Page 20 of In the Crease

Chapter Eight

Maren

I heard him cross the snow behind me before I saw him, footsteps steady and unhurried, and then he was beside me at the waterline, looking out at the dark pond.

My heart rate spiked, sharp and immediate.

I’d known what was happening since he picked me up at the airport. That was the honest version. Not since the waterline, not since the sweatshirt—since we met and he handed me a hat with a moose on it without making anything of it.

I’d been managing it all weekend. Tracking where he was in every room, telling myself to stop, stopping for thirty seconds before starting again. I had a list, which was bad. The set of his jaw when he was thinking, his forearms at the bar when he rolled his sleeves up—I’d had to look at the opposite wall, hard, for a full thirty seconds. The way he’d laughed at something Griffin said and it had been genuine, a full-body laugh. His voice in the truck, low and certain, talking about the pond. The way he’d said both things are true at the same time and meant it. The smell of his bathroom. The way he’d offered me tea and put a towel on the counter and hadn’t made a single thing of any of it.

The sweatshirt I was currently wearing, which smelled exactly like all of that and which I had been emphatically trying not to think about for three hours.

I was eighteen years old and I knew exactly what this was. I also knew it had nowhere to go. He was Griffin’s best friend, he was four months from a draft that would take him somewhere else, and I was standing at the waterline of a frozen pond in the dark choosing to stay there instead of going back to the bonfire where there were other people and less of this inconvenient problem.

I had no good explanation for that last part.

“You’re cold again,” he said.

“I’m okay. You gave me your sweatshirt.” I turned back and smiled at him.

“You still look cold.”

The fire crackled behind us. The cold here was damper, more settled, the ice exhaling into the air just above the surface. From across the bank, I could hear Griffin’s voice, someone laughing. The pond completely still.

“The draft,” I said. “Are you not worried about it, or have you gotten good at not showing it?”

He turned to look at me. “What makes you think it’s one or the other?”

“Griffin gets quieter before big things. You got quieter at dinner last night when he mentioned April. And you’ve been skating harder today every time you come back out.”

I watched him process this. The fact that I’d been tracking it, that I’d read something he hadn’t been showing. He was quiet for a moment.

“I’m not not worried,” he said finally. “I just don’t see the use in carrying it around all the time.”

"Does that work? Just…deciding not to carry it?"

"Most of the time."

I looked at him. The fire was at our backs and the pond was dark in front of us and our breath came out in small clouds between us.

"What do you say when it doesn't?"

He turned to look at me. "What do you mean?"

"When something catches you off guard. What comes out?"

He was quiet for a moment, his jaw working slightly like he was deciding whether to answer.

"Swedish, usually."

"You speak Swedish?"

"Grew up with it. My dad's from Malmö."

"What would you say right now?"

He held my gaze. His shoulders shifted slightly. My heart was going faster than it had any business going.