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“Proud of you, bud,” he says into my ear, and he means it, but it’s empty to me.
My side burns. I focus on letting out a breath before I turn blue. That stretch of skin doesn’t feel like the rest of me. It mostly stopped hurting a couple of years ago, but I still remember what it felt like. I make myself lift my arm and put my hand on his back and pat him twice, because that’s what you do.
“Thanks, Dad.”
He lets go. And over his shoulder, three feet away, there’s Kylie with her popcorn under her arm, watching the two of us, smiling at me like it’s the nicest thing she’s ever seen.
31
Rude.
Kylie
I’m standing with my stupid popcorn bag under my arm, watching a grown man wrap his arms around Nash, who is wider than he is, and it’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen. Wade says something into his ear. Nash doesn’t say anything back for a second, and then he pats his dad twice on the back, and they come apart. Nash’s face does something quick, there and gone, and his hand goes to his side.
He took a hundred hits tonight. He went into the boards so hard in the first period that Paige screamed. He got cross-checked and cross-checked somebody and sat in a box and got grabbed by the jersey by a man in a black jacket in front of a thousand people. So if Nash Kennebeck is standing in a lobby with a sore rib and a bad attitude, I’m not going to push.
“So,” Wade says to me. “Kylie. You a hockey person?”
“I’m learning.” I hold up my popcorn. “I know what a center is. I know what icing is now, because Koda explained it four times.”
“That’s more than his mother ever learned.” He grins. He has the same mouth as Nash, which is a weird thing to notice about somebody’s father. “You know he used to sleep in his shoulder pads?”
“Dad.”
“Six years old. Wouldn’t take them off. He’d get in bed in them with his mouthguard in.”
“Mouthguard in?”
“Mouthguard in. I’d go in at ten at night, and there he’d be, flat on his back, pads on, staring at the ceiling like he had a game in the morning.” He’s laughing at his own story before he gets to the end of it. “Which he did not. It was a Tuesday.”
Nash won’t look at me. He’s standing there with his bag on his shoulder, and I’m going to think about six-year-old Nash sleeping in his mouthguard for the rest of my life.
“What are you guys doing?” Wade says to him. “Team thing? You want food?”
“There’s a thing at the rink,” Nash says. “Then I don’t know.”
“I’ll come to the thing for twenty minutes,” Wade says, “and then I’m going to bed, because I’m fifty-one and I drove five hours today.”
He doesn’t ask me anything, and that’s okay, because I’m going out with the girls. “Well,” I say, “it was so nice to meet you. Truly. Because of the mouthguard.”
Wade shakes my hand again like we’re closing a deal. At the rail, I had butter on my fingers and wasn’t paying attention. This time I am. The middle of his palm doesn’t feel like a hand. It’s smooth and shiny and tight, like the skin was pulled over it and shrink-wrapped, and there’s a ridge where it meets the normal skin at the base of his thumb. When he lets go, I glance down, and the back of his wrist has the same shine, pale and slick, disappearing up into his jacket sleeve. Some kind of burn, old and healed.
“Kylie,” he says warmly. “Pleasure.”
“Bye,” I say to Nash.
He doesn’t say anything.
I’m at the doors when I look back. Wade has his hand on the back of Nash’s neck again, talking, steering him toward the cookie table, and Nash is nodding. He’s exhausted. He just played a hockey game, his dad drove five hours, and his coach grabbed him in front of everybody.
By the time I get back to Corvin, Kenzie is already in my room, cross-legged on my bed, talking to Tessa, who is answering in full sentences, which I note. Paige walks in a minute later in a tiny top and immediately looks at Tessa. “You should come out with us.”
Tessa looks at me for rescue, then down. “No. Thanks, though.”
Paige watches her, and I already know what Paige is thinking.
“Tessa’s a homebody,” I say cheerfully. “She’d rather curl up with a good book.”
