Page 248 of Across His Line

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

He puts his phone on my desk and plugs the charger into the outlet beside my bed. His toothbrush goes next to mine in the little cup by the sink. He pulls the shirt off his shoulder and drops it over the back of my chair.

I close the door. My hand goes to the chain. I slide it across. The metal clicks.

Behind me, my mattress squeaks.

I turn around.

Rafe is already in my bed on my pillow, taking up entirely too much of it.

I stare at him for a second.

Then I turn off the light and get in with him.

34

Was that Hard?

Rafe

Berwyn skates us until three guys throw up.

That’s how the first practice after break goes. He blows the whistle four minutes before we start because everyone is here, and he doesn’t blow it again for forty minutes, except to send us back to the goal line. Suicides. Then suicides with pucks. Then a drill he calls “holiday weight” where you skate the length of the ice carrying another guy’s stick over your head, and if you drop it, everybody goes again. Greeley drops it twice. Weber throws up in the trash can by the bench. Mathers throws up next to the trash can by the bench. Barnes throws up on the ice in the corner, and Berwyn makes him go get a towel and clean it up himself while the rest of us skate around him.

I don’t throw up.

I’m fucking good. I’m laughing internally watching these idiots. In the three-on-two drill at the end, I take a pass from Kennebeck off the wall on my backhand and put it top shelf on Fernandes without looking, and Fernandes calls me something through his mask that I’m pretty sure isn’t a compliment, but I let it slide.

“Getting laid agrees with you,” Barnes says on the bench, still pale, with a towel around his neck.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Unfortunately,” Kennebeck says, on my other side, squirting water into his mouth, “he’s right.”

I get up and go back out on the ice.

After the second practice, at five, it’s dark out and snowing. I come out of the rink with my bag over my shoulder and my hair wet, and Tessa’s there.

She’s sitting on the low brick wall by the front doors, under the light, with her laptop open on her knees and a coffee in a paper cup next to her. She isn’t looking for me. She isn’t watching the doors. She’s typing something, frowning at the screen, chewing on the inside of her cheek, with snowflakes landing on the keyboard that she brushes off without looking up.

I stand at the top of the steps for a second and look at that.

The guys come out behind me. A wave of them, bags and sticks and steam coming off their heads in the cold. Weber. Mathers. Greeley with his headphones in. Layous and Orr, arguing about something. Fernandes, still mumbling something I don’t know.

Orr stops on the top step and squints at the wall.

“Is that Canten?”

“Who?” Layous says.

“The girl on the wall. Kylie’s roommate. She was at Theta in November.”

“Why is she wearing Waleska’s hat?”

They both look at me.