Page 19 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
I look at the TV. Luke is fixing something in Lorelai’s house. Lorelai is pretending she doesn’t need him to fix it. They’re standing in the same kitchen, breathing the same air, and lying to themselves about what they feel.
“He can never know,” I say.
“Never.”
“I’ll keep my distance.”
“Good.”
“I’ll write back as S.B. Keep it professional.”
“Perfect.”
“I won’t eat cookies with him.”
“There’s my girl.”
We say goodbye, and I hang up and let out a sigh. On the screen, Lorelai says something quippy in a diner, and Luke puts on a show of not reacting. Never letting on how much she means to him. I really hate this show.
Outside, the snow falls past the tall Tudor windows, and the furnace kicks on. And somewhere across Minneapolis, Beckett Benson is sitting in an apartment that I’m guessing looks nothing like this—nothing warm, nothing collected, nothing soft—writing a letter to a woman he thinks is a stranger.
I go upstairs to my office. The research wall stares back at me. Beckett’s section. Action shots clipped from the Star Tribune. Magazine clippings. The printed timeline of the doping scandal pinned with blue tacks.
I should take it down.
But I don’t.
Instead, I sit at my desk. I open my laptop. I look at the manuscript and read through my last scene with Jake, my hero.
Then I think about five letters in a box under my bed, written by a man who believes the best version of himself only exists on paper.
And I think about my bare wrist, where my bracelet used to be—the tiny book charm Mom gave me for my twenty-first birthday. For my girl who carries stories everywhere she goes. Gone. Lost in the same night I found out that the most honest person in my life is someone I’ve been keeping secrets from for six months—not out of malice but because I never knew who he was until tonight.
I close the laptop. Go to bed, then pull the covers over my head.
This feels like the only option, doesn’t it?
BECKETT
In my line of work, anger has exactly one useful application: converting it into something that puts points on the board.
Crack.
The puck ricochets off the goalpost.
“Benson.” Wyatt caught the puck and now flips his mask up. Sweat drips off his chin. “You want to talk about it, or do you want to keep trying to send me to the morgue?”
I dig my blades in, skate back to the blue line. Shoot. “Option B.”
“Cool. Just checking.” He tosses the puck onto the ice, and it’s picked up by Tyler, passed back to the middle to Candy, who takes it in stride, shields it for half a second, then feeds it wide to Kalen Boomer on the left. Conrad picks off the pass, spins, fires it ahead to me.
I don’t think. I just move.
I read the ice the way other people read rooms. Blake is already on my left, the rookie’s speed putting him exactly where I need him when I pass it off without looking. Justin “Blade” Blake has one setting—Go. I just point him at the net.
He goes.
Derek Munson closes fast—because Derek is good, whatever else is true—and Blake cuts inside, loses the angle. Dishes it back blind.
