Page 42 of Fractured Ice

Sienna

The restaurant is barely contained chaos, which, after an away win, is apparently just what hockey teams do.

Rory and I claimed a booth toward the back before the team fully descended, taking over every table in the place, which means we have a decent view of the entire picture unfolding. Half the players are crammed into a section of tables they've clearly just pushed together without asking anyone's permission. A coach at the far end is pretending to study the menu. Someone's already knocked over a drink. The local college students occupying the rest of the restaurant are mostly standing, probably waiting for to-go orders, watching the whole thing with a combination of amusement and mild alarm that I fully understand.

"Is it always like this?" I ask.

"Pretty much." Rory steals one of my fries. "The win helps. You don't want to see them after a loss."

Our food arrives and we eat and watch the chaos. It's the most comfortable I've felt on this trip, which probably says something about my social skills. Rory starts talking about Jace's performance, a specific sequence in the third period where he made a decision in goal that changed the whole momentum of the game, and I'm listening, then I'm thinking about the third period, and then somehow I'm the one talking.

"Ethan made three plays in the second that set up the shift," I say, remembering Rory explaining the intricacies of many of the plays to me, although I only really recall the ones involving Ethan, for some reason. "The first one was the defensive read near the blue line, where he took himself out of the offensive equation to cut off their top forward before the pass came. Nobody was looking at that. Everyone was watching Knox. But Ethan positioned himself wrong, on purpose, and then wasn't wrong, and it changed where their guy thought he could go." I reach for my own fries. "And then the behind-the-back pass in transition, which looked like a mistake and wasn't, it was already anticipating where Luca would be twenty feet later. And the sequence right before the goal, the way he pulled their defenseman wide⁠—"

I stop.

Rory is looking at me.

"You’re really good at remembering details," she says.

"It's my job."

"You described three separate Ethan plays with more enthusiasm than I've ever heard you use about anything."

"I'm covering him. It's relevant."

"You sound impressed."

"I'm professionally engaged."

"You sound impressed and you don't want to be," Rory says. She's smiling like she's right and she knows it and she's going to let me figure that out on my own schedule. "Which is fine. He's very good."

"He's fine," I say, and immediately hear how that sounds. "He's good. At hockey. It's useful for the profile."

"Of course."

I eat my fries. "He's annoying."

"Mm."

"He's been annoying for as long as I can remember. He knocked my science project into a lake in sixth grade. He showed up at every social event I attended in high school and somehow made himself the center of attention. He ran into me with a kickball and then told me I looked good wet." I pause. "He has apparently been with half the women in a three-state radius."

"The lake," Rory says. "Did he ever tell you he went back for it?"

"He mentioned that."

"He felt terrible about it for weeks. I know because Knox told me." She tilts her head. "A lot of the things you're describing sound more like him being a disaster than him being bad."

"There's a difference?"

"I think there might be."

Jace appears, dropping into the booth beside Rory and immediately pulling her against his side, pressing a kiss to her temple, and she goes into him like it's the natural state of things, easy and entirely unselfconscious. Ethan slides into the seat next to me a second later.

"Good game," I tell them generally.

"Great game," Jace says, already looking at Rory rather than me.

Ethan and I fall into the slightly awkward rhythm we always fall into when we're face to face and haven't had an argument to structure the conversation. He asks if I got enough game footage. I tell him mostly. He asks if the restaurant is what I expected. I tell him I didn't have expectations about the restaurant specifically, since I just went where the team went.