Page 168 of The Lies We Play

Liv isn’t here. She’s in Europe with her mother. The trip was a promise her parents made if she kept her grades up during her first year of college, and Liv kept them up because Liv keeps promises like they’re load-bearing walls.

She is independent in every way that matters until it comes to them. Only child. Miracle baby. Born to parents who had her at forty-five and still look at her as if the world might ask for a refund if she stops being perfect for one second too long.

So she follows the rules.

Most of them.

College first. Family first. No dating.

Definitely, no dating a professional hockey player and his boyfriend, who just finished his second year of law school and has the emotional effect of a locked evidence room.

We don’t fight her about it.

That is the official position.

The unofficial position is that Halston once said, very calmly, while pouring coffee into a travel mug at six in the morning, that if her parents disowned her for having one boyfriend—or two—he would pay for every remaining credit, every apartment, every book, every meal, every damn thing until she never had to ask them for a cent again.

He said it like he was discussing a filing deadline.

Liv threw a bagel at him.

I fell a little more in love with both of them, which was inconvenient, since I had practice in two hours and no emotional bandwidth for revelations before eight a.m.

Today, though, Halston is asleep beside me.

He is on his stomach with one arm tucked under the pillow and the other thrown across my chest, where it has been since we got into bed at four am after the after-party at the team owner’s house in Tribeca. His fingers are loose against my ribs. His face is turned toward me, half-hidden by the pillow, dark hair fallen forward, mouth soft in a way he never lets it be when he is awake.

I don’t move.

There are men who sleep like they trust the room.

Halston doesn't.

Even like this, bare shoulder out from under the sheet, his body has a readiness to it. Watchful in rest. Built for consequence. He stalks through life more than walks, as if every hallway might require an exit strategy and every person might become a liability.

I stare at the ceiling and remember.

We won the Cup.

Game six. Madison Square Garden.

The words are too big to fit inside the room.

I had two assists in the third period and one goal. I was on the ice when the horn went off. I was on the ice when the captain raised the trophy. I had my picture taken with the Cup over my head while my parents stood in the front row.

I don’t remember the last hour and a half of last night.

I remember enough.

I remember the locker room, champagne spraying cold down my neck, guys screaming until their voices broke, gloves and tape and towels on the floor. I remember someone putting the Cup in my hands, and for a second, I had no idea what to do with it. I’d spent my whole life chasing it. Then it was there, dented and silver and real, and all I could think was: I wish Liv could touch it. I wish Halston would stop standing three feet away like wanting something made him guilty.

I remember the owner’s house in Tribeca. Too much glass. Too many people. Music vibrating through my bones. Men I’d never met were clapping my shoulder hard enough to find the bruises from the third period.

Proud.

He never looks proud loudly. With Halston, pride is in the details. His eyes tracking me when someone mentions the goal. His thumb brushes the mouth of his beer bottle when I laugh too hard. The slight shift of his body when a drunk sponsor gets too close to my injured side. Protective without performance. Possessive without asking for credit.

Liv was on my phone for part of it, her face pixelated from some hotel room in Rome or Florence or somewhere with old stone and bad Wi-Fi. She had wet hair and a hotel robe and kept saying, “I’m not crying, the connection is just deeply unsupportive of my dignity.”