Page 24 of Blueline Baby

He takes my hand, and we do slow laps around the empty rink. The massive overhead lights are mostly off, leaving just the dim glow from the bench illuminating the ice. The only sound in the entire twenty-thousand-seat arena is the steady, synchronized scrape of our skates.

It’s the most ridiculously teenage thing I have ever done—holding hands, skating in slow circles at one in the morning. Except the guy holding my hand is a professional athlete whose jersey is currently being sold in the team store. The sheer absurdity of the situation should bother me.

It doesn't. I don’t want this to ever end, which feels like its own mild panic alarm going off in the back of my head.

Eventually we have to stop, because the ice doesn’t belong to us forever. We change back into our shoes mostly in silence, both of us still a little stunned. He walks me out and opens the passenger door of his truck the exact same way he did at the start of the night.

But when I reach up to grab the handle and climb in, he catches my hand, turns me back around, and kisses me again. Just like he needed to confirm the feeling was actually still there.

“Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry in the slightest. “Had to.”

I get into the truck with my whole face on fire. I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing I could possibly say right now that wouldn’t give me all the way away.

He drives with one hand casually resting on the wheel and the heat cranked to high. The cab smells like the cold night air and the expensive cologne he uses. The silence between us isn't the heavy, anxious kind from the beginning of the night. It's the stunned, incredibly loud kind of quiet that happens right after an explosion.

I watch the road, mostly. But at a red light, I let myself look over at the line of his jaw and the way he’s smiling at absolutely nothing.

He catches me instantly.

“I can feel you looking at me, Chloe.”

“I’m not.”

“It’s okay.” The light turns green and he pulls through the intersection, reaching over and taking my hand off my lap like it belongs to him now. “I can’t stop looking at you either.”

I turn my burning face back to the passenger window, and I hold his hand the entire way home.

When he walks me to my door—the exact door he fell through drunk two months ago, the only reason any of this exists—he stands there in the hallway and doesn’t try a single thing. He just looks at me like he can’t quite believe he’s actually here with me.

“That was the best night of my life,” he finally says.

And I, the careful girl with a highly structured plan which definitely did not involve falling for a hockey player, hear myself reply, “Me too.”

He steps in, giving me every second in the world to stop him. I don’t. He kisses me one more time against my own front door. It's soft and unhurried, with both of his massive hands framing my face like I’m something he’s decided to be incredibly careful with. It feels less like the end of this night and more like a promise about the next one.

When he finally pulls back, he rests his forehead against mine and just breathes for a second. I feel it go all the way through me.

“Goodnight, Chloe,” he says softly.

“Goodnight.”

I slip inside the apartment before I do something completely insane, like ask him to stay.

I lean back against the closed wood of the door and press my hand flat over my chest. My heart is physically hammering against my ribs. And here, in the quiet of my own apartment, I finally let myself process the logistical reality of the thing I’ve been actively outrunning since he sat down at my table in the library.

I am in so much trouble.

13

JACK

PLANS ARE OVERRATED

We’re supposed to be watching a movie.

That was the plan. My apartment. The big TV in my room. Some action thing she picked that we completely stopped paying attention to twenty minutes ago. She’s tucked into my side with my arm around her and my fingers in the ends of her hair. I’m honestly content. It's a realization that would have absolutely killed the old version of me. I’ve got a beautiful girl in my bed. Normally I’d be pushing for more, but with her, I’d be perfectly happy to just lay here and do exactly this all night.

Chloe has other ideas.