Page 12 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
BECKETT
I once got two penalties in three seconds against Detroit, so the bar for crashing and burning was already impressively low. But somehow, mistaking bestselling author E.J. Hartley for a server still manages to clear it.
And what’s worse? Watching her walk away as though I don’t even exist. I’m going to be replaying this moment probably for the rest of my life. I’ll die, and I’ll still be thinking about the icy click of her setting that Perrier bottle down on the buffet table. Don’t worry about it.
Yeah. I’m gonna worry about it.
I lean against the bar, watching the line curl through the crowd for her signature. She scrawls a message inside another book, hands it off with a killer smile. In my defense, the author photo on the back of the book I picked up earlier showed a woman with pin-straight dark hair, bold red lipstick, and a leather jacket. It’s stark and edgy and, between you and me, the woman at the signing table looks nothing like that photo. Her hair is short—a dark, choppy bob that frames her jaw. Without the heavy makeup, her face is completely different. Softer. She’s put on glasses for the signing—wire-framed, slightly crooked. They keep sliding down her nose, and she keeps pushing them back up with one finger, and I cannot stop watching it happen.
She’s familiar. Something about the head tilt when she’s listening. The curve of her smile. The slight frown of concentration as she scribbles her name across another page. I know that frown.
She looks up. Our eyes meet across forty feet of ballroom, and now I’m sure I’ve seen her before.
She looks away first.
A hand claps my shoulder hard enough to rearrange my vertebrae.
“Beckett! Have you picked up a book yet?”
Coach Hart. He follows my gaze to the signing table, and his whole face transforms. “She’s fantastic, isn’t she? Crime thrillers. Smart stuff. I keep telling her she should write something with more hockey in it, but?—”
“You know her?”
Coach looks at me like I’ve been hit in the head with a frozen fish. “My daughter. Everly.”
The room tilts.
The smile. The jaw. The head tilt. That unforgettable frown.
Oh no. The last time I saw Everly Hart, she was a round-faced thirteen-year-old, sobbing at Sutton Arena, and I was the monster who put her there.
“That’s…E.J. Hartley is your?—”
“Everly Jean Hartley. E.J.” He’s already moving. “Come on, I’ll reintroduce you properly.”
I would rather wrestle a bear. But Coach’s hand is on my back with the pressure of a man who has been steering reluctant athletes for two decades, and resistance is not an option.
Everly looks up from signing a book. Her smile for her father is warm, genuine, the kind that makes her nose scrunch. Her gaze slides to me, and the temperature drops so fast I half expect to see my breath fogging the air.
“Evie, you remember Beckett Benson.”
“We’ve met.” Two words. Arctic.
“You look”—don’t say different, don’t mention the hair, don’t reference the tray—“great. The books are—congratulations.”
Spectacular, Benson. Give that man a Pulitzer for conversation.
Coach radiates with the blissful ignorance of a man who has never read a room in his life, then he drops a kiss on Everly’s head that makes her eyes close for half a second, and something behind my ribs aches. He retreats into the crowd.
“I didn’t know,” I say. “At the buffet. I genuinely did not?—”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’ve said that.”
“I’m going to keep saying it because repetition is all I’ve got.”
