snowangelii

the tv is on but you're not watching it you haven't been watching it for maybe twenty minutes, if you're honest, which you don't really want to be right now some rerun of a show you used to love is playing at a volume just low enough that it's more company than content, a low hum to fill the apartment while megan's away, and you've got your knees pulled up under one of her old practice hoodies and a mug of tea gone cold on the side table and a night that was supposed to be easy.

these nights usually are easy, actually, or they have been all season the particular quiet of an empty apartment on a game night has its own rhythm you've come to like, almost you make something simple for dinner, something megan would tease you for calling a meal, you leave the tv on for noise more than content, some familiar show you've seen enough times that missing whole stretches of dialogue doesn't matter. 

you check the score on your phone between episodes, more out of habit than nerves, because you trust the team, because you trust her, because three years in you've stopped white-knuckling every road trip like it might be the one where something goes wrong.

she's in minnesota a road game, second one of a back-to-back, and you'd texted her good luck around six with a picture of the two of you from thanksgiving because you know she likes having something dumb and warm to look at in the tunnel before puck drop, and she'd sent back a single heart and then nothing else, which is normal, which is how it always goes on game nights. 

you don't expect to hear from her again until after, maybe a blurry post-game selfie in the locker room, maybe just a call once she's back at the hotel and untangled from interviews and ice baths and whatever passes for a wind-down on the road so when your phone buzzes against your thigh you assume it's her it's not. 

it's your mom's contact photo, the one from christmas two years ago where she's got a paper crown slipping off her head, and that alone doesn't mean anything your mom calls you all the time, mostly to talk about nothing, mostly because she likes the sound of your voice on a weeknight except she calls again four seconds after you let it ring out, and then a third time before you've even processed the first two, and there's a particular kind of dread that comes from someone calling back immediately it doesn't wait for you to be ready it just arrives.

"hi, what's wrong," you say instead of hello, because something clearly is.

"nothing's — i don't know if it's wrong," your mom says, in the voice she uses when she's already decided it's wrong and is trying to be fair about it anyway. "i just. someone sent me something and i wanted you to see it before you saw it from someone else."

"see what."

there's a pause, the sound of her fumbling with her phone, and then your phone buzzes again a text this time, a photo and you pull it away from your ear to look at it while she's still talking, her voice gone small and far away against your leg.

it's megan it's clearly megan, the away jersey half-changed out of, her hair still damp and pushed back, and she's laughing at something, her head turned toward a woman standing close to her, closer than you'd like if you're being scored on a rubric you didn't ask to be handed, one hand resting on the woman's shoulder like it's the most natural thing in the world. 

the angle is bad, it's the kind of photo a stranger takes without meaning to catch anything, thirty feet away with a phone held at chest height, and it makes everything look more like something than it probably is. "who sent you this," you ask, and your voice comes out flatter than you feel.

"someone in the family group chat, i don't even — i think it's from some fan account, someone's cousin follows one of those minnesota game recap pages, i don't know, honey, i just didn't want you finding out from a stranger's screenshot before you heard it from me."

"heard what. it's a picture. it's not — mom, it's not anything."

"i know, i know, i just wanted to check on you." you say something reassuring, you think, though you're not entirely sure what, because your eyes are still on the photo, on the tilt of megan's head, on the woman's hand that you now notice is resting lightly against megan's forearm, and something in your chest has gone very quiet and very loud at the same time. 

you know megan you have known megan for three years, you have watched her turn down drinks from strangers at her own draft party because she wanted to call you instead, you have seen the particular careful way she holds herself around anyone who isn't you or her family or her teammates, like affection is a currency she doesn't spend loosely you know this.

you also know what a photo like this does to a phone in your family's group chat, which is apparently already doing its work, because your phone buzzes a third time, and it's your cousin now, a single line—wait is this real—and then your best friend from home, who doesn't even really watch hockey, sending a ??? who is this with three question marks that feel louder than they should.

you put the phone face down on the couch cushion like that will do anything it doesn't it buzzes again almost immediately, face-down, a dull insistent knock against the fabric, and you sit there with your mom still talking in your ear about nothing in particular now, filling space, and you think; i know she wouldn't. 

you think it clearly, once, the way you'd state a fact you were sure of and then you think it again, quieter, with a question mark starting to grow at the end of it that wasn't there the first time.

your mom is still going something about how she almost didn't send it, how she went back and forth for ten minutes first, how she just didn't want you blindsided by strangers online and you make the right sounds in the right places, it's okay, mom, i know, it's fine, on autopilot, while some other part of you is already turning the photo over again in your head like a stone you can't put down. you notice things you didn't notice the first time. 

the way megan's hand isn't just resting on the woman's shoulder but curled slightly into it the way neither of them seems aware of the camera, which should read as innocent nobody performs for a candid but somehow reads, tonight, in this particular chemical cocktail of your own making, as evidence of something unguarded.

you think about the road trip schedule sitting in the fridge, the one megan printed out at the start of the season because she likes having something to point at when she explains where she'll be. 

minnesota tonight back to boston tomorrow afternoon, then four days home before the team flies out again. you think about all the cities on that schedule you've never once questioned, and you hate that tonight is the night your brain decided to start. "i should let you go," your mom says eventually, softer now, having run out of things to fill the silence with. "you sound like you need to think."

"i'm okay," you say again, and you almost believe it.

"call me if you need anything, okay? and — honey, i really don't think it's anything. i just didn't want it to be a surprise."

"i know. thank you. i love you."

you hang up and the apartment goes quiet in the particular way it only does after a phone call ends, the tv rerun suddenly too loud in the new silence, some laugh track cackling at a joke you didn't hear the setup to. 

you turn it down you don't turn it off and you sit there with your knees still pulled up under megan's hoodie, the one that still smells faintly like her, like the detergent she uses that's different from yours, and you think about the very first time she ever had to talk you down from a version of this feeling nearly two years ago now, an early-season road trip, a photo of her at some bar with teammates and a stranger who'd clearly bought the whole table a round, and how you'd texted her something small and anxious about it, and how she'd called you the second she saw it, not defensive, not annoyed, just steady. that's alina's cousin, he was celebrating his birthday, i promise you it's the most boring story in the world. 

you remember how relieved you'd felt, how embarrassed, how she'd never once made you feel stupid for asking that's the version of you that knew how to ask. you don't know, sitting here now, where that version went.

there's a version of this feeling you recognize from before megan, from an ex who used to disappear for stretches of a weekend and come back with stories that never quite lined up, who taught you, over two bad years, that a bad feeling in your stomach was usually right about something.

you'd promised yourself, after that, that you'd never let paranoia calcify into a personality you'd watched it happen to a friend of yours, watched her turn every silence into evidence, watched the men she dated after resent her for a crime someone else had committed and for three years with megan you've been proud, quietly, of how little that old instinct has had to work. 

megan has never once given you a reason to run the old tape tonight the tape starts playing anyway, uninvited, dragging up every old bruise like it's relevant, like the two of them are the same kind of person just because your body remembers the same kind of dread.

you don't remember deciding to hang up with your mom, you remember saying you were fine, and you remember her not quite believing you, and you remember the particular tenderness in her call me if you need anything, okay? that made your throat go tight for reasons that had nothing to do with her.

what you remember more clearly is sitting on the couch afterward with the tv still murmuring and your phone still buzzing in irregular little bursts, and the sensation of your own house growing too loud for how quiet it was.

it isn't that you think megan is cheating on you, you want to be precise about that, even now, even with your pulse doing something uneven in your throat, you don't think that you know the difference between what you know and what you're afraid of, most days but knowing something and feeling safe in it are apparently not the same muscle, and tonight the second one has gone slack in a way you didn't sign up for.

you pick your phone back up more texts your cousin again—okay i looked closer, could be nothing, sorry for freaking out—which should help and somehow makes it worse, the could be sitting there like a door left open a crack. 

your best friend has sent a screenshot of the original post, the fan account caption underneath the photo reading something like megan keller with a mystery girl after tonight's win 👀 and you hate, actively hate, the tiny emoji doing its tiny insinuating work.

you don't text megan you tell yourself it's because she's still probably in the locker room, still doing media, still riding the bus back to the hotel, and texting her hey who's this would be needy and small and exactly the kind of thing you've promised yourself you wouldn't become, one of those partners who requires an accounting for every hour she's not in your sightline. 

you've watched what that does to people you've watched teammates' girlfriends get talked about in group chats you're not supposed to know about, the exhausted way megan describes some of the guys' partners back when she still played mixed league in college—she checks his location like it's her job—and some old, stubborn part of you would rather sit in this feeling than become that.

so instead you sit in it, you sit in it while the show on tv loops through its rerun without you following a single line of dialogue you sit in it while you reread the caption four more times like it might change. you sit in it while you think about all the road trips this season, all the cities, all the hours you don't get a play by play of because you don't ask for one, because you trust her, because trust was supposed to mean you didn't have to sit here doing this and the thought arrives, unbidden and ugly, dressed up as concern: what do you actually know about the hours you don't ask about.

you know that's not fair you know it the second you think it you think it anyway your phone buzzes once more, and this time it's not family it's a name you don't recognize in your group chat with two of the girls from your old work someone's forwarded the post there too, apparently, hockey twitter's little ecosystem doing what it does, and one of them has written, with the kind of breezy cruelty people only manage over text, if my girlfriend's picture was making rounds like that i'd be asking questions.

you put the phone down again you pick it back up you do this three times in the space of a minute, like the fourth time might be different it's not someone else in the chat has added a laughing emoji under the first comment, which somehow lands worse than the comment itself, like your private worry has already become a bit, a piece of gossip with a punchline, and you have the distinct, nauseating sensation of being watched from several directions at once your family, your friends, strangers on an app you don't even use that often, all of them looking at the same fifteen square inches of a photograph and drawing their own conclusions, and none of those conclusions are yours to control.

you think about texting back, you don't know her, she's not like that, and you don't, because some small vain part of you doesn't want to be the girlfriend defending her partner in a group chat, doesn't want the story of tonight to become a thing people discuss the way they're discussing the photo itself. 

