Page 62 of Payback On The Ice

Nico shakes his head. He shuts the door. I watch him walk back across the lot toward the arena, slow on the ice, one hand on his neck, and Priya comes out of the side door and meets him halfway and puts her arm around him, and they go inside together.

I sit in the car.

I don't go home.

I don't know where he is. I don't want to know. If I go home, he'll be on the other side of the wall, and I'll have to⁠—

I don't know what I'll have to do.

Lou's still in the building, doing the post-game cut. He looks up from the Zamboni when I come down the tunnel in my suit and my dress shoes.

"Forget something, Dane?"

"Can you leave the lights?"

He looks at me. Then he shrugs.

"Kill 'em on your way out," he says. "Panel's by the bench."

When he's gone, I go to the panel and turn off all the overheads, every single one, until there's nothing but the red exit signs at either end and the little green glow off the scoreboard. HOME 3. GUEST 2.

I walk out onto the ice in my dress shoes.

It's slick and the soles slide. I don't care. I walk to center ice, to the faceoff dot, to the big painted lantern in the middle of the rink. I sit down on it. The cold comes through my pants immediately.

I sit there in the dark.

He threw the hit.

I keep saying it in my head, the way I've said it every morning since September. He threw the hit. He went out for the third period and he saw Nico's numbers and he had a whole second, and he decided. Nico said it. Theo said it, to Nico, every time, first thing. It was me. That's still true. Nothing Nico said in that car made it not true.

And he asked my brother to lie to me so I could keep hating him.

He let me put him at a card table every Thursday for four months, and he made Marcy laugh. He let me make him wait to eat. He let me watch a pile come down on him, and then he made rules, and the first rule he made was that I don't get to bring April into it. He asked for that. In there, it's not about him. I thought he was protecting himself.

He was protecting me.

You decided I blamed you. And then you went and found somebody else to be the guy who stood there.

I put my face in my hands.

Both things are true. He threw the hit. I've spent half a season punishing somebody my brother forgave in August. I don't know how to hold both of them at once. I keep trying, and one of them keeps slipping out of my hands, and I pick it back up, and then the other one goes.

My phone buzzes in my pocket.

I take it out. The screen's so bright in the dark it hurts.

It's not Nico.

It's a number I don't have saved. I know whose it is. I've seen it on the team contact sheet a hundred times and never put it in my phone.

Unknown: I'll be there at 6

Unknown: if you don't want me to be, say so and I won't

I read it twice.

I don't answer.