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He shoves it over my head. For a second I’m in the dark inside it, laughing, and it smells like him and the rink, and then my head comes out the top with my hair full of static. It hangs past the middle of my thighs.
KENNEBECK, across my shoulders.
Everybody pushing past us toward the parking lot sees it. The name, the number, the guy who sat out Friday in a suit and put a Rubin defenseman into the glass tonight. That’s what they know about him.
I’m the only one who knows what’s under his jersey.
And now I’m under it, too.
He picks up both bags, and we go out through the doors into the cold with everybody else.
On Thursday, there’s a pre-Halloween party at a house two streets off campus with a porch full of people in coats, and I get Tessa to come to that, too.
It takes me two days and one direct appeal to her sense of obligation. She says an hour, and I jump for joy, because I’m thrilled she’s coming.
It’s a good night from the second we walk in. Bianca’s found people she knows. Kenzie is telling everybody about the empty-netter. Nash gets handed about nine congratulations in the first ten minutes about Tuesday’s game and hates every one of them. By eleven, he’s on the arm of a couch in the front room with me half on his lap, and his hand keeps ending up under the back of my sweater.
Rafe’s in the kitchen doorway with a cup, doing what he always does, which is stand somewhere and be unimpressed. He’s talking to Koda. He’s talking to a girl. He’s completely normal. Except he knows exactly where Tessa is at all times.
I notice it around eleven-thirty, and then I can’t stop noticing it. Tessa moves from the counter to the window to the hallway, and every single time, within about four seconds, Rafe’s head turns. He looks, and then he looks away, and goes back to whatever he’s doing.
Tessa never looks at him once. Not once, in an hour and a half, which is impossible in a house this size.
“Something’s happening,” I say into Nash’s ear.
“With what?”
“Rafe and Tessa.”
Nash looks over at the kitchen doorway for about a second and a half.
“No,” he says.
“What do you mean, no?”
“He would have told me.”
“Maybe he doesn’t tell you everything.”
Nash gives me a look, and I laugh because I’m the girl who slept with him for weeks and told an entire room we were fuck buddies.
“Okay,” I say. “Whatever. I just think something’s going on.”
Later, I’m pouring a drink. Tessa’s beside me with her arms folded, being told by Kenzie about a professor. Nash is behind me with his hand on my hip. And Rafe comes down the hall with an empty cup and reaches past all of us for the two-liter.
“Move, Tess,” he says.
And everything in me stops.
Because nobody calls her that but me. I’ve lived with her since the last week of August. I thought she knew nobody on campus.
She doesn’t move. She doesn’t look at him either.
“Sorry,” I say. “Do you two know each other?”
“No,” Tessa says. “I have no idea who he is.”
Rafe puts the bottle down.
