Page 229 of Across His Line

It’s the truth. That’s fucking stupid. That’s all it ever was. I liked it. I liked the sound the puck made off the tape. I liked the cold. I liked the way the garage smelled after two hours. I liked hitting the corner I was aiming for on the four-hundredth try after missing it three hundred and ninety-nine times. I didn’t care about June. I didn’t know what June was. I just liked it, and I wanted to get better, so I went back out the next day and missed some more.

“Exactly,” she whispers more to herself than to me.

She puts her head back down on my chest.

And I realize she’s talking about herself. Her notebook. Her box with a question mark in it. The forty dollars making it last a week. Whatever she’s going to try, and miss, and try again. She’s lying in the dark doing math on how many shots it takes, and she used me to check her numbers.

But that isn’t where it lands.

I lie there and stare at the ceiling, and it lands somewhere else. Somewhere I didn’t know was sitting open because I haven’t thought about that in a long time. The garage. The tarp. The four-hundredth shot. I haven’t thought about liking it in years. For years now, it’s been three teams in a drawer and a man named Ames and my father on the phone and guys with notebooks. It’s been what I owe. It’s been what everybody’s waiting for.

And she just asked me why I kept going, and the answer wasn’t any of that.

Her breathing slows down. Her fingers go loose in mine.

“Rafe?” she says, almost asleep.

“Yeah.”

“How many?”

“How many what?”

“Shots.”

I think about it.

“I don’t fucking know, Tess. A hundred thousand?”

She smiles. I can feel it, against my shirt.

“That makes me happy,” she says.

“That makes you happy?”

She’s weirder than I thought.

She nods against my shoulder.

“You’re not going to give up until you get what you want. I like that a lot.”

I don’t sleep for a while. I lie in the dark and count them. Not really. I can’t. But I try anyway. The garage. The tarp. The backyard rink. Six a.m. on a Tuesday when I was eleven and it was nine below and my father sat in the car with the heat on and watched me through the windshield. A hundred thousand. More. I missed most of them. I missed almost all of them at the beginning.

None of the misses meant stop. I didn’t even know they were supposed to. I just picked up the next puck.

And for once, when I think about hockey, I don’t think about June.

I think about the rink.

The airport’s an hour away.

“Your driveway is a mile long,” Barnes says from the back seat as the gates swing open. “Who needs a driveway a mile long? What are you hiding up here?”

“My father.”

He grins at me in the mirror.

I’ve been gone a little over two hours. An hour to the airport, an hour back. Kennebeck and Kylie came off the same flight from her parents’ where he spent Christmas. Barnes landed forty minutes after them and walked out of baggage claim with his hood up and a duffel over his shoulder, looking like he’d been abandoned there.