Page 164 of Across His Line

“So?” Rafe says again.

“It’s just. You know. The whole thing.”

“There isn’t a thing.” He says it flat. Not angry. Just like it’s a fact Lucas got wrong.

“I just didn’t want you blindsided, man.”

“I’m not.”

I finish my laces. I stand up, wobbling, on the frozen ground by the fire, and turn around. They’re both looking at me. Lucas looks like he wants the snowbank to swallow him.

“It’s okay,” I say.

Rafe looks at me.

And I watch him read it. It isn’t Emma didn’t do anything. It isn’t I don’t care. It’s I can handle Emma.

He knows the difference. I see him know it.

He nods. He doesn’t say anything else about it. He lets me have it.

So, I can skate. Sort of. My grandma took me to the public rink downtown twice when I was ten, and I spent most of both times holding onto the wall, and then a boy from my class told me I looked like a baby deer, and I never wanted to go back. So I step out onto the shoveled rectangle like it’s a floor that might move, which it does, and I hold my arms out a little, and I go forward, slow, in short scrapes.

I don’t fall. That’s the most I can say.

And then Rafe gets on the ice.

I’ve seen him play in college. Twice. A rink with a crowd and a scoreboard and his name across his back. I’ve seen him on a TV screen in my head every time Kylie talks about a game. I’ve never seen this. He isn’t playing. He’s just playing. He steps over the snowbank and onto the ice and he’s gone, like the ice was waiting for him. He picks up a puck off the end of Lucas’s stick before Lucas knows it’s gone. Lucas swears and comes after him. Rafe lets him get close. Then he pulls the puck back between his own skates, around behind him, and out the other side, and Lucas goes right past him into the snowbank.

“Fuck you,” Lucas says from the snowbank.

Rafe laughs out loud across the ice in the cold with his breath going up white. It isn’t the almost thing at the corner of his mouth. It’s a real laugh, the whole thing, and I’ve heard it twice in my life, both times on his couch, and both times it surprised him.

This time it doesn’t surprise him. He’s just happy out here on a frozen lake with a puck and a friend in a snowbank, he’s just happy.

The other guys notice him.

Rafe does it again. Lucas comes out of the snowbank and goes after him, and Rafe puts the puck right through his legs, skates around him, and picks it up on the other side. Lucas throws his stick. It slides across the ice. Rafe steps over it without looking down.

And then he turns, and he comes toward me too fast. He’s coming straight at me across the ice with the puck on his stick, and my whole body goes tight, old and automatic, bracing for it—

And he goes around me.

Just around. A circle. A big, slow, easy circle, with me in the middle of it, the puck on the end of his stick the whole time like it’s attached by a string. Once. Twice. He doesn’t look at the puck. He looks at me.

I laugh. I can’t help it. He’s showing off. He’s obviously showing off.

“Are you done?”

He goes around again. “No.”

And on the fourth time around, he flips the puck up off the ice with the blade of his stick, and catches it on the blade, and bounces it there, once, twice, three times, without looking, still circling, still looking at me.

“Oh my God,” I say. “You’re obnoxious.”

“You’re impressed.”

I am. I’m so impressed I can feel it in my face.