Page 97 of Filthy Goalie
I stood up and I walked to the door.
Maple said, “Where are you going.”
I said, “Back to my apartment. I have a proper proposal to actually plan.”
Maple said, “Knox.”
I stopped at the door. Turned around. Met her eyes across the diner.
She said, “The proper proposal. The string lights and the porch. That’s still happening.”
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “Good. Because I’m going to wear my grandmother’s dress and I’m going to cry when you ask me, andI’m going to say yes in front of everyone, and then we’re going to have the whole town over for cake and coffee.”
I said, “Okay.”
She said, “And then I’m going to marry you.”
I said, “I know.”
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On a Saturday morning at the diner three years after Day 1, with Knox at booth four, his three-year-old son Caleb on his lap, a half-eaten piece of apple pie on the counter, and Maple at the espresso machine — and an announcement Caleb is not supposed to be making yet.
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While you’re here— Cassie Wood writes the Frostbite Falls Hockey Club series, ten interconnected steamy hockey romances set in the small Minnesota lake town that built itself a hockey team and, in doing so, built itself a family.
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27
MAPLE
Iwoke up alone in Knox’s apartment.
The bed was still warm where he had been, and the morning light was pale gold coming through the curtain—not sunrise anymore, but the soft light that happens when the sun is already up and you’ve slept past the beginning of the day. I could hear him moving around in the kitchen. The clink of a mug. The whisper of the refrigerator opening. He was making coffee. The familiar sound of the espresso machine—the hiss, the pull, the small metallic clink of the portafilter being set down. He was making coffee the way I made coffee. He had learned it from me.
I lay there for a moment in the quiet and felt the weight of the ring on my left hand. Felt it the way I would feel gravity—constant, real, not something you questioned. It was there. He had put it there. I had said yes. Not once, but multiple times now. Yes in the diner at sunrise. Yes on the porch with the string lights. Yes in his arms when he asked if I was sure.
I was going to marry this man.
The thought made my chest tight in a way that was not bad, was not fear, was just—everything. Too much and not enough and exactly right.
The footsteps came back from the kitchen.
I could feel him before I heard him. He had that effect—not loud, just present. The way a person’s presence takes up space in a room. He had changed the architecture of my life just by existing in it.
The bedroom door opened.
I turned my head just in time to see him come in with a mug in each hand—black coffee, still steaming, the kind we both loved. He was wearing the thermal shirt that he slept in, the one that clung to his shoulders in a way that made my mouth go dry. He was not wearing anything else. I could see the line of his abdomen, the definition of his chest, the particular way his body moved when he was trying not to wake me. I could see the tattoo on his left forearm that he had never explained but that I had spent a lot of time studying—a number, a date, and a name in old cursive:beloved,Caleb,21,2013. His brother permanently etched onto his skin.
