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I get up.

I don't plan it. I'm just standing, all of a sudden, in my T-shirt and boxers, the carpet rough under my bare feet, in the gap between the beds. The cold air from the window hits me all down one side. I can see him now, sort of. The shape of him under the blanket. The pale line of his face turned toward me.

He sits up.

We're close. The beds are close. His knees are almost touching my thighs. I can feel the heat coming off him, which is crazy, because the room is freezing.

"Get back in your bed," he says. Low.

"Make me," I say. Lower.

I lean down.

I don't touch him. I put one hand on the mattress next to his hip, and I lean down until I'm right there, until there's an inch of air between his mouth and mine, and I can feel his breath on my lips. Mint. Hotel toothpaste. He's breathing fast now. He's not hiding it anymore. Neither am I.

He doesn't move. He doesn't pull back. He doesn't lean in either. He just sits there, so still, the goalie stillness, and I can feel what it costs him to stay that still, and I know—I know—that if I moved one more inch, he'd let me.

"Tell me to go back to bed," I whisper.

It's a dare. It's a stupid dare. I want him to say no. I want him to grab the front of my shirt and pull me down.

He says, "Go to sleep, Theo."

It's the first time he's ever said my name.

My first name. In the dark. Quiet and rough and completely sure, and before my brain even gets there, my body's already doing it.

I stand up. I turn around. I get back into my bed and lie down on my back and pull the blanket up to my chin.

I just did it. He said go to sleep and I went. No mouth. No make me. No fight. I lay down like a dog that's been told bed.

I stare up at the ceiling. The light slides across it and goes away.

On the other side of the gap, I hear him lie back down. I hear him let out a breath, long and shaky, like he's been holding it this whole time.

My hands are shaking under the blanket. My whole body is humming like I've got a fever. I'm hard, and I hate it, and I don't move, because he told me to go to sleep.

I don't sleep.

At four-thirty, in the dark, I hear him get up. Quiet. I hear him get down on the floor between the beds to stretch, and I lie there with my eyes shut and listen to him breathe, a foot and a half from my face, and I pretend I'm asleep, and he pretends he believes it.

8

DANE

Saturday we lose 2–1 in overtime, and it's my fault.

It's a nothing shot. A wrister from the half-wall by a third-line Thorne Valley kid who's just trying to get it on net so he can change. It hits my glove and I don't close it, and it drops behind me and trickles over the line, and the building in Hollis loses its mind.

I sit in the crease for a second after the horn. I can't remember the last time I didn't close my glove.

"Shake it off, D." Jace raps my pads on his way past. "One shot."

"Yeah."

In the handshake line I go behind Lindqvist again. I don't decide to. I'm just there.

He doesn't look back at me. He hasn't looked at me all day. He came down to breakfast before me and sat with Wes and two of the freshmen, which nobody told him he could do, and nobody told him he couldn't. He rode the bus to the rink with his hood up. At the morning skate, he didn't chirp anybody. He kept his eyes on the ice.