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“So, what's everyone doing with their week off?” he asks, sitting on the bench three lockers down. “I'm heading home. My mom's already planning enough food to feed the entire fucking team.”

“Bring some back,” Camden calls from across the room.

“Fuck off. I'm eating all of it.”

A few guys laugh.

Cole looks over at me. “What about you, Larkin? Heading back to Minnesota?”

“Nah. Staying in LA.”

My answer comes too fast. I already know it's too fast the second the words left my mouth, so I reach for my gear like my elbow pads need urgent tactical attention.

"Whole week off and you're not going home?"

"Not this time." I say it easy because I've practiced the line. It lands easy too as the attention moves to Camden's flight with a layover in Denver. The guys start making their way out of the locker room.

Jordan's attention doesn't slide.

He's got one skate blade resting across his knee, sharpening stone forgotten in his hand, and he's watching me with an expression that isn't teasing yet. Just waiting to see if I'll hand him an opening.

"What?" I ask, because the silence is worse than whatever he's going to say.

"Didn't say anything."

"You're doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you don't say anything real loud."

"You never go home," he says. Not a question. Just a fact he's apparently been sitting on for a while, deciding when to say it out loud.

"Not really a home to go to."

"Your parents still there?"

"Jordan."

"I'm not trying to—"

"I know you're not." I zip my bag harder than the zipper actually requires, the teeth catching, and I yank it again until it gives. "I just don't want to do this right now."

It comes out sharper than it usually does. I usually have a joke ready to soften the door before I close it. Some line about Minnesota winters or my mother's cooking, something that makes the subject change feel like my idea instead of a wall going up. This time there's no joke. Just the wall, fast and obvious enough that even Jordan, who's pushed on this before and backed off polite every time, looks briefly startled by how hard it landed.

"Okay," he says, quiet. "Okay, man. But I know there is more to it. Don't tell me if you don't want to, but tell someone."

He grabs his own bag, claps me once on the shoulder on his way past, the kind of touch that says no hard feelings without needing the words. I know, somewhere underneath the relief of that, that the harder I close a door, the more obvious it is there's something behind it worth closing a door over. I know it and I do it anyway.

I feel like garbage about it the whole drive to Quinn's, replaying how fast I shut him down, how unlike my usual deflect-with-a-joke routine it was. Jordan's never gotten anything but charm out of me. But this subject.

My dad left the spring after. Mom stayed. I haven't been back in three years, and every time someone asks why, I give them a lighthearted response and walk away.

I park in the spot outside Quinn's building that's starting to feel like mine.

When I knock on her door, she opens it with a smile. “Hi!”

“Hey, Princess.”