Page 167 of Jaded

Like a suggestion, rather than a touch. I can only stare at those long brown fingers on my paler hand as his thumb smooths over the ridge of knuckles, just beneath the ink scrawled on my fingers.

“I mean it. Yougotit. And if you don’t?” He shrugs, and his eyes bore into mine, dark, untouched by the light of the locker room. “Then I got you. You know that, right? I got you.”

“Right.” I exhale a slow, shaky breath. But he’s right. Because maybe I didn’t have it in me to bet on myself—then or now. But tonight? I’m not betting on me.

I’m betting on Avery Bennett.

So I snatch up the jersey balled into the cubby next to me, careful not to let the number show as I stuff it into my helmet along with my mask. Then I slip out of the locker room and into the hall to finish changing so no one’s privy to my deceit.

I nearly run headlong into a broad-shouldered man standing outside the door. “Sorr—Jess?”

I stop so short, the door thumps against my ass as it closes behind me. Because there, right in front of me, is none other than Jesse Taylor. In pleated dress pants and a button-down.

I stare.

“Hey, Nat.” Jess ruffles his hair, offers me an awkward grimace-smile. “You’re playing, huh?”

“Surprised?” But the word doesn’t come out with the bite I intended.

“No.” He tucks a loose strand of hair behind his ear. “You always were way better than you thought.”

I huff, a sad sort of half laugh. I’ve no idea how to respond to such a sentiment. Fortunately, my brain finds something else to focus on. “You’re not dressed.”

“No.” Jess’s smile is half a grimace. “You kidding? I wouldn’t last one round in the Ice Out. I could barelywatchit.”

I almost laugh. Almost. But I’m too shocked to say anything.

“Nah, tonight’s all you, little brother.” He tilts two fingers against his forehead in a mock salute. “Good luck.”

And then he turns and walks away. Leaves me standing there, shocked, like someone’s dumped cold water over my head.

Eerie silence washes over the arena as the national anthem pours out over the crowd, the ice, the players waiting atop it. Nothing has ever felt so foreign and familiar all at once, the emotions so tangled and interwoven I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

It’s been eighteen years since the last time I did this.

It’s like no time has passed.

It’s like the entire world’s come between.

It’s so different—the cloth mask presses up against my cheeks, around my mouth. The other four skaters on my team, and the opposition hovering across the ice, also cloak themselves in obscurity.

And yet, it’s the same. All of us in this arena caught up in this singular moment, the pause between breaths, the calm before the hurricane. Unified, all of us humans, by this one simple song—actually, Olli onceinformed me, the national anthem is a poem set to an old British drinking shanty.

Masks or not, jerseys or shirts or pads or skates and sticks, Ice Out and Dingoes—it’s pucks on the ice and those who chase dreams across it. It’s hockey. And all of us in this arena were born for it.

The anthem ends.

The cheering resumes. Flashing lights and stomping feet and pounding music and pulsing energy that floods me in a torrent I haven’t felt in eighteen years. The rink hasn’t seen this level of excitement in almost as long either.

But now isn’t the time to think about that. Not when I’m standing on the blue line, my makeshift team around me, and the crowd around all of us.

I don’t know who my teammates are. We’re all masked, our numbers assigned by Coach.

Except, of course, I know exactly who stands beside me. Who’s always stood beside me, since the very first day he waltzed into town and sat down beside me at the bar.

Olli James, my Aspen, my little ghost. He’s wearing his mask and his Twenty-Three jersey. But I’ve traded my Forty-Seven for Avery Bennett’s Seventeen.

Ironically, my high school number.

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