so you say nothing, and the nothing sits there, and one of the girls sends a single-word follow-up—update??—twenty minutes later like you owe her a report on the state of your relationship, and you mute the conversation without responding, which feels like a small, hollow victory that doesn't actually fix anything.

you keep coming back to the plainest version of the thought, though, turning it over and over like it might wear smoother with enough handling: you know her you know the low, private way she laughs at her own jokes before anyone else gets them. you know she still calls her mom every sunday without fail, an hour-long call that leaves her in a better mood every time. 

you know the exact face she makes when she's nervous before a game, a stillness that isn't calm so much as focus, and the exact different face she makes when she's actually scared of something the last time you saw that one was when her grandfather went into the hospital, and she'd come home and put her head in your lap and not said anything for twenty minutes, and you'd just held her, no fixing, no talking, just weight and presence, because that's what she'd needed and you'd known it without being told.

you know all of this it should be enough to drown out a stranger's caption and a cousin's half-formed doubt and a coworker's cheap one-liner for a while, it almost is you sit there with the tv droning and the duffel bag not yet pulled down from the closet, holding the knowledge of her like a small steady flame cupped in both hands, and you think, i am not going to let this ruin a perfectly good night and then your phone buzzes one more time, and it's your cousin again, not with more doubt this time but with something almost worse a screenshot of the same photo, cropped tighter now, someone else's zoomed-in version circulating with a new caption underneath: anyone know who this is? asking for a friend 👀and you notice, in the tighter crop, a detail you hadn't clocked before megan's other hand, out of frame in the wider shot, resting at the small of the woman's back, just for a second, just in the one frame someone happened to catch and the flame in your hands gutters, just slightly, just enough.

you know there could be a hundred explanations for a hand at someone's back you know this but knowing and feeling have stopped talking to each other tonight, and it's the feeling that gets up off the couch first, that walks to the closet, that pulls megan's old duffel down off the shelf before your mind has caught up enough to stop it.

it's not that any single voice convinces you of anything it's that there are so many of them now, all arriving at once, all with slightly different shapes of the same doubt, and none of them are megan's voice, and megan's voice is the only one that's ever actually made you feel safe about this and she isn't calling. 

she isn't calling because she doesn't know anything is wrong, because to her this is a wednesday, a road game, a stranger's photo she probably hasn't even seen yet but knowing that doesn't stop the small mean thought that surfaces anyway: if it were nothing, wouldn't she already feel like she had to explain it? you know that's not how it works you know the guilty don't always explain and the innocent don't always know they need to.

you stand up anyway you're not sure, later, if it's a decision or just something your body does while your mind is still arguing with itself, but you find yourself in the bedroom pulling megan's old duffel down from the closet shelf not even your own bag, hers, the beat-up one with her college number still sharpied on the tag, which feels significant in a way you don't examine and you start folding things into it without really choosing what.

a sweater, your charger, the book you haven't finished you move through the apartment collecting pieces of a life you don't know how to be inside of right now, and every text that comes in during it adds one more thread to the pull, until the pull is stronger than the part of you that keeps saying, quietly, underneath all of it: you know her. you know her. you know her.

you don't turn the tv off you just leave, the door clicking shut behind you on a rerun no one's watching, and you sit in your car in the parking garage for four full minutes before you can make yourself put the key in the ignition, because some last honest part of you knows that once you drive away from this apartment tonight, you're choosing the voices over her, and you don't have a good enough reason for that, and you do it anyway.

the hotel you pick is fifteen minutes away, not far enough to feel like a real departure and not close enough to feel like nothing, and you don't examine that choice either you check in with a card that isn't the joint one, because some instinct in you wants this to not show up anywhere she'd see it first, which is its own small, shameful admission of what you're doing.

the room is generic in the particular way of business hotels; a bed too neatly made, a desk no one will use, a window looking out at a parking lot and, past it, a strip of highway lit orange there's a paper folder on the desk with the hotel's logo on it, a laminated card about checkout times, a coffee maker with two sealed pods and a stack of paper cups, all the small anonymous furniture of somewhere nobody stays for long, and you find yourself absurdly grateful for how little personality the room has, like a space that doesn't ask anything of you is exactly what you need right now.

you unzip megan's duffel out of some restless need to have something to do with your hands, and find, on top of the sweater and the charger and the unfinished book, one of her practice socks that must have gotten swept in with everything else, an ordinary grey athletic sock with a small hole starting at the toe that she keeps meaning to throw out and never does, and the sight of it so plain, so hers, so entirely unrelated to anything happening tonight makes something crack open in your chest that the photo somehow hadn't managed on its own. you sit there holding a sock in a hotel room you booked to get away from her and think, not for the first time tonight, that you might be handling this badly.

you sit on the edge of the bed with the duffel still open at your feet and your phone in your hand and you don't call anyone you think about calling her you get as far as opening the contact, her name over the photo of her mid-laugh from your friend's wedding last spring, thumb hovering over the call button, and then you think about what you'd even say—hey, are you cheating on me, a stranger's photo made me leave our apartment—and the sentence is so ugly out loud in your head that you can't make yourself send it into the world.

so you text instead, because text feels like it has more room in it for you to control how unhinged you sound. you type and delete four different versions. what you finally send is short, and even as your thumb hits send you know it's the version that tells her the least and worries her the most: i needed some space tonight. i'm okay. i'll explain tomorrow.

you turn your phone face-down on the nightstand like you did on the couch, like distance from the screen will do anything about the distance you've actually created, and you lie back on a stranger's bed in a stranger's room, and you let yourself cry for exactly as long as it takes for the shame to catch up with the fear, which is not very long at all.

somewhere in the middle of it you almost call your best friend from college, the one who isn't in any of the group chats currently dissecting your relationship, the one who's talked you down off smaller ledges than this one before. 

you get as far as opening her contact, thumb hovering, and then you think about how you'd have to explain the whole thing from the beginning the photo, the calls, the leaving and how saying it out loud to someone else would make it a real, documented event instead of something you could maybe still take back if you turned the car around in the next ten minutes. 

you don't call her, you put the phone down instead, and some small, still reasonable part of your brain notes, almost clinically, that this is the third person tonight you've decided not to be honest with, including yourself.

you think about turning the car around you think about it seriously, for almost a full minute, picturing yourself walking back into the apartment and hanging the hoodie back on its hook and pretending none of this happened, and you don't do it, because some stubborn, wounded piece of you has already decided that leaving was a stance, a statement, and going back now would mean admitting the statement was wrong before you'd even gotten an answer. 

so you stay, you sit with the unfairness of that logic even as you're following it, aware of the contradiction and unable, tonight, to talk yourself out of it because underneath the hurt and it is hurt, real and specific, the particular ache of imagining someone else's hand where yours usually is there's another feeling starting to surface, slower, quieter, and much less flattering: you know her. you have always known her. 

you know the way she double texts you did you eat if you go more than four hours without checking in, you know she still gets nervous before every single game like it's her first, you know she cried actual tears the day you told her you loved her back, not performed tears, real ones, the kind she was embarrassed about after. you know all of this, and you let a screenshot from an account called something like pwhlgossip_247 undo it in under an hour that's not megan's failure, that's yours.

you don't let yourself off the hook for it, sitting there in the dark with the tv remote you haven't touched and a duffel bag full of evidence against your own better judgment but you also don't get up and drive home, not yet, because shame is apparently not the same thing as courage, and you're tired, and some small cowardly part of you would rather sit in a hotel room feeling guilty than go home and have to say out loud, to her face, i didn't trust you for one night and i don't have a good reason why.

your phone lights up on the nightstand you don't turn it over it lights up again and again you know, somewhere underneath the exhaustion, that this is the part where you find out what you've actually done.

megan finds out something is wrong the way most road-trip disasters find their way to her late, and secondhand, and in the worst possible order.

the third period had ended the way she likes them to, boston up by two, the bench loose and loud in that particular way a team gets when a road win is basically already banked, and she'd spent the last five minutes doing what she always does in that stretch talking calm into her d partner's ear, tracking clock instead of chasing the puck, the unglamorous captain's work of making sure nobody does anything unnecessary. 

postgame she'd done the handshake line, done a two minute stand-up with the beat reporter who always asks the same three questions, signed a stick for a kid pressed against the glass by the tunnel because the kid's dad looked like he might cry about it, and none of it had felt any different from any other wednesday on the road. 

her phone had sat in her stall through all of it, screen dark, the way it always does on game nights, because whatever's happening in the world can wait ninety minutes by the time she gets to her stall and unlocks it, it's already lit up with more notifications than a wednesday game usually produces. 

she assumes, at first, that it's about the game she'd had a good one, an assist and a takeaway that'll probably make the highlight package and it's not until she's three texts deep from teammates she wasn't expecting to hear from that the shape of it starts to come into focus.

hey u good? from her d partner, sent with a bewildered little emoji.

not my business but ppl are talking about a photo from another one.

by the time she finds the actual post someone's finally sent it to her directly, mercifully, instead of making her go looking she understands two things almost simultaneously: one, that the woman in the photo is claire, her old college roommate from boston college, who'd surprised her by driving up from where she lives now just to catch the game, who'd hugged her in the hallway afterward because claire's dad had just gotten good news from a scan they'd all been worried about for months and she was crying about it, happy-crying, the kind you hold someone through; and two, that whatever this photo looks like to a stranger scrolling past it, it does not look like that to anyone who doesn't already know the context, and you, megan realizes with a drop in her stomach that has nothing to do with the game, do not have the context.

she calls you before she's even out of the tunnel, jacket half-zipped, bag still on her shoulder it rings out she calls again rings out again she texts—hey i saw what's going around, that's claire, i can explain everything, please call me—and watches the delivered mark sit there undisturbed for four minutes that feel considerably longer, and then your text arrives, the one about needing space, about explaining tomorrow, and something in megan's chest goes cold in a way that three periods of hard hockey hadn't managed.

she doesn't scream at her phone, though she wants to she's not a screamer what she does is go very quiet in the way her teammates have learned to read as worse than yelling, and she stands in the hallway outside the locker room with her bag still on her shoulder while alina, walking past, takes one look at her face and says, "hey. you okay?" and megan says, "i don't know yet," which is the most honest thing she's said all night.

she thinks, standing there, about every road trip this season, every hotel room, every late bus ride back from an arena in some city that isn't home, and how she's never once thought of any of it as something she needed to account for, because you'd never asked her to. 

that had felt, until about eleven minutes ago, like one of the steadiest things about the two of you that trust wasn't a thing either of you managed, it was just the ground you both stood on she doesn't know yet how to feel about the ground, apparently shifting on a wednesday in minnesota over a photo of her hugging her college roommate, but she knows she doesn't have the luxury of feeling anything about it right now except urgency.

haley, her d partner, falls into step beside her in the hallway, still half in her gear. "what's going on?"

