nineteen. He was so proud of it. He used to comb it on the bus."

"Maybe his girlfriend made him."

"Cody Varga doesn't have a girlfriend. Cody Varga has a mirror."

Sorel laughs. Across the ice, Varga's still watching me.

We haven't played Nashville since opening night. Three months. We've won ten of our last twelve. Owen and I are on the top line, and my name's been on the league's rookie-of-the-month list twice, and I've started to think, a little, that maybe I don't have to be afraid of Varga anymore. That maybe I'm past him.

I'm wrong about that.

The first period's clean. Too clean. Varga plays me straight, doesn't say a word, doesn't take a run at me. It's weird. It makes the back of my neck itch.

It happens in the second. Two to one for us. There's a scrum in front of their net after a whistle, the usual stuff, guys shoving, gloves in faces. I'm on the edge of it, not really in it. Varga skates up next to me. He's not looking at me. He's looking at Owen, who's in the middle of the pile with his hand on the back of a Nashville defenseman's jersey.

"Your boyfriend's got a nice grip," Varga says.

I go cold.

"What?"

"Hale. Your boyfriend." He's still watching Owen. His voice is low, pleasant, like we're talking about the weather. "I've seen the way he looks at you on the bench. Everybody's seen it. It's cute. Old man found himself a little⁠—"

He says the word.

He says it loud. Not whisper-loud. Loud enough that the linesman, who's pulling guys apart three feet away, turns his head. Loud enough that the Nashville defenseman Owen's holding looks over. Loud enough, I find out later, that the microphone mounted in the glass behind the net picks it up and sends it out to every TV in two countries.

It's a word I've been hearing since I was sixteen. I've been called it on buses and in locker rooms and in comment sections. I've had it written on my car in Rimouski in shaving cream. I thought I was used to it.

It's different, hearing it next to Owen's name.

I don't think. I just swing.

It's not a punch. It's worse than a punch, in the rulebook. It's my stick, two hands, a slash across the back of his calves, hard. He goes down like he's been shot. Of course he does. He's Cody Varga. He's been diving since juniors.