Page 51 of Cross Ice

“It will be.” He said it simply, not as empty reassurance but as a statement of fact, like he’d already decided. “You were the best one out there tonight, I could tell, even not knowing what I was looking at.”

I closed my eyes. “You’re biased.”

“Extremely,” he agreed. “Doesn’t make it less true.”

We were quiet for a moment. The comfortable kind. Just his breathing on the other end of the line and the silence of someone who didn’t feel the need to fill it.

“Can I ask you something?” he said.

“Anything.”

“Your tattoo… I think you gave me the explanation you give everyone. I want the real one.”

I smiled at the ceiling. “The real one is embarrassing.”

“Good. Tell me anyway.”

I shifted against the headboard, getting comfortable. “I got it the day after I signed my big contract with the Lasers. Not a week after, not when things settled down, the literal next day. I was twenty-five and I’d just gotten everything I’d worked for my entire life. I sat in my apartment that afternoon and realized I was terrified.”

“Of what?”

“Of doing exactly what I’d been doing. Making it to the top and still living like I was nobody. Hiding. Going through the motions of a life without actually living any of it.” I took a deep breath. “So I decided to get the tattoo. As a reminder. One life, and I was wasting mine.”

“That’s not embarrassing,” Evan said. “That’s⁠—”

“I’m getting to the embarrassing part.”

“Mmhm.”

“Miguel came with me. We drove to this tattoo shop downtown, nothing fancy, just a place André recommended, and I was acting very cool about the whole thing. Very unbothered. Very ‘I do this all the time.’”

“You were terrified.”

“I was terrified,” I confirmed. “I’m scared of needles.”

He gasped, then chuckled. “Oh no.”

“The needle touched my skin and I felt the blood drain from my face. Miguel looked at me and said, and I quote, ‘Are you going to pass out?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely not, I’m fine,’ and then I nearly passed out.”

Evan laughed—a real one, the kind I could feel through the phone.

“The artist had to stop. Miguel had to go find orange juice from a market down the street. I had to put my head between my knees in a tattoo chair while my younger brother told me to breathe.” I shook my head. “He never let me forget it. He still brings it up at Christmas.”

“You got a tattoo about living while being afraid of a needle,” Evan said.

“The irony was not lost on me.”

“What changed?” His voice had shifted—still warm, but quieter. Genuinely asking.

“I watched other people do it,” I said. “Griffin. Marco Morelli and Étienne Savard. They were living, actually living, and I was still sitting in my house being careful.” I paused. “I’d had the tattoo for five years and I was still doing exactly what it told me not to do. Half a life. Just the hockey half.”

“And now?”

“And now I’m calling you from a hotel room in Portland after a loss, and it’s the best part of my day.” I said it simply because it was simple. “That’s new.”

The silence that followed was the warm kind.

We talked for another hour, about nothing and everything, the way we’d learned to do. At some point I stopped thinking about the loss and started thinking about Thursday, and by the time we said good night I was almost looking forward to Seattle.