"long story. i need to get home tonight."

"tonight, tonight? we've got shootaround at ten."

"i know." megan is already scrolling for a car service, thumb moving fast, not looking up. "i'll be there. i just—i can't explain it right now, i need to go." haley studies her for a second, the particular look of a teammate deciding whether to push, and then just nods. "go. i'll cover for you with sparre if it comes to that."

it doesn't come to that, in the end megan's text to her coach is short and gets a short reply back, understood, see you at 10, the kind of grace a captain earns after three seasons of never once needing it before and by the time the car pulls up outside the arena's players' entrance, megan is already composing the story in her head, trying to find the fastest, clearest way to say it's not what it looks like without it sounding like every guilty person's opening line.

the drive is long enough for her to call your mom, and long enough afterward for her to sit in the back seat with her phone gripped so tightly her knuckles ache, watching the highway lights slide past the window, running through every version of the conversation she's about to have. 

she doesn't rehearse excuses she rehearses the truth, over and over, because the truth is simple and she just needs you to hear it before the noise gets any louder than it already has she calls your mom next, which she's never done before without you on the line already, and your mom picks up on the second ring, worry already loaded into her hello like she's been waiting for someone to call.

"i think i did something," your mom says, before megan can even get a full sentence out. "i sent her a photo, i didn't mean to—i just didn't want her blindsided—"

"it's claire," megan says. "the woman in the photo. she's my friend from college, her dad's been sick, i was just — i was hugging her because she got good news. that's it. that's the whole thing." there's a pause on the line, and megan can practically hear your mom recalibrating, the particular guilt of a mother realizing she's set something in motion she can't take back from three states away. 

"she left," your mom says quietly. "she texted me a little while ago. i think she went somewhere for the night."

"where."

"i don't know. she didn't say." megan closes her eyes in the hallway of an arena in minnesota, a thousand miles from wherever you are, and does the math on flights and drives and whether there's anything faster than either, and comes up with almost nothing, because she is on a road trip with a team and a schedule that doesn't care what's happening in her personal life, and the next flight home isn't until morning with the rest of the group.

she calls a car instead, straight from the arena, and texts her coach something short and true family emergency, i need to head back tonight, i'll be at morning skate and doesn't wait to see if that's a problem, because right now it isn't the kind of thing she's willing to weigh against anything else.

alina catches her by the bus, still in half her gear. "go," is all she says, when megan tries to explain. "we've got shootaround tomorrow, we don't need you until then. go fix it."

you don't sleep, not really you doze in fragments with the hotel tv on low, some late night infomercial glow flickering against the ceiling, and every time you surface you check your phone like it might have rearranged itself into something less painful while you weren't looking.

it's a little after one in the morning when there's a knock on the door as you go still it's not the kind of hotel where anyone should be knocking, and for one absurd second your mind supplies a dozen unlikely scenarios before it lands, with a jolt that goes straight through your chest, on the actual likely one.

you look through the peephole and it's her, she's still half in her travel gear, hair damp from a shower she must have taken between the arena and wherever she found a car this fast, and she looks like she hasn't breathed properly in hours. 

you open the door and neither of you says anything for a second, the two of you just standing there in a strip of hallway light with a hotel door between the rest of the world and this very small, very fragile moment. "how did you find me," you say, which is not what you meant to lead with.

"your mom had the hotel chain you always pick for work trips. i called every one within twenty minutes of the apartment until someone confirmed a booking under your name." she says it like it's obvious, like of course she did that, like there was never a version of tonight where she didn't come find you. "you drove."

"i got a car. i didn't drive, i was in no state to drive." a beat. "can i come in?" you step back and let her in, and the door clicks shut behind her, and for a second you both just stand there in the dim hotel light not touching, the duffel bag still sitting open and half-packed on the end of the bed like evidence neither of you wants to name yet.

"claire," megan says, before you can say anything, before the moment can curdle into something defensive. "her name is claire. we roomed together freshman and sophomore year at bc. her dad's been getting scans for months, they thought it might be something bad, and tonight she found out it wasn't, and she drove three hours to surprise me at the game and tell me in person, and i hugged her in the hallway because she was crying, and someone thirty feet away took a picture of the world's least romantic hug and turned it into a caption." she says all of it fast, like she's been rehearsing it in the car, like she needs to get every fact out before you can build a wall around any of it.

"you've mentioned her before," you say slowly, the name surfacing from somewhere a story about a road trip to a tournament junior year, a joke about claire's terrible taste in freshman-year boyfriends, a birthday card megan still keeps in a drawer that you've never once thought twice about. "the one who talked you out of quitting hockey that one semester."

"that's her." something in megan's shoulders eases slightly, like it matters to her that you remember, that the name has context in your life too and isn't just a stranger conjured out of a bad photo. "she's the reason i'm still playing at all, honestly. she noticed i was burning out before i noticed it myself, made me talk to someone, sat with me through the worst of it. i'd do anything for her. i just never thought a hallway hug was going to end up being the thing i had to explain to you at one in the morning."

"i wish i'd known that context existed before i saw a stranger's photo of it," you say, and it comes out quieter than you mean it to, more sad than accusing.

"i know. i wish i'd texted you the second she surprised me, told you the whole story before anyone else got a chance to make up their own version of it. i didn't think i needed to, because it didn't feel like anything worth reporting on my end, it felt like a good moment in a friend's hard year, not a thing that needed a disclaimer." she exhales, long and tired. "i think that's on me a little too. not everything, but some of it. i should've known a photo like that could travel before the context could catch up to it."

"i know," you say, and your voice cracks on it in a way that surprises you. "i mean — i didn't know the details, but i knew. i knew you wouldn't. i knew it the second i saw the picture, before anyone said a single word to me, i thought she wouldn't, and then everyone kept texting and calling and adding their own little doubts on top of it, and i let it drown out the one thing i actually knew for sure."

megan's jaw does something complicated, somewhere between hurt and relief. "so you knew," she says, "and you still packed a bag."

"yeah."

"why." it's not an accusation, not really, though it lands like one, sharp and fair you sit down on the edge of the bed because your legs don't feel entirely reliable, and you look at the duffel her duffel, you realize now, with something like embarrassment, that you grabbed her bag instead of your own without noticing and you try to find the honest answer instead of the easy one.

"because it's never just one voice," you say slowly. "it's my mom, worried. it's my cousin, half joking. it's people i barely talk to anymore weighing in like they have a right to. and none of them know you. none of them have three years of you double texting me to make sure i ate, or crying when you told me you loved me, or turning down every single person who's ever hit on you at a bar because you'd rather text me something dumb instead. none of them have that. i have that. and i let all of their noise get louder than what i actually know, and i am so sorry, because you didn't do anything wrong tonight except comfort a friend, and i still left."

megan is quiet for a long moment, standing there in the middle of a hotel room that neither of you chose for this, and when she finally sits down next to you on the bed, close enough that her knee presses into yours, some of the tension goes out of her shoulders like she's been holding a held breath the entire drive over.

"i'm not mad that you had a feeling," she says quietly. "i get it, okay? i've seen the photo, i know what it looks like out of context, i'm not going to pretend a stranger wouldn't wonder. i'm not even that mad you left, honestly, if leaving is what you needed to do to not sit there spiraling in our apartment all night." 

she takes your hand, turns it over in both of hers like she's checking it's real. "what scares me is that you didn't call me. you texted me i'll explain tomorrow like i was something you had to manage instead of someone you could just say it to. i would've told you everything in thirty seconds if you'd called. i would've put claire on the phone if you needed to hear it from her."

"i know that now," you say. "i think i knew it then, too, honestly. i just the second the thought what if got in, it brought every other voice in with it, and yours was the one voice i didn't reach for, which doesn't even make sense, because yours is the only one that's ever actually helped."

"it doesn't make sense," megan agrees, gently, no bite in it. "but i get how it happens. i've watched it happen to other people guys on other teams, girlfriends who start out solid and get worn down one photo at a time until they don't trust their own read on things anymore. i never wanted that to be us. i still don't think it has to be, if we're honest about tonight instead of just moving past it."

"i don't want to just move past it either," you say. "i want to actually figure out why i went from i know she wouldn't to packing a bag in under an hour. that's not really about you. that's something in me that got loud tonight and i let it drive."

megan is quiet for a moment, thumb tracing slow circles over the back of your hand. "for what it's worth," she says, "i don't think it's nothing that you knew, first. before anyone weighed in, before the group chats, you had it right. i think that matters more than the part where it wobbled later. everybody's is going to wobble sometimes, especially with this many people watching from the outside and getting to have opinions about a life they're not actually living. i just need you to wobble toward me next time, not away from me."

"toward you," you repeat, like you're making yourself a promise instead of just repeating her words. "okay."

she pulls you in then, properly, your face tucked against her collarbone, still damp from her rushed shower at the team hotel, still smelling faintly of the arena underneath it, and you let yourself sit there for a long moment just breathing her in, feeling the steady, unhurried rise and fall of her chest under your cheek, so unlike the frantic hour you'd just put yourself through. neither of you says anything for a while.

it doesn't feel like it needs saying it just feels like the two of you, finally in the same room, finally telling each other the truth instead of managing it from a distance, and for the first time since your phone buzzed with your mom's name, the quiet in the room feels like relief instead of dread.

