Page 72 of The Lies We Play

“You didn’t answer.”

“No.”

“No, you’re not retiring?”

“No, I didn’t answer.”

Manny laughs like I gave him something worth keeping. “You hockey guys are weird.”

“Occupational hazard.”

Outside the window, Manhattan runs wet and silver beneath the cab lights. People move along the sidewalks with collars up, umbrellas tilted, heads bent against the rain. Every face has somewhere to go. Every window looks like a life seen from the wrong side of glass.

I got nowhere else to go.

That’s what I said to the reporter, because I’m apparently a sentimental idiot when concussed by adrenaline and two missed shots on goal.

I meant it as a joke.

Everyone laughed.

That’s the thing about telling the truth in public. If you make it dry enough, people think you’re entertaining.

I take a sip of coffee and regret it immediately. Burned. Bitter. Bought from the arena lounge fifteen minutes after someone from media relations asked me if I wanted to soften the retirement response before it got clipped online.

No, I told him.

He looked at me like I was making his evening harder.

Good.

The quarter moves across my knuckles again.

Over. Under. Catch.

My hands have always been the problem after games. Not during. During, everything knows where to go. Stick. Boards. Shoulder. Ice. Puck. Breath. The body understands violence when it has rules. It understands impact when a whistle decides where pain begins and ends.

Afterward, though?

Afterward, my hands remember they were built for other things too.

That is where the trouble starts.

I flex my fingers around the coin.

I don’t let myself think about Hal’s old apartment.

I don’t let myself think about the couch, the takeout we lived on for weeks, Livia’s bare foot tucked under Hal’s thigh like she belonged there because she did. I don’t let myself think about the way Halston used to bend toward me with that unbearable patience in his eyes, the look that made me feel seen before I was ready to be touched. I don’t let myself think about Livia’s fingers against my jaw, her laugh catching when Hal kissed me, her body between ours like she had known before either of us how to make three people into one home.

I don’t let myself think about our wedding—it wasn’t real. It was paper. It was them. It was all the law would let us have. We took it, and we celebrated it, and afterward we walked back to the apartment that was supposed to be ours and ate cold pizza on the floor at midnight and laughed about how we’d gotten away with something. Something. Like we hadn’t just made a vow that would outlast the law.

Which means, naturally, I think about it every fucking day.

I look at my wrist where the tattoo is and think if they still have them. Wonder if I’m an idiot for not going to a clinic and having a doctor laser it. Maybe the memories will stop haunting me that way. Maybe the connection I feel will be over—like us.

Manny changes lanes and says, “You played good tonight.”

“Thanks.”