Page 15 of Off-Limits as Puck

It’s not a question. It never is with him.

I hang up without answering and drain my beer in one pull. The party feels smaller, tighter. I’m halfway to the door when a hand catches my elbow.

“Leaving already?” The guy is tall, built like a—no. I’m not doing this. Not comparing every man to someone I knew for six hours.

“Early morning,” I say, gently extracting my arm.

“Let me at least get your number.”

He’s cute. Normal cute, probably with a normal job and a normal smile that doesn’t make my pulse race. This is what I should want. This is safe.

“Sorry,” I say, and mean it. “I’m not really available right now.”

It’s the truth, even if I can’t explain why. How do you tell someone you’re hung up on a ghost? That you wrote your number on a stranger’s arm and have been waiting for a call that never comes?

Back in my apartment, I pull up the Outlaws game on my laptop. They’re losing, badly. The commentators are brutal, dissecting every failed play. I should turn it off, focus on my actual life instead of this weird parallel fixation.

But I don’t.

I watch until the end, until the team skates off clearly frustrated. The camera pans across the bench, and something in my chest pulls tight. It’s ridiculous. There are how many NHL players? The odds of randomly seeing him on some team’s roster are astronomical.

Still, I find myself studying faces, looking for something familiar in the way they move.

“You’re pathetic,” I tell my reflection in the laptop screen.

My phone lights up with texts from Leah, asking if I made it home. I send back a thumbs up and close the computer. Tomorrow I’ll be better. Tomorrow I’ll stop checking highlights and looking for ghosts. Tomorrow I’ll accept that Vegas was just Vegas. It was just a beautiful anomaly that belongs in the past.

But tonight, I let myself remember. The weight of him above me. The way he laughed at my jokes. How he looked at me like I was something precious before falling asleep with his arms locked around my waist.

Did he even see my name and number? Does he think about that night at all, or am I just another notch in some player’s bedpost?

My phone rings again. Dad.

This time, I don’t answer.

But I know I’ll be at that home opener anyway. Not for him. Not for some job I don’t want.

Maybe just to prove to myself that I can be in the same building as professional athletes without losing my mind. That I can sit in those stands and not look for broad shoulders and dark hair and a smirk that dared me to misbehave.

I fall asleep with the taste of lies in my mouth and dreams of tattoos I never got to fully explore.

Somewhere in Chicago, a hockey team is preparing for another season.

8

Two years, three months, and sixteen days. That’s how long I’ve been slowly dying in academia, but who’s counting?

I stare at the stack of papers on my desk—another round of undergraduate attempts at understanding basic statistical analysis—and contemplate setting them on fire. It would be more productive than what I’m actually doing, which is reading the same email from my father for the fifteenth time while pretending my life hasn’t become a cautionary tale about wasted potential.

Chelsea,

The position is open again. The team needs someone with your expertise. I need someone I can trust.

It’s been years of me trying to get you this position.

This is the last time I’ll ask.

—Chris

---