"i know," you say, and it's the truest thing you've said all night. "i think i was scared that if i said it out loud — if i said are you cheating on me — it would make it real somehow, even though i didn't believe it. saying nothing felt safer than asking and being that person."

"you're never going to be that person to me," megan says, and there's something fierce underneath the tiredness in her voice. "ask me anything. call me from the middle of a spiral if you have to. i would rather get a three a.m. call asking me to explain a bad photo than find out you left the apartment because you didn't think you were allowed to ask."

you feel your eyes go hot again, a different kind of crying than before. "i'm sorry," you say again, because it feels like it needs saying more than once. "i'm sorry i let the noise win tonight."

"you drowned it out eventually," megan says. "you said it yourself — you knew, before anyone weighed in. that's not nothing. that's the part i actually trust." she brings your hand up, presses a kiss to your knuckles in the specific gentle way she only does when she's trying to put you back together. "we'll work on the part where you call me instead of a hotel."

you don't leave the hotel room that night there's something almost funny about it, later, the two of you curled up on top of the comforter of a room you booked to get away from her, megan still half in her travel clothes because neither of you thought to bring her a change, your phones both face-down on the nightstand for once by mutual, wordless agreement.

"i have shootaround at ten," she mumbles into your shoulder, sometime past two, voice already halfway into sleep. "i know. go."

"i don't want to."

"you have to. i'll be here when you're done or i'll come to the rink, i don't care, i just i want to see you off right this time. not like tonight." she huffs something that might be a laugh against your collarbone. "you booked a room fifteen minutes from the apartment. you weren't running that far."

"i wasn't trying to run from you," you admit, quiet, into the dark. "i think some part of me knew i'd need you to be able to find me." megan is quiet for a second, and then she pulls you in closer, her chin tucked over the top of your head. 

"good," she says. "i will always come find you. i don't care what city i'm in or what time it is, just  call first next time, okay? save me the twenty minutes of calling every hotel in a five-mile radius like a maniac at midnight." you laugh, actually laugh, for the first time since your phone buzzed with your mom's name hours and what feels like a lifetime ago. "deal."

you wake before her, the room gone gray-blue with early light through cheap hotel curtains that don't quite meet in the middle, and you spend a few minutes just watching her sleep, one arm still slung heavy across your waist like she doesn't trust you to still be there if she lets go, even unconscious. you think about how many times you've watched her sleep like this over three years and how close you came to not being in this bed at all this morning, and you have to look away from her face for a second, out at the strip of parking lot and highway beyond it, to get your eyes to stop stinging.

she wakes with the particular groan of someone who's had four hours of sleep after a hockey game and a two-hour car ride, and the first thing she does, before she's even fully upright, is check that you're still there, a hand patting the mattress beside her like she's confirming a fact. "hey," she rasps. "hey."

"i have to be at the rink in an hour."

"i know. go shower, i'll figure out coffee." there's no clean change of clothes for her, her bag is still at the team hotel across town, checked out from under her in the middle of the night by a very confused night manager she'd apparently apologized to profusely on her way out so she pulls on your leggings, which fit her fine through the legs and look absurd on her taller frame, and one of your shirts that's too small everywhere, and finally gives up and digs through the duffel at the foot of the bed, the one still half-packed with the things you grabbed without thinking last night, and pulls out her own hoodie instead, the one you'd been wearing on the couch when this whole thing started, and laughs, short and disbelieving, when she realizes what it is. "you packed my hoodie."

"i wasn't really making good decisions last night."

"clearly," she says, but gently, and pulls it on anyway, and it looks right on her in the way it never quite did on you, and something in your chest settles at the sight of her back in her own clothes, back in something that fits.

in the lobby she buys you both terrible hotel coffee from a machine that dispenses it in a thin, apologetic stream, and you walk the six blocks to the rink together in the cold morning air, not saying much, just her hand finding yours somewhere around the second block and not letting go for the rest of the walk. 

she does go to shootaround, hair still damp from a two-minute shower, wearing your hoodie underneath her jacket because it was the closest clean thing to hand, and you sit in the stands with a coffee you don't really want just so she can look up between drills and find you there. claire texts you sometime around noon megan must have given her your number, or maybe you'd had it all along and just never used it a simple, warm hey! sorry my dumb happy tears started a whole thing lol, hope you're doing okay with a photo attached of her dad giving a thumbs up from what's clearly a hospital waiting room, and you type back something grateful and a little embarrassed and mean every word of it.

you don't tell your mom everything right away you tell her enough that it wasn't what it looked like, that you're okay, that you love her but you need her to maybe not forward things from group chats before checking them first and she's quiet on the phone in a way that tells you she's already turning it over in her head, already deciding to be more careful next time, and you let that be enough for now.

that night, back in your own apartment, the tv rerun long since ended and the duffel bag unpacked and put back on its shelf, megan pulls you into her on the couch and says, into your hair, "for the record. next time someone sends you a picture that scares you, i want the middle of the night call. i want the are you cheating on me text, ugly and unfiltered, straight to me. 

i would rather answer that a hundred times than find out you drove somewhere alone to sit with it by yourself."

"okay," you say, and you mean it, and some of the noise from last night your mom's worry, your cousin's half-joke, the stranger's cruel little aside has finally gone quiet enough that you can hear, underneath all of it, the one voice that was right the whole time it sounded a lot like your own.

it takes about a week for the story to stop feeling like something you're carrying and start feeling like something that happened claire texts you a few more times after that first message, easy and unbothered, the way people are when they've genuinely got nothing to feel guilty about a photo of her dad home from his last follow-up appointment looking tired but grinning, a joke about how she's never letting a stranger photograph her hugging anyone ever again, and by the end of the week you've somehow ended up in an actual group chat with her, megan rolling her eyes fondly at her phone one night and saying, "you two are going to be worse than the twitter account that started this whole thing," which makes you laugh so hard you have to set your own phone down.

your mom calls on sunday, the way she always does, and this time she doesn't lead with anything careful. "i talked to your aunt," she says. "told her not to forward things like that again without checking first. i felt terrible about it, you know. i didn't mean to start anything."

"i know, mom. it's okay. it actually turned into a good thing, weirdly."

"how do you figure that." there's a note of genuine curiosity in her voice, the kind she gets when she's bracing to hear something she thinks might still be bad news dressed up kindly for her benefit.

"because i found out i still trust her not just in theory actually, in practice, in the middle of a bad night, i found out the thing underneath the panic was still true." you pause, watching megan through the doorway, tasting the sauce off a wooden spoon with a face like she already knows it's not quite right. "i don't think i would've known that for sure if nothing had ever tested it."

your mom is quiet for a second. "you sound like you've been thinking about this a lot."

"i have. megan and i talked about it for like two hours the day after. actually talked, not just smoothed it over and moved on. it was good for us, i think. uncomfortable, but good." you think about it for a second, megan's laugh drifting in from the kitchen where she's making dinner badly and cheerfully, some song playing too loud on her phone propped against the toaster. 

"i think i needed to find out i still know how to trust her, even after a bad night," you say. "i wouldn't have found that out if nothing had ever gone sideways." your mom is quiet for a moment, and then, warmly: "she's a good one. i'm glad she came and got you."

"me too."

the fleet's next home game falls exactly ten days after minnesota, and you're in the stands at agganis with a coffee you don't really need and your phone tucked away in your bag instead of your pocket, on purpose, because you've been trying deliberately, imperfectly to notice the difference between an actual reason to worry and just a loud room full of other people's opinions. megan finds you in the crowd during warmups the way she always does, a small private moment neither of you make a big show of, and lifts her stick in your direction, and you lift your coffee back, and it's such a plain, unremarkable exchange that it almost undoes you a little, how much you'd nearly thrown away over a stranger's blurry photograph.

she scores in the second period, an assist really, a perfect saucer pass that alina buries, and the whole building comes up out of its seats, and you're on your feet too, screaming with the rest of them, and megan finds your face in the stands again on her way back to the bench, and this time she doesn't just lift her stick. 

she points, once, right at you, unmistakable, the kind of gesture that isn't for the cameras or the crowd or anyone circulating anything anywhere it's just for you after the game, waiting by the players' family entrance the way you have a hundred times before, you watch her come through the doors still damp-haired and jacketed, scanning the small cluster of people until she finds you, and the smile that breaks over her face when she does is the same one from three years ago, the same one from the wedding photo on your phone, the same one you'd let a screenshot and a chorus of other people's doubt try to convince you wasn't real.

"good game," you tell her, when she reaches you, and she wraps an arm around your shoulders and presses a kiss to the top of your head, unhurried, in front of anyone who might be watching, in front of anyone with a phone who might catch it and post it somewhere with a caption of their own.

"let them," she says, when she catches you glancing, half out of old habit, at a stranger nearby with a phone half-raised. "i don't care what story anyone else tells about this. i only care about the one we tell each other." you nod, and you believe her, and for the first time in ten days the quiet in your own head feels like peace instead of the held breath kind of quiet that comes right before a storm.

on the drive home, your phone buzzes once, and instead of your stomach dropping you just glance at it, easy, unbothered it's your cousin, of all people, sending a photo from tonight's broadcast, megan mid-celly with alina, captioned simply: she's so good, i'm sorry again about before, love you guys.

you type back a heart and put the phone away, and reach over instead for megan's hand on the console between you, and she laces her fingers through yours without even looking over, like it's the easiest, most obvious thing in the world, because for the two of you, it finally is again.

the streetlights slide past the windshield in slow, familiar intervals, the same route you've driven a hundred times before, and you find yourself thinking, not for the first time this week, about how close you came to not being in this car at all tonight to still being somewhere fifteen minutes and a lifetime away, sitting with a duffel bag and a version of the truth that wasn't the whole truth. 

you don't dwell on it the way you might have a week ago, turning it over and over until it wears a groove in you. you just notice it, the way you'd notice a scar healed enough to stop being tender, and let it go.

meet cute

❄︎ she checks you into the boards during a coed pickup scrimmage her team runs for charity, immediately drops her stick to help you up, mortified.

❄︎ you're the equipment intern who has to re-lace her skates before a game because she blew through her laces arguing with a ref in warmups.

