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I turn around and go back before anybody sees my face.

Barnes cheats for the laugh. He holds onto the back of Palinski’s hoodie on a breakaway, and when Palinski complains, Koda mentions how there are no refs.

I put Barnes into the snowbank twice, once for messing with Palinski and once because he was standing there.

When Barnes goes down, his skates fly in the air and he grunts loudly. I start laughing at him because I don’t know how his body ended up in that position. My lungs are burning, laughing at Barnes in a snowbank, and I don’t remember the last time I laughed out on the ice. I think it might have been here when I was twelve.

And every time somebody scores or wastes my fucking time, my head goes to the fire.

She’s always there, watching and talking to Kylie. I know that she’s cold because she’s been pulling her sleeves down over her hands for twenty minutes. Once, she’s standing at the edge of the snowbank with her arms wrapped around herself, watching Kennebeck and me run a two-on-one against three of the hometown guys like she’s watching it on my TV, and she calls out he’s already going before Kennebeck even moves.

She isn’t wrong. He was.

I look over to see if she saw him score. She did.

“She’s still there, Waleska,” Barnes says, skating past me backward. “She didn’t go anywhere. I checked.”

“Piss off, Barnes.”

Around two, Palinski skates up next to me while Koda is trying to dig the net out of the snowbank. He doesn’t say anything at first. He just leans on his stick and looks at the fire at Tessa, who’s holding her hands out toward it.

“Could’ve just said you liked her,” he says. “On the twenty-third. When I asked where she was. You could’ve just said.”

“What is it to you?”

He shrugs. “I don’t get why she likes you.” He grins. “That’s all.”

That’s fair, but I don’t give it to him. I just stare at him as he skates off.

As soon as the next game starts, I skate hard and rush him into the snowbank.

Tessa is standing at the edge of the ice when I look over. I leave Kennebeck to it and skate over to her. She’s shivering. Her nose is red. She’s got her hands shoved all the way up inside the sleeves of her coat.

“I can’t feel my face,” she says.

I pull my glove off with my teeth. I take her hand out of her sleeve and put the glove on it. It’s about four sizes too big for her. She looks at it, then at me.

Then she leans up and kisses me. Quick. Easy. On the mouth. With her hand in my glove on my chest.

She forgot. I can see it the second she pulls back. Her eyes go wide. She forgot anybody was here. And from the bench by the fire, very loud, in a voice that goes all the way across the lake and probably all the way to the farmhouse:

“Tessa Canten!”

Tessa smiles and closes her eyes. “Sorry.”

I shake my head and kiss her again. “Don’t ever be sorry about that.”

Kylie stands up on the bench by the fire with a hot dog in one hand and the blanket falling off her shoulders, pointing at us with the hot dog.

“What the fuck?”

Tessa turns around very slowly with her face gone redder than her nose. “Kylie—”

“Tessa, what the fuck!”

Kennebeck skates up behind me.

“You seriously didn’t know?” he says toward the bench.