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She shakes her head and shrugs with an easy expression. “No.”
I look back down. He’s still staring at her.
“Not at all?” I ask, looking back at her.
“Not at all,” she says.
The puck drops, and Nash wins it. There’s a scrum on the boards, sticks and two other bodies, and for three seconds nothing happens, and then Nash comes out of it with the puck and everybody else doesn’t.
Rafe starts a fight in the middle of it. Gloves drop, and Nash is still moving the puck, not realizing what’s going on behind him. The guys start piling on each other. Nash and Koda get there fast, pulling guys off Rafe. Rafe goes after another guy.
I look at Tessa.
She looks at me. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Neither do I,” I say.
They win 3–1. Koda does something with his stick that gets him yelled at by his own bench.
When it’s over, they do the thing where they line up and tap the goalie’s pads, and then they raise their sticks to the student section, and Nash finds me in about a second and a half.
He doesn’t smile. He just looks at me, taps his stick twice on the ice, and follows his team down the tunnel.
We wait in the concourse by the trophy case with everybody’s families.
Tessa leaves. She got her hour and then some, and she says she’s got a lab at eight, so she hugs me goodbye, which she has never done, and she’s gone before I can say anything about it.
The guys come out with wet hair, in their team jackets, bags over their shoulders. Koda comes out first and gets swarmed by four people. Rafe comes out and goes straight past all of us and out the doors into the parking lot without stopping.
Nash comes out last, the way he always does.
He’s got a fresh cut across the bridge of his nose.
“You,” I tell him, “are a fucking asshole.”
“What?”
“On the ice. You’re an asshole on the ice.”
He looks down at me, and something happens at the side of his mouth.
“You like it,” he says.
I nod with a small pout.
He gets his hand around the back of my neck and kisses me, and I get a fistful of his shirt and don’t let him go for slightly longer than is appropriate.
“Your nose.”
“It’s fine,” he says, and takes my bag off my shoulder and puts it on his own.
The doors to the parking lot open, and the wind comes straight in, and I’m in a long-sleeve and nothing else, because I didn’t bring a coat. Again.
Nash looks at me for one second. He drops both bags on the concrete, unzips his, and pulls out his practice jersey.
“Arms up.”
“Nash—”