❄︎ she slides into your dms after you tweet something roasting her team's power play, expecting a fight, gets charmed instead.

❄︎ stuck next to her on a delayed flight, she talks your ear off for four hours and doesn't ask your name until boarding's already over.

❄︎ you're the only one in the arena still cheering during a blowout loss, she finds you after and asks who raised you to be that loyal.

❄︎ she mistakes you for someone else at a bar, realizes halfway through the conversation, decides she likes this version better anyway.

❄︎ your dog runs onto the practice rink and she's the only one who chases it down instead of yelling.

❄︎ she's doing a locker room interview and you're the reporter who asks the one question that actually makes her think before answering.

❄︎ you both reach for the last of something at a team sponsor event, she insists you take it, spends the rest of the night finding excuses to talk to you.

❄︎ she slides into the seat next to you on the team charter bus by mistake, too tired to move, falls asleep on your shoulder within ten minutes.

dating & fluff

❄︎ she's loud about you — interrupts postgame interviews to blow you a kiss in the stands, no shame.

❄︎ tags you in every dumb meme within seconds of seeing it, expects a reaction within the hour.

❄︎ calls between periods just to hear your voice for ten seconds before she has to go back out.

❄︎ hype woman before romantic — "you're the smartest person i know," "you could run this whole league," said with total conviction before she gets soft.

❄︎ wants to be introduced as her girl to literally everyone, teammates' families, equipment managers, the zamboni driver.

❄︎ gets a little insufferable when you come to away games — plays better, points at you after every good shift.

❄︎ slow dances with you in the kitchen to whatever's playing, no occasion needed.

❄︎ buys you jerseys with her name on the back before you've even asked for one.

❄︎ nervous energy before big games gets soothed only by you — texts you the lineup like you're her sports psychologist.

❄︎ cries a little the first time you watch her hit a milestone, tries to play it off as allergies.

❄︎ keeps a photo of you taped inside her locker, denies it when teammates notice.

❄︎ drives across town after a loss just to sit on your couch and not talk about the game.

❄︎ learns the words to your favorite song specifically to embarrass you in public.

❄︎ shows up to your work event even though she hates small talk, spends the whole night glued to your side anyway.

❄︎ writes your initials on her stick tape before big games, thinks no one's clocked it.

cute / domestic

❄︎ keeps a running note on her phone titled "reader quotes 😭" of things you've said that made her laugh.

❄︎ terrible at mornings, wakes you up at 2am because she "had a thought" that could've waited.

❄︎ learns your coffee order before your middle name.

❄︎ steals your hoodies specifically because she likes drowning in something that's yours.

❄︎ post-game, gear half off, still smelling like rink ice, immediately wants to be held.

❄︎ turns grocery runs into an event — narrates the whole store, does a little two-step in the cereal aisle.

❄︎ bad at doing dishes but insists on doing them anyway so she can "prove she's domestic."

❄︎ falls asleep mid-sentence during movie nights, always denies it happened.

❄︎ leaves you voice memos instead of texts because she says typing "doesn't capture the bit."

❄︎ has a designated "your side" of the closet within a month of you basically living there.

smut

❄︎ confidence on the ice doesn't fully translate — first time together she's all bark, hands shaking a little as she undresses you, checking in twice as often as she needs to.

❄︎ loves pulling on your hair, will never admit it unprompted but melts the second she do it.

❄︎ talks through almost everything she's doing half filthy, half genuinely checking that you're okay, somehow both at once.

❄︎ gets embarrassingly vocal when she's close, tries to muffle it against your shoulder and fails.

❄︎ post-win energy turns into her wanting to show off a little — strength, stamina, holding you up against a wall just to prove she can.

❄︎ loses all her trash-talk swagger the second it's the two of you — replaced by something almost reverent, slow and deliberate.

❄︎ obsessed with your reactions — will pause just to watch your face, ask "yeah?" like she needs the confirmation every time.

❄︎ switches between rough and achingly gentle depending on the day — post-loss is desperate and clingy, post-win is teasing and drawn-out.

❄︎ aftercare-heavy without fail — pulls you in immediately after, traces lazy patterns on your back, doesn't let you get up for a while.

❄︎ mornings after, all her competitive cockiness comes roaring back — smug, insufferable, absolutely will bring it up at breakfast.

❄︎ gets possessive in a low-key way after — traces over the marks she's left like she's checking her own work.

❄︎ bites down on her own lip trying to stay quiet when you're the one taking control, fails every time.

❄︎ gets a little competitive even here — keeps track, half-joking, of who "won" that round.

❄︎ slows everything down on off days when there's nowhere to be, drags it out just to watch you fall apart twice.

the flight attendant has said "final descent" twice now and you still don't believe her three years of this of tarmacs and gate numbers and the particular ache of a phone screen at 30,000 feet, no service, no way to know if she scored, if she's hurt, if she's happy  and somehow you still fly like it's the first time, white knuckles. 

the window seat you always ask for so you can watch montreal come up out of the dark, all that grid of light, and pretend you're not doing the math you're always doing: fourteen months since you moved for your job and she stayed for hers six weekends this year one broken phone screen from throwing it across the room after a bad loss in january, hers not yours, and you'd cried harder than she had.

long distance was supposed to be temporary, you don't say that out loud anymore because you're both a little embarrassed by how long temporary has lasted you think, sometimes, about the specific archaeology of loving someone from a distance the way you've built an entire relationship out of secondhand materials. 

facetime calls with bad lighting. a shared calendar color-coded within an inch of its life a shoebox in your closet of boarding passes you can't bring yourself to throw away, each one a receipt for a weekend that felt, at the time, like it might be enough to last until the next one. 

it never quite is you've gotten good enough at the performance of enough the brave face at airport security, the i'm fine, i'll see you in three weeks while privately keeping a tally you never mention to her six weekends this year. 

four missed birthdays combined, across four years, hers and yours both, celebrated over video call with a cake you baked alone and held up to a laptop camera like an offering you don't resent her career. 

you want to be extremely clear with yourself about that, even now, mid-descent, heart going a mile a minute. you love that she gets to do this, chase pucks for a living, be captain adjacent great at the thing she's built her whole life around. 

you would never ask her to want it less you've just, somewhere in year three, started quietly wanting more of her than the version that fits into a six-hour layover so when she'd told you, two weeks ago, over a call that kept freezing on her face mid-sentence i really think we've got a shot at this, babe, i really think this is our year  something in you had gone very still and very certain, all at once, the way it does right before you do something reckless. 

you'd looked at her frozen half-smile on your screen and thought: i am not watching this on a screen. you booked the flight before you'd even fully admitted to yourself that you'd decided.

but tonight, tonight is game seven of the walter cup final, and abby is somewhere underneath you right now, in a building you can't see yet, lacing up skates with hands you know better than your own, and you are landing forty minutes before puck drop with a duffel bag and a jersey that still smells like your apartment and not hers.

you'd told her you couldn't make it. work trip, you said. she'd said okay in that voice she uses when she means it's not okay but she's not going to make you feel bad about it, and you'd hated yourself a little for the lie, and then you'd spent four hundred dollars you didn't really have on a ticket she doesn't know about.

the plane's wheels hit the tarmac and something in your chest unclenches for the first time in nine hours you don't make it inside for puck drop you make it for the end of the first, breathless, having sprinted through a terminal in doc martens like an idiot, having shoved twenty canadian dollars at a cab driver who did not care about your emotional state, having texted your season ticket holding friend leah in all caps: I'M HERE WHERE ARE YOU SAVE ME A SEAT.

the arena swallows you whole sound first, always sound first, twelve thousand people mid-roar over something you missed and then leah's hand grabbing your sleeve, hauling you into a seat four rows off the glass that she has apparently been guarding like a dragon. "you're insane," she says, delighted. "she doesn't know?"

"she doesn't know." on the ice, montreal is up one-nothing, and abby is doing that thing she does where she skates a fraction slower than everyone else on the backcheck because she's already three moves ahead of where the puck is going to be. 

you have watched her play a hundred games you have watched her play on a laptop propped against a hotel pillow at 1 a.m. your time, sound off so you don't wake up whoever you were staying with, mouthing along to a commentary you'd basically memorized. 

you have never once gotten used to it the specific, unfair miracle of watching someone you love be good at something, effortlessly, in front of strangers who will never know the way she takes her coffee or that she cries at dog food commercials or that she still has a voicemail from her grandmother saved on a phone she upgraded two years ago because she can't bring herself to delete it.

you know all of that tonight, twelve thousand strangers just get to know that she's good it should feel like enough, watching her be good some nights it is tonight, forty minutes off a plane with your heart still somewhere over lake ontario, it isn't, quite. 

tonight you want the after you want her skin still hot from playing, her hair damp at the temples, her mouth against yours saying something dumb and euphoric that she'll deny remembering tomorrow you didn't fly a thousand miles for the game you flew a thousand miles for the ten minutes after it.

second period, montreal extends it to two the building is a living thing by now, a single organism of noise, and you are screaming along with it though you couldn't tell you anyone what you're screaming, just sound, just the pure animal relief of watching the team you love be one period away from everything leah keeps looking at you like you might combust. "you good?"

