Page 18 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
I close my eyes, and I can still see it. Vinyl banners dangling from the walls. The cold scent of chemicals. The sun pouring over the ice from the horizontal windows at the top of the arena. The whole team, decked out in blue, swarmed the ice like sharks.
“I walked in during the middle of practice, and it took all of two seconds for Beckett to spot me. He sprayed ice in my face. And then he told me to ‘stick to the stands.’ I was…humiliated. I didn’t know what to do, so I just ran. Stowed away in the hall and waited for practice to end. A few minutes later, Beckett showed up and found me with mascara running down my face and my hands shaking. He said, ‘I got benched. Happy now?’” My fingers tighten around my mug. “Like I was the problem. Like my pain was an inconvenience to his ice time.”
I take a breath.
“I know he was only fourteen. I know kids are terrible. But Julia, I can still hear him saying it. I hear it every time someone says his name.”
“And this is your pen pal.”
“This is my pen pal.” The man whose words follow me for days, make me feel like someone important. “I don’t understand. I really don’t.”
“You never put the pieces together?” Julia asks. “Nothing in those letters made you stop and wonder? He signs it B.B., for Pete’s sake.”
I slump back against the couch, dragging a hand over my face. “No. They were…they weren’t like that. They didn’t have personal details. They were…more like therapy. When the first letter came, it was just telling me how my book made him feel. How the words spoke something that seemed to come from his own heart. After that, after I wrote back, we just sort of kept writing. The letters were almost philosophical, in a way. Vulnerable. Honest. The kind of honest that spills out fast and unedited. As if…he was discovering something.”
“Like what?”
“Himself.” I stare at the ceiling. “But nothing, never in my wildest dreams was there anything that made me think the writer might be Beckett Benson.”
“Everly—”
“Why couldn’t it be someone else?” My voice comes out thin. Pathetic. “Why couldn’t my anonymous pen pal be, I don’t know, a schoolteacher? A firefighter? A cheesemonger?—”
“A cheesemonger?”
“—or literally anyone other than the one person on earth who represents everything hockey took from me.”
“I’m sorry, love.”
“You want to know the cherry on top?” Or maybe the frosting would be more fitting. “He ended up driving me home. My dad put him up to it, and I had to accept when I couldn’t get an Uber. He was…perfectly civil. He even offered to go get us cookies. Cookies, Julia.” I drop my head, the very memory sucking away my energy. “I don’t know what to do.” My voice is a whisper. “The next time I get one of his letters.”
“Evie, you can’t let him find out.” Her voice shifts. Takes on that careful, measured quality she uses before she delivers a closing argument. Julia the attorney. Julia who weighs evidence and wins.
“Of course.”
“No, Everly. Listen. To. Me.” Each word lands separately, deliberate. “He can never find out that you are Sutton Blake. He can never find out that you’ve been reading his letters.”
“I know?—”
“Because if he finds out, he won’t just be hurt. He’ll be destroyed. You read what he wrote. He already believes people only value him for what he does. He already believes vulnerability gets punished. If he discovers that the one person he trusted with his real self is the coach’s daughter who blames him for her broken family, who studied him for a novel?—”
“I didn’t study him for a?—”
“It won’t matter what it was. It’ll matter what it looks like. And what it looks like is the worst possible confirmation of everything he already believes about himself. And if he takes it to the press, if anybody finds out, you’re going to look like the bad guy here. And your career will be in shambles.”
The words land in my chest like dropped anchors. Because she’s right. Of course she’s right. Julia is always right when you desperately need her to be wrong.
“So what do I do?”
“You keep the secret. You maintain distance. You for sure do not eat a cookie with him. You keep your head down and write your book, turn it in to Margot, and you move on with your life.”
“And the letters?”
“You keep writing back as S.B. You keep it warm but professional. You do not let it get more personal than it already is. It’ll blow over; he’ll stop writing eventually.”
“And if he does find out?”
“He won’t.” Her mug thumps against the counter. “Because you’re not going to let him.”
