Page 16 of In the Crease

I took the sweatshirt.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Won’t you be cold?”

He stood in front of me in his skates, wearing a T-shirt under a long-sleeved shirt and nothing else. He seemed unbothered by this.

It was warm and soft and it smelled like him—slightly sweaty and warm and the same scent I’d noticed in his bathroom yesterday and told myself I wasn’t noticing—and it hit me mid-thigh so I pulled the collar up and kept my eyes on the ice and my face completely neutral.

He smiled at my reaction—slow and real, starting at the corner of his eye before his mouth caught up.

“Not while I’m playing. It feels good.”

My brain snagged on that word and wouldn’t let go.

Then he laughed at my response. “I have a coat in the truck for later.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Mmhm.” The corner of his mouth turned up just slightly before he turned and skated back out.

I was wearing Ryan Lindqvist’s sweatshirt at a frozen pond in Minnesota in February, and I was going to be extremely normal about that.

Totally normal. I said this while pulling the collar up to my nose and inhaling like a person with zero self-control.

God dammit.

The light dipped, and the fire was stoked up, and the hockey became a bonfire in about ten minutes without any coordination.

Jensen came to stand beside me at the fire’s edge. He was quieter than the others, someone who seemed to save his words for when they counted.

“Good ice this year,” he said, and went to get another beer. “You really don’t skate?”

“You guys looked great out there. And, no, I live in Arizona. Not much need for it growing up. Griffin is the skater,” I replied.

We made some more small talk before someone called him over and he excused himself.

I stood alone and looked at the dark pond. The moon and the firelight gave it a shine. The fire was warm at my back and the cold was real in front of me. Griffin’s voice carried from across the bank, easy, loud, completely himself. And somewhere in the group behind me, Ryan was there, probably not saying much, which I’d come to understand was not the same as not noticing everything.

I inhaled the collar of the sweatshirt I had on discreetly for maybe the hundredth time. I was standing at a bonfire in Minnesota wearing the sweatshirt of a man I’d met twenty-four hours ago, and it was cozy and it smelled like him, and I was a hell of a lot warmer since putting it on over my clothes.

It was just a little fascination. Crushing on Ryan was pointless. In April he’d be somewhere else. Griffin too. This whole group would scatter, never doing exactly this again. Standing here with the ice and the birch trees and the fire at my back, it landed differently than it had as something I just knew. Their group had something different about it. Older, maybe, or just more settled. Like they actually knew who they were.

I was still standing there when Kowalski appeared at my elbow. He was friendly enough—talking about the ice, the season, asking where I went to school, the usual. He was cute and knew it, which was fine. I smiled and answered his questions and let him do his thing.

“ASU,” I said. “Pre-PT.”

“No kidding. So you actually know what you’re talking about when you watch these guys skate.”

“I know enough.”

“Griffin’s sister.” He said it like he was connecting dots. “He talks about you.”

“Does he.”

“Says you’re the smart one.”

“He’s not wrong.”

He smiled. Moved a half step closer. “You here for the whole weekend?”