"i'm — " you laugh, and it comes out wet, embarrassing, and you wipe your face with the heel of your hand. "yeah. i'm good."

you're not, really you're doing the thing you do, which is loving someone so much it becomes a kind of grief in advance already mourning the ten days from now when you'll be back in your own city, in your own bed, texting good morning to a time zone that's still asleep already aching for a night that hasn't ended yet.

abby doesn't know you're here that's the part that keeps catching in your throat between screams somewhere down there she thinks you're in a hotel room in a different city, phone off, missing this. and you are going to get to watch her face when she finds out otherwise, and there is nothing, nothing, not a walter cup, not a signing bonus, not a parade that you want more than that specific expression, whatever it turns out to be.

you think about the last time you saw her in person six weeks ago now, a stolen forty eight hours between a homestand and a road trip, the two of you doing almost nothing with the time except existing in the same room, cooking a bad pasta together, falling asleep on the couch by nine because neither of you could bear to waste a minute of consciousness on sleep in separate beds. she'd cried a little at the airport when you left, quietly, the way she does, turning her face like she thought you wouldn't notice you'd noticed you'd cried the whole drive to your gate, too, and texted her from your seat before takeoff: forty-eight hours was not enough. it's never enough. i love you, go win things.

she'd texted back, an hour later, once she'd landed somewhere else entirely: i'm going to. and then i'm going to figure out how to stop doing this to us.

you hadn't known, at the time, if that was a promise or just something people say to make an ache more bearable you think about it now, watching her skate a lap she doesn't need to skate, buying time on the backcheck, and you wonder if tonight is the night that promise starts meaning something.

the second period ends with montreal's lead intact you don't remember standing for the buzzer. your legs just do it on their own intermission drags leah buys you both a beer you don't taste, and you spend the seventeen minutes doing what you always do in the gaps between hockey scrolling old photos on your phone without meaning to, the way your thumb just knows the way there. 

abby asleep on a plane, mouth open, entirely unglamorous, a photo she'd threatened your life over and you'd kept anyway abby at your cousin's wedding two years ago, the one weekend that season she'd flown in specifically so you wouldn't have to go alone, looking wildly out of place in a rented suit and not caring at all. 

abby, sweaty and grinning after some regular-season win in a city you'd never visited, holding her phone up to facetime you into a locker room celebration that was, at the time, the closest you'd ever gotten to a night exactly like tonight.

you'd cried after that facetime call too, a little, once it ended and the apartment went quiet again happy for her, lonely for yourself. both, always both, that particular contradiction being the entire emotional weather system of loving an athlete from four states away.

tonight there's no phone screen between you tonight, whatever happens, you're going to be standing in the same building when it does.

the third period is the longest twenty minutes of your natural life you have watched a lot of hockey in your years loving abby you have learned, against your own instincts, to read a period the way she does not just the scoreboard but the shape of it, the way momentum has a physical presence if you know how to look for it, the way a team can be winning and losing at the same time depending on who's controlling the middle of the ice. 

you learned all of this the hard way, at 1 a.m. on a couch, muting a laptop so as not to wake a roommate, teaching yourself a language so you'd have something to talk about besides i miss you on the nights that was all either of you had energy left to say.

it has made watching her harder, honestly, not easier you used to be able to just feel the crowd's mood and borrow it now you see every small thing the way montreal's forecheck is getting sloppier as fatigue sets in, the way abby's line has been out for longer shifts than any of the others because the coaching staff clearly trusts her in exactly this kind of moment, the way her stick, in the defensive zone, keeps finding passing lanes half a second before they open. 

you see the whole machinery of it, it makes the stakes worse, not better, knowing exactly how much of this is riding on the woman you love simply refusing to get tired montreal's lead narrows to one with six minutes left, a fluke deflection off a d-woman's skate that nobody could've stopped, and the arena's roar curdles into something tighter, more desperate you grab leah's arm.  

leah grabs the stranger's arm on her other side as the stranger, a man in his sixties wearing a jersey older than you are, does not seem to mind.

abby's on the ice for the final minute of course she is she's been on the ice for every final minute of every close game for six years, because she is, in the particular language of the sport, a closer someone who wants the puck when it matters most instead of flinching from it and you have never once understood how she does that, wants the weight of a whole season landing on her shoulders in the last sixty seconds, when your own hands are shaking just watching.

the clock ticks under a minute montreal wins an offensive zone faceoff and cycles the puck low abby's stick finds it behind the net, and you watch her do the calculation you can see her doing it, the half-second pause that means she's seeing three moves ahead and she banks a pass off the boards to a teammate crashing the slot who buries it top shelf with twenty-two seconds left.

the building doesn't roar, the building detonates you are on your feet, you are screaming a sound you didn't know your body could make, you are hugging leah and the man in the old jersey and a child you've never met, and somewhere down on the ice a pile of women in blue and gold is forming around the goal scorer, and abby roque is at the bottom of it, and the clock is running out, running out, running out the horn sounds.

it's over, montreal wins the walter cup.

there's a version of you that almost didn't get on that plane at all, not the flight itself, but the relationship it was in service of. 

you don't think about this often, because it's not a flattering memory, but standing in the tunnel waiting for the horn to sound, adrenaline making everything feel unusually clear, you find yourself thinking about it anyway.

eighteen months ago there was a stretch six weeks, maybe seven where you'd almost ended things not dramatically, no fight, no ultimatum, just a slow, exhausted erosion, the kind that doesn't announce itself until you're standing at the edge of it. 

you'd been living out of a supply closet turned home office, taking calls with her at odd hours because her schedule ate every reasonable window you had, and one night, over facetime, you'd said, quietly, almost experimentally, "i don't know if i can keep doing this."

she hadn't argued that was the part that had scared you most, honestly you'd braced for a fight, for reassurance, for anything, and instead she'd just gone very quiet on the screen and said, "i don't want you to have to keep doing something that's hurting you. i love you too much to ask you to just endure me."

you remember hanging up that night not knowing if you'd just ended something you remember three days of radio silence, both of you licking wounds, before she'd called again and said, simply, "i've been thinking. i don't want to lose you to distance. tell me what you need and i'll try. i can't promise i'll get it right, but i'll try."

it hadn't fixed anything overnight there'd been more hard months after that one, more arguments about time zones and missed calls and the particular loneliness of loving someone whose job takes up more of the calendar than you do but that phone call i'll try had been the first time either of you had said out loud that the distance was a problem worth solving together, instead of a fact to just quietly survive.

you think about all of that now, in the tunnel, six seconds from a horn that's about to change both your lives, and you think: this is why you flew here not for the trophy, for the proof that trying had worked you don't remember getting down to ice level. 

you remember leah shoving a security guard's badge she is absolutely not authorized to have at someone, some connection through the team's media staff that you'll thank her for properly later, and then you're standing in a hallway that smells like rubber and ammonia and champagne already, somehow, though the cup hasn't even been presented yet, and your whole body is vibrating like a struck bell.

on the ice, chaos streamers, someone's doused someone else in a water bottle in celebration, gatorade colors running down blue jerseys cameras everywhere and abby you can see her through the tunnel opening, at center ice, being swarmed by teammates, her helmet gone, hair stuck to her forehead with sweat, and her face.

her face is doing something you've genuinely never seen it do before, not the controlled, focused thing it does on the bench, not even the easy, private smile she gives you across a kitchen at 7 a.m. something rawer than either. something cracked open.

she's crying abby roque, who didn't cry at her own draft, who you have seen cry exactly twice in four years once at her grandmother's funeral, once, quietly, on a random tuesday for reasons she never fully explained and you never fully pressed is standing at center ice of the walter cup final with tears actually streaming down her face, laughing and sobbing at the same time, getting crushed in a pile of her teammates.

you should let her have this, this moment belongs to her and eleven other women and a coaching staff and a franchise that's waited its whole short existence for this you know that you tell yourself that, standing in the tunnel, holding yourself back with something like willpower and then she looks up.

you don't know what makes her look maybe just the particular chaos-scan every player does, searching stands out of habit even mid-celebration, some part of the brain that never fully turns off but her eyes cut across the ice, past teammates, past cameras, past twelve thousand strangers, and land on the tunnel mouth where you're standing in a jersey with her name on the back, half-hidden by an equipment cart, looking like you might throw up from how hard your heart is going her whole face just stops.

she doesn't say your name she doesn't say anything she just starts skating, cuts straight across the ice she's supposed to be celebrating on with her actual teammates, still in full gear, stick discarded somewhere behind her, and you have exactly four seconds to decide whether you're allowed to go to her before your body decides for you and you're moving too, ducking under the arm of a security guard who's already given up trying to hold the line, hitting the ice in your doc martens which have approximately zero grip and absolutely do not care.

she gets to the boards first vaults them, actually, gear and all, like she weighs nothing, and then her arms are around you and you're both nearly going down in a heap and she's saying your name into your hair over and over like she doesn't believe it either.

"you're — " she pulls back just far enough to look at you, hands framing your face, and up close you can see it properly now, the tears, the disbelief, the two-day stubble of exhaustion under her eyes. "you're here. you said you told me you couldn't—"

"i lied." your own voice cracks embarrassingly on the second word. "i'm sorry. i lied, i bought the ticket last week, i wanted i needed you to not know, i needed to see your face "

"you flew a thousand miles to lie to me."

"i flew a thousand miles because i couldn't watch you win this on a screen again." the words come out messier than you'd planned, more honest than you'd planned, three years of every missed game and every delayed flight and every 2 a.m. call cracking loose all at once. "i've missed too much. i wasn't going to miss this." she makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh and isn't quite a sob and kisses you.

it's not a good kiss, technically she's crying, you're crying, there's a mouthguard somewhere she should probably remove, the ice under your boots is doing absolutely nothing to help either of your balance but it is, without competition, the best one of your entire life. 

twelve thousand people are still screaming behind you somewhere a cameraman has clearly clocked what's happening and is bearing down with a lens, and neither of you cares even slightly.

"i love you," she says, against your mouth, laughing now, properly, the sound scraped raw. "i love you, i love you, you absolute…you lied to me— "

"i love you too. congratulations. you won the cup."

