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I don’t have to look. I know the shape of it, the hour of it. Dad. It’ll be Logan this time — no, Logan was last week — Noah, then, some kid in some rink in a state I don’t live in, my father’s arm at the edge of the frame like a signature on a life I’m not in. And I know, without looking, that under the photo there’ll be nothing, because he never writes anything, because the money already says it for him: I pay for your life. I’m in it whether you want me or not. You can keep the wall up all you like; you’re standing on ground I bought.

The want goes out of me like someone pulled the plug.

Because here’s what dating means, and I’ve done the whole equation a hundred times. Dating means staying. Staying means being chosen and choosing back, means handing somebody the exact thing my father proved gets used against you. I let a man all the way in once — no wall, no terms, loved him with everything a kid’s got — and it turned out he had a whole second family the entire time and I was the last to know. He’s a photo on my nightstand now. He’s a number on a spreadsheet I can’t wait to zero out. He’s the reason I leave first, every time, and the reason I can’t afford the one thing that’s ever made me want to stay.

And the draft — the draft is the only door out of owing him. If I let this girl pull my head off the ice, if I blow June because I couldn’t keep a want in its box, then I don’t get drafted, and if I don’t get drafted I never pay him back, and I’m on his string for the rest of my life. She doesn’t just cost me the draft. She costs me the one thing that gets me free of my father. That’s what’s in this bed with us, and she can’t see it, and I’m not going to show her.

She’s waiting. She floated it and pulled it back and now she’s gone very still, waiting to see what I do with it.

So I give her the true thing. The sayable half.

“We can’t,” I say. Quiet, into the gray. “You know we can’t. I’ve got the draft. Camp’s in June, there’s a scout at half my games, and there’s no room in the next five months for anything that isn’t hockey — not a girlfriend, not a schedule that isn’t mine, not one distraction I can afford. My whole life’s riding on the next five months. My mom’s. And there’s a — “ I stop. This is more than I meant to give. I give a piece of it anyway, because I don’t lie to her. “There’s a debt I have to clear, and the draft’s the only thing that clears it. I can’t screw it up. Not for anything.”

All true. Every word.

I just don’t say the other part — the part the photo on my nightstand is still glowing about — where not now is a coward’s word for not ever. Not with anyone. Because I watched what love costs and I’m not paying it.

And here’s the thing I can’t work out, the thing I’ll turn over the rest of the day: she relaxes.

I brace for her to argue — she argues everything, she’d argue with the tide. Instead the tension goes out of her against my chest. She almost sags, with something that looks, impossibly, like relief. Like I just took something off her. Like we can’t was the answer she was hoping for and couldn’t say she was hoping for.

“No, you’re right,” she says, and there’s a lightness in it that isn’t performed, that’s real, and I don’t understand it at all. “God, obviously. The draft. Your whole life. What was I even — yeah. This is fine. This is exactly enough.”

I don’t get it. I told a girl no, and she went soft with gratitude for it. In my experience, no is the word people brace against. She leaned into it. Like I’d handed her an exit she was too polite to ask for. I add it to the list of things about her I keep getting wrong, and I promise myself I’ll work it out later, and I already know I won’t.

“This is exactly enough,” she said.

Neither of us believes it. But it’s a good lie, and we’re both good at those, and we lie there in the gray not dating and not stopping and not saying the sixth term out loud.

Then her phone alarm goes off, and the manager comes all the way back online, and she’s up and finding her leggings and rebuilding Margo Ashby piece by piece, and I lie there and watch her do it and hate, a little, that she has to.

I walk her down to the side door because I can’t help it, and outside it’s spitting the kind of half-snow that can’t commit, and her car’s at the curb with a skin of it on the windshield.

“Don’t,” she says, already reading me. “I have a scraper now. I learned my lesson. I’m a whole functional adult with car-weather equipment.”

“Get in. Start it. I’ve got it.”

“Theo —”

“You’re going to be late arguing with me about four seconds of snow. Go.”

She goes. She gets in and starts it, and I clear the windshield with my forearm while it warms up, four seconds, nothing, and through the glass I catch her watching me with that look I still can’t name and still don’t try to. Then she rolls the window down two inches, because apparently she’s not done.

“For the record,” she says, “you’re a lot, and you cheat at the whole grumpy thing, and I don’t know what to do with any of it.” A beat. Then, quieter, the bright gone: “Thanks. For the — for not lying to me. Even the part where it would’ve been easier.”

“I don’t lie.”

“Yeah.” Something crosses her face, quick, gone. “I’m starting to get that about you.”

She rolls the window up. She pulls out. I stand there in the spitting snow and watch her taillights to the end of the block, because you don’t leave till they’re gone, and then I go back up to a room that smells like her and a phone I still haven’t touched and a spreadsheet with my father’s name all over it.

The draft’s the whole reason. That’s what I tell myself.

I almost believe it.

I’m getting worse at believing it.

Chapter 7