Page 22 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
“Yeah, but it was a good shot. Next time, it’ll go in.”
After dinner, we do the dishes. I wash. She dries. Then we settle down in the living room, and I help her finish the crossword. The evening sun peeks under the tree line, casting the sky in shades of purple and blue.
On the mantel, where they’ve been since I was ten, sit the photographs. Mom put them there after we moved in. The story of my life. Me at eight, gap-toothed holding a hockey stick taller than I am. Mom and Dad’s wedding—a courthouse photo, both of them laughing at something off camera. Dad in his gear at Sutton Arena, leaning against the boards with one glove off, looking like a man who thought every morning was a gift.
It’s funny. I’ve looked at the picture a hundred times. But sometimes, it feels like I’m seeing it for the first time. Michael Benson. Dark hair like mine. Blue eyes like mine. The jawline I see in the mirror every morning.
He was thirty-one when he died. I’m thirty-one now. He made it exactly this far and no further.
He played at Sutton Arena back when it was still a minor-league-affiliate rink, before the Blue Ox went full NHL. Practiced there, loved the ice there.
Saturday, I’ll stand on that ice. The same ice where he stood. The ice he loved.
The last rays of sun finally drop below the horizon, and the golden light of the living room bleeds out into the dark through the windows.
I think back to the gala, to the bracelet in my jacket pocket. Back to practice today, to me taking my anger out on the ice. To the cold drive home after dropping off Everly a few nights ago.
The problem isn’t that I’m angry. The problem isn’t that she said no. The problem isn’t even that I deserved the no, that I earned it at twelve and reinforced it at fourteen.
The problem is that I’d trade everything—my contract, my stats, every goal I’ve ever scored—to go back to that elevator. To that dark. To the two minutes before the lights stuttered on and the girl in the darkness vanished.
For a chance at a clean slate with someone who doesn’t see my past or a number on a jersey.
I’d go back and I’d say: My name is Beckett. I’m the worst version of a man who’s trying to be better. I’m sorry for things I haven’t told you about yet. Can we stay in the dark a little longer?
But you don’t get to go back. Mom said so. The ice said so.
And maybe they’re all right.
Four
Everly
I’m playing a losing game against a blank screen. The cursor’s a cheater—it’s been blinking at me, menacingly, for the last forty-seven minutes while I develop dry eye. I give in and shut my eyes.
Ugh. Another round to the blank page.
It’s been like this since Tuesday. The blank page winning, doing fist pumps and leaving me slumped at my desk like a deflated pool float, hair piled into a messy bun inside my fuzzy hooded blanket, and stacks of half-empty mugs at the edge of my desk growing new lifeforms.
My research wall devours the space above my desk—a floor-to-ceiling collage of photos, articles, sticky notes, and red string that makes me look like the subject of a future Netflix documentary. Hockey plays. Xcel Center photos. A glossary of terms I cobbled together when I started writing hockey romance.
And then there’s Beckett Benson.
His section colonizes the right third. Action shots clipped from games. Magazine clippings. A printed timeline of the doping scandal. Notes in my handwriting:
Defensive style—patient, reads the play, positions himself between threat and goal.
And underneath, scrawled in red marker from a night I’d mainlined too much coffee:
Why can’t I make him real on the page???
That was before the gala. Before the elevator. Before I said no to cookies and watched his face slam shut like a vault door.
Now every photo has shifted. The action shots are no longer just a specimen pinned under glass—they’re of a man who’s haunted by a past he can’t outrun. The timeline is no longer just a plot structure but a culmination of the worst moments of someone’s life. His life.
My laptop glows with Ice Cold Heart, due in eleven weeks. My editor Margot’s last email has taken up permanent residence in my anxiety center.
The hero reads as emotionally distant. Almost clinical. Like you’re writing him from behind glass. Where’s the man underneath? Where’s the thing that makes him ache? Find that, and you have your book.