"i won the cup," she repeats, like she's only just remembering, like the last ninety seconds have knocked the entire fact clean out of her head, and then she's laughing harder, forehead dropping to your shoulder, and you're holding onto her pads and her sweat and the particular unbearable joy of a body you love, present tense, in your arms, not on a screen, not a thousand miles away.

they eventually make her go back to her teammates there's a cup to lift, a trophy presentation, a whole ceremony that does not, technically, pause for anyone's reunion, no matter how photogenic but not before she grabs your hand and hauls you along the boards with her, not letting go, introducing you to the security staff by saying, breathless, "this is my—she's just let her stay, please, i just won the walter cup, let me have this."

nobody argues with a woman who just won the walter cup.

so you end up standing at the bench, half over the boards, watching abby line up with her team for the presentation, watching the commissioner make her way down the ice with an entourage and a trophy so absurdly, gorgeously heavy that it takes two staff members to carry it out. 

you watch the captain lift it first, the traditional thing, arms shaking with the weight and the emotion both, and then abby, abby who assisted the cup-winning goal, who's been an alternate captain for two years, who has quietly, unglamorously been the best two-way forward on this roster since the franchise's first season gets handed the cup next.

she doesn't lift it straight away she looks for you first finds you at the boards, jersey damp now from where she'd hugged you in her gear, mascara probably a disaster down your face, and she grins at you a full, unguarded, boyish grin that you get to see approximately never on television, a grin that belongs to you and not to the cameras and then she hoists the cup over her head and the whole building loses its mind again you're crying you don't try to stop. 

what nobody tells you about championship celebrations, what four years of watching from a distance never quite prepared you for is the sheer length of them, the way the ceremony sprawls out in every direction at once, no single moment allowed to be the last one. 

after abby lifts the cup, she passes it to the next teammate in line, and the next, and the next, a slow relay of joy moving down the roster in whatever order feels right to them in the moment, seniority and sentiment tangled together the longest-tenured player first, then the rookies, then, somehow, a trainer who's been with the franchise since its inaugural season and has clearly never expected to get her hands on it, sobbing into the metal like it's a person she's been waiting to hug.

you watch abby watch all of this, still catching her breath at the boards beside you, arm looped loosely around your waist like she can't quite bring herself to let more than a few inches of air exist between you. she points out teammates to you by name, some you know from stories, some entirely new "that's sasha, she broke her collarbone in november and everyone thought she was done for the year, watch her, she's about to lose it completely."and sure enough, sasha does, collapsing to her knees at center ice the second the cup reaches her hands, teammates swarming to hold her up.

"i've been dreaming about this exact scene since i was nine years old," abby says, quiet, almost to herself, watching it all unfold. "not — not the specifics. i didn't know it'd be here, or this team, or this year but this, this feeling. i used to lie in bed as a kid and imagine what it would feel like and i always got it wrong, somehow. i always imagined it being about the winning. it's not, really. it's this part. everybody getting their turn."

"is this your turn?" 

"i already had mine." she looks at you, eyes still wet, cheeks still flushed from champagne and adrenaline and the particular sunburn of standing under stadium lights for two straight hours. "i had mine the second i looked up and found you in that tunnel. everything since then has just been extremely good bonus content."

you laugh a real laugh, wet and undignified, and someone nearby snaps a photo that will, you'll learn later, end up as the header image on the team's recap article, the two of you laughing at the boards while a trophy makes its slow circuit of the ice behind you, utterly unbothered by the fact that a professional photographer has clearly identified your moment as more interesting than the ceremony itself.

the locker room celebration afterward is chaotic in the specific way only a championship locker room can be: plastic sheeting over the stalls, goggles passed around, champagne sprayed in every direction with the joyful disregard of people who have earned the right to ruin some very nice suits. 

you get pulled in by teammates who've met you exactly twice before and hug you like family regardless, get a plastic cup of champagne shoved into your hand by a rookie who can't be older than twenty-two and is sobbing happily into her stall, get abby's arm slung around your shoulders half the night, sticky and soaked and radiant.

"so this is the girlfriend," someone says you think it's the captain, though it's hard to tell through the goggles and the noise and abby, disheveled, drenched, delirious, just says, "yeah. this is her," with a kind of simple pride that makes your chest hurt in a good way.

you catch snatches of things the team's starting goalie telling you, unprompted, that abby talks about you constantly, that she'd once benched an entire film session by fifteen minutes describing some restaurant you'd taken her to on an off day. 

a rookie defender asking, wide-eyed, if long distance is really as hard as it looks, and you telling her, honestly, yeah, it is, it's the hardest thing i've ever done, and it's also completely worth it, watch and abby, twenty feet away, laughing at something with her head thrown back, champagne-soaked, cup-winning, yours.

you'd tell that rookie again if she asked you'd tell anyone it is worth it it has always, even on the worst nights, even during the four-hundred-dollar flight you couldn't afford, even during the january loss and the broken phone screen and the fourteen months apart, been worth it.

the assistant captain a soft-spoken defender who you've met exactly once, at a team barbecue two summers ago, but who apparently remembers you with startling specificity finds you by the equipment rack and tells you, conspiratorially, that abby had asked the coaching staff months ago, quietly, almost sheepishly, whether the team had any policy about family attending the parade if they made it that far. "she was already planning for you before we'd even clinched a playoff spot," the defender says, grinning. "we all clocked it. she's not subtle, your girl."

your girl you turn the phrase over privately while someone's rookie sprays champagne dangerously close to your hairline. you like the shape of it more than you'd admit out loud.

at some point abby extracts herself from a knot of teammates mid-story and comes to find you properly, pulling you a little apart from the chaos, into the relative quiet of the doorway to the equipment room. 

she's still soaked, still radiant, goggles pushed up into her hair, and up close you can see just how tired she is underneath the adrenaline, the specific exhaustion of a body that's given absolutely everything it has for two hours and is only now beginning to remember it has limits.

"hi," she says, like you haven't already said everything there is to say tonight, like the word itself is a whole sentence.

"hi." you reach up, thumb brushing a smear of dried champagne off her cheekbone. "you look like you got hit by a parade float.

"i feel like i got hit by a parade float." she leans into your hand, eyes closing briefly, and something in the gesture undoes you a little how much trust it takes, to let yourself go soft in the doorway of a locker room mid-celebration, guard fully down, in front of teammates who could see. "i can't believe you're actually here. i keep looking over expecting you to be a hallucination."

"i'm not a hallucination."

"i know. i checked. you've got champagne in your hair and everything, very convincing detail work." she laughs, and it catches on something rawer underneath, and for a second her eyes go bright again. "i thought about you the whole third period. i know you're not supposed to admit that, you're supposed to be locked in, but i kept thinking, god, i wish she could see this, i wish she was here for this one, and then i looked up and you just — were. like i'd wished you into existence."

"you didn't wish me. i bought a plane ticket."

"don't ruin the romance of it."

"never." you kiss her, softer than the ice rink kiss, unhurried, the kind of kiss that doesn't need an audience to mean something. "go finish celebrating with your team. i'll be here."

"you'd better be." she squeezes your hand once, hard, before letting go and diving back into the noise, and you watch her go watch the way her teammates absorb her back into the celebration without missing a beat, watch the particular ease of a woman who is loved in two places at once and finally, for one night, gets to hold both at the same time.

you leave the arena a little after 1 a.m., abby's gear bag slung over your shoulder because she insists her arms are too tired to carry anything, though you suspect it's really just an excuse to keep both her hands free for yours. 

the streets outside are still loud pockets of fans lingering, honking horns, someone's car stereo blasting the team's goal song on repeat but it thins out fast the further you walk from the arena, until it's just the two of you and the strange, hollowed-out quiet that follows any enormous noise. "i can't feel my legs," abby admits, laughing, leaning into you at a crosswalk. "i'm serious. i think i left them on the ice."

"do you need me to carry you?"

"tempting. you're smaller than me, it'd be a disaster, but tempting." she loops her arm through yours instead, head dropping briefly to your shoulder as you wait for the light. "can i tell you something kind of unbelievable?"

"always."

"the second the horn went off before i even found you in the crowd, the very first thought i had, before we won, before anything, was i wish she'd seen that and then i thought, god, i'm going to have to call her and describe it, and it's never going to sound as good over the phone as it actually felt, and i hate that, i've hated that for years, describing things to you secondhand." 

the light changes; neither of you moves for a second. "and then i looked up and you were just there. real. not a phone call. i think that might've been the best half-second of my whole life, actually, better than the goal, better than the horn. just — you, existing, in the same building as me, for once." you don't trust your voice, so you just tighten your grip on her arm and keep walking.

the parade isn't until the following afternoon, giving montreal exactly one night to sleep off a championship, which nobody really does you end up back at abby's apartment near midnight, both of you still faintly sticky with champagne, abby still wearing an unzipped montreal victoire hoodie over nothing else in particular, and there's a strange quiet after the roar of the day the specific hush of a home that's been empty for a week finally holding two people again.

she showers first, comes out with wet hair and her old college t-shirt on, and finds you on the couch with the cup miniature replica, team-issued, the kind every player gets to keep a small model of even if the actual walter cup goes on its ceremonial tour turning it over in your hands like it might not be real.

"you're allowed to hold the big one too, you know," she says, dropping onto the couch beside you, hooking her chin over your shoulder. "next time it comes back to the city they'll let family take pictures with it."

"next time," you repeat.

"i'm planning on there being a next time." her arms come around you from behind, and you feel her breathe out, long, the sound of a body finally letting six months of playoff tension go. "i'm planning on a lot of things, actually." something in her voice makes you turn. "like what?"

she doesn't answer right away she takes the mini cup out of your hands, sets it on the coffee table with a strange, deliberate care, like she's buying herself a second, and when she looks back at you her eyes are doing the thing they did at center ice cracked open, unguarded, more than she usually lets show even to you.

you notice, for the first time, the boxes stacked neatly against the far wall of the living room three of them, flattened, still bearing a hardware store's logo, tucked half out of sight behind the armchair like she'd meant to deal with them before you arrived and hadn't quite gotten around to it. 

you'd clocked them earlier and assumed, vaguely, moving-related admin, something to do with her own lease you hadn't let yourself consider the other possibility. "were you already — " you gesture at the boxes, throat tight. "abby, is that what i think it is?"

she has the grace to look sheepish. "i ordered them three weeks ago. i told myself it was just in case, that i wasn't going to say anything unless we won, unless there was actually a version of this where i could ask you to build a life somewhere instead of asking you to keep flying into one for the weekend." 

she scrubs a hand over her face, laughing at herself, disbelieving. "i've been sitting on this for three weeks. i almost told you on the phone twice and chickened out both times."

"you've had moving boxes in your living room for three weeks and didn't say anything."

