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“We’re good.”

I stand there and let a guy who hit me from behind with a stick put his hand on the bruise in his own doorway, because half the roster is in this house and every one of them is going to remember whether Kennebeck came in cold.

Then he looks past me. “Kylie Vandercook.”

I fucking despise hearing her name in his mouth.

“Hi,” she says, and walks straight past him into the house without slowing down. Paige goes with her, and so do Kenzie and Bianca, who met us at the corner, and all four of them are gone into the crowd inside fifteen seconds.

Greeley watches them go, then turns back to me and lifts his beer, grinning. “She looks good tonight. That’s a lot of girl in that skirt.”

It’s the same play he’s run every time since the first week. He’s found a button, and he’s going to keep pressing it until something happens, and if I say one word about it in his entryway, he’ll just press harder.

“Where’s the beer?” I ask.

He laughs and points. “You know where it is, Kennebeck.”

I get one and go out to the back steps with Pennock and two D-men, who are talking about a guy they know in the Ontario league. Through the kitchen window, Kylie is at the drinks with her friends, laughing, chugging whatever’s in their cups. I look at her waist and drink my beer.

The back door opens, and Paige comes out onto the steps with a joint pinched between two fingers and her lighter already going. She sits down on the step above me like it’s her porch. “You guys want?”

“Skate Monday,” Pennock says.

“No,” I reply.

She shrugs and takes a long pull and lets it out slow, looking up at the sky with her whole body going loose, like somebody turned down the volume inside her.

“You’re all so boring,” she says, almost fondly, and when she goes back in, the smell stays on the steps.

I go back in too. Koda is talking with Mathers in the living room. Mathers shakes my hand and asks me something, and I answer it, and I don’t give a shit what it was, because Kylie is in the living room with Paige and Kenzie, dancing.

When the song ends, they drop onto the couch and laugh at something on Kenzie’s phone, and Greeley walks over with two drinks and hands her one. She looks at Paige, takes it, puts it down on the nearest flat surface without looking at it, and says something with fire in her eyes. I know that look. It’s about four words. He says something back. She says four more. Greeley sips his own drink and walks away, and she picks her own cup back up and turns to Paige like nothing happened.

I go back to the steps.

Ten minutes later, a guy walks up to her who isn’t on the team. He’s shorter than me, in a flannel, and he says something that makes her laugh, and she puts her hand on his arm for a second when she does. Everything in me stops. I look at him again. He’s fine. He’s normal. He’s just a guy at a party.

I watch them for a while. It’s just me and my beer now. She catches me when she turns to say something to Paige, her eyes going past me and coming back. She holds it. Then she turns to flannel guy and says something and puts her hand on his arm again, and this time she looks at me while she does it.

Okay. So that’s what we’re doing.

Five minutes later, she does it again. She leans in to hear something over the music, laughs, looks at me.

I take another sip.

Rafe appears at my shoulder. “You’ve been standing here for forty minutes.”

“I’m aware.”

“Are you going to do something, or is this the whole night?”

“It’s the whole night.”

Across the room, Greeley lifts his beer at us. Neither of us reacts.

“He thinks he’s winning,” Rafe says.

“Yeah.”