"i panicked! it felt like too much to ask someone over facetime. 'hey, also, restructure your entire life for me, no pressure, talk later, love you, bye.'" she says it in a mock-breezy voice that makes you laugh despite the tears threatening again, and something about her nervousness abby roque, captain-adjacent, ice-cold in a third period with a championship on the line, absolutely undone by the idea of asking you to move in makes the whole thing feel more real than any speech could have.

"like not doing fourteen months again," she says quietly. "like — you flew here to lie to my face so you could watch me win a trophy, and that's the most insane, romantic thing anyone's ever done for me, and i spent the whole third period thinking about how i wanted to skate over during a championship celebration and you weren't even supposed to be there, and i just— " 

she exhales, laughs at herself, a little wet. "i don't want to keep doing long distance. i want you here. properly here. not visiting-here. living here." your heart does something complicated and enormous. "abby — "

"i know it's a lot to say the same night i won a trophy, i know i'm not thinking totally straight, i've had champagne and adrenaline and approximately four hours of sleep in the last two days, but i've been thinking about it for months, and i wasn't going to say it like this, i had this whole — plan, actually, for after the parade, but you're sitting right here in my apartment with your mascara still smudged from crying about me on national television and i can't wait for a plan."

"abby."

"i'm serious. move here. or — not even here, necessarily, we can figure out the logistics, i just mean — with me. i want to build the after with you. not just the ten minutes after a game. all of it."

you're crying again, which feels like it should be embarrassing at this point, given how much crying you've already done today, except it doesn't feel embarrassing at all, it feels like the only honest thing your body knows how to do right now.

"yes," you say. "obviously yes. i've wanted that since the first missed weekend."

she kisses you like the ice rink kiss's quieter twin slower this time, no cameras, no twelve thousand witnesses, just her mouth soft against yours in an apartment that smells like champagne and rented moving boxes she apparently already started packing weeks ago, some small traitor part of her already betting on this outcome before either of you said it out loud.

the parade the next day is its own kind of overwhelming confetti cannons, a route packed twenty deep with people in blue and gold, abby on an open-topped bus with the actual walter cup this time, hoisting it every few blocks to a fresh wave of screaming and you watch from the sidelines with leah, who has, at this point, appointed herself your unofficial handler for the whole trip and does not seem to mind even slightly.

you'd woken up that morning still faintly disbelieving of the night before, half convinced you'd dreamed the entire thing until you rolled over and found abby already awake beside you, propped on one elbow, just watching you with an expression you didn't have a name for yet. "morning," she'd said, entirely too pleased with herself for someone running on four hours of sleep. "you're really here. i checked twice more overnight, for the record, just to be sure."

"you checked twice more overnight?"

"i woke up at four and at six specifically to confirm you hadn't evaporated. very scientific process. rigorous." she'd kissed your shoulder, then your jaw, unhurried, morning soft, before groaning theatrically into the pillow at the memory of the parade schedule taped to her fridge. 

"we have to be at the staging area by ten. i can't feel either of my legs and montreal wants me standing on top of a moving vehicle for three hours."

"i'll hold your hand the whole time."

"you'd better." the parade route itself runs along a downtown stretch you don't know well, packed six generations deep in places grandparents in old-school jerseys, kids on shoulders with faces painted blue and gold, a group of teenage girls near the front holding up a hand-lettered sign that just says WE SEE YOU that makes leah, watching from beside you, actually tear up a little herself. 

the noise builds in waves as the bus makes its slow crawl down the street, cresting every time it draws level with a new block, a rolling, cumulative roar that never quite dies down before the next surge picks it back up.

a woman near you, maybe sixty, clutching a homemade sign with abby's number on it, turns to you at one point you're wearing the jersey again, mascara reapplied since yesterday's disaster, unmistakably part of something even from the sidelines and asks, hopeful, "are you with the team?"

"my girlfriend plays," you say, and the word still feels new and enormous in your mouth even though you've said it a thousand times before, except today it means something slightly different, today it comes with an apartment and three flattened boxes attached to it. "abby roque."

the woman's whole face lights up. "she had the best year on that team, you know. quietly. everyone always talks about the goal-scorers, but my husband and i, we watch the whole game, we see what she does. tell her we said congratulations."

"i will," you promise, and you mean it, filing the moment away carefully, already composing how you'll tell abby later some stranger on the parade route thinks you had the best year on the team, quietly, and she wanted you to know she noticed because you've learned, across four years of loving an athlete, that the praise she needs to hear most is rarely the loud kind. 

it's the quiet, specific, unglamorous kind, the kind that says; someone was paying attention the whole time, not just at the end.

at one point abby spots you in the crowd waves you up, over the barricade, some poor volunteer's protests overridden yet again by a woman holding a trophy and you end up on the bus for two full blocks, one arm looped through hers, the cup between you, twenty thousand people cheering a version of the day that has nothing and everything to do with you.

"so," she says, into your ear, under the noise, cup gleaming between you, jersey collar still smelling faintly of last night's champagne, "living here. i was serious."

"i know."

"i already looked at apartments. i didn't want to say in case it freaked you out, but there's a two-bedroom near the practice facility, good light, you'd like the kitchen. " you laugh, disbelieving, delighted. "you found an apartment during the walter cup final."

"i multitask." she grins, sun-bright, exhausted, victorious, hers, yours. "so is that a yes to the apartment too, or do i need to win another championship to ask properly?"

"it's a yes," you say, and mean it more than you've meant almost anything, watching confetti fall gold and blue over a city that gets to keep her a little longer, and you, finally, permanently, get to keep her too.

she laughs, delighted, and hoists the cup one more time for a fresh wave of the crowd, and then turns back to you almost immediately, like the twenty thousand people screaming her name are a pleasant background hum compared to whatever's happening in the six inches of space between the two of you.

"i mean it about the kitchen, by the way," she says, apropos of nothing, grinning. "good light. you'll love it. i already imagined you in it approximately four hundred times while i was supposed to be reviewing game film."

"you reviewed game film thinking about my future kitchen."

"i'm a multitasker, i told you. elite level. it's part of why we won." she says it so seriously that it takes you a second to catch the joke, and when you do you laugh loud enough that a cameraman nearby swings his lens toward the two of you again, capturing what will become, over the following week, a small but devoted corner of the internet's favorite recurring image the exhausted, confetti-drenched forward and the girlfriend who flew a thousand miles to lie to her face, laughing at some private joke atop a parade bus while an entire city celebrates around them.

"can i tell you something kind of embarrassing," she says, quieter now, leaning her forehead briefly against yours as the bus rolls past another surge of noise. "i've been composing the apartment speech in my head for three weeks. i had a whole draft. candles, maybe. a specific playlist. i had opinions about which restaurant to propose the idea at. and instead i said it in a hoodie on my couch at midnight covered in dried champagne, mid-ramble, completely unplanned. and it was still the best conversation of my life. better than any speech i could've written."

"i liked the unplanned version better anyway. the version where you meant it too much to wait for the right candles."

"good. because that's the only version i've got left in me. i think i used up my entire life's supply of nerve in the last thirty-six hours." she kisses your temple, settles back against your side as the bus continues its slow crawl, cup gleaming in the afternoon sun between you, and for the rest of the route neither of you says much else at all just watches the city go by, gold and blue and impossibly loud, holding on to each other in the middle of it like the only quiet thing in a very loud world.

you call your mother from the back of the bus, mid-parade, because there is no version of this day where you don't, and because some part of you has been composing this phone call in your head since you were twenty two years old and first said the words i think i'm falling for a hockey player out loud to another human being.

"i'm moving to montreal," you say, before your mother's even finished saying hello, and there's a pause on the other end that stretches just long enough for you to worry.

"finally," your mother says, and you can hear her crying already, the particular sound of a woman who has watched her daughter fly out of a dozen airports over four years and quietly worried, every single time, about the toll of loving someone from that far away. "finally, honey. i'm so happy for you. is she there? put her on."

abby, hearing her name, leans over with the trophy still cradled against one hip like it's a particularly heavy toddler, and takes the phone with a grin that could power the entire parade route by itself. "hi, mrs. — yeah, no, i know, i should've asked you first, that's very old-fashioned of me to have not — no, i'm kidding, i'm — yes, we won. yes. i'll take care of her. i promise."

you watch her talk to your mother with the walter cup wedged against her ribs and confetti in her hair and think, not for the first time today, that you have never in your entire life loved anyone the way you love this exact, specific, unbearable, wonderful woman.

the rest of the parade passes in a blur of noise and gold confetti and abby's hand finding yours every few minutes like she needs to check you're still real by the time the bus finally loops back to the arena and the crowds start to thin, both of you are hoarse, sunburned, and thoroughly, gloriously exhausted in the specific way that only follows a day too full to properly hold.

you end up back at her apartment soon to be your apartment, plural, a fact that still doesn't feel entirely load-bearing yet, like a bridge you're not sure will hold your weight until you've actually walked all the way across it a little after seven, and for the first time in two days neither of you has anywhere else to be.

abby collapses face-first onto the couch, cup still technically in her custody for the next forty-eight hours per some absurd but sacred league tradition, propped on the coffee table where it will apparently need to be guarded like a sleeping infant. "i genuinely cannot move," she announces, muffled into a couch cushion. "if the building catches fire, leave me here. i've had a great life."

"you've had a great two days."

"a great two days is basically a great life, at this point, i'm delirious, don't quote me." she rolls over enough to look at you, hair a disaster, cheeks pink from a full day in the sun, and something in her face goes soft and slow in a way you've only ever seen right before sleep or right after admitting something true. "come here."

you go you always go you curl into the space beside her on a couch too small for two grown adults and a hockey trophy, her arm heavy and warm across your waist, the tv on low with a highlight reel neither of you is really watching, and for a while neither of you says anything at all.

"i keep thinking about the boxes," she says eventually, quiet, into the crown of your head. "i ordered them thinking, worst case, i just return them, i never even show her, it was a stupid impulsive thing to do three weeks before a championship. and then i kept thinking, if we lose, i can't ask her this. i need to have something to offer besides just — more of the same. and if we win. "

"if you won, you got your nerve up."

"i got my nerve up," she agrees. "you make me brave. i don't know if i've ever told you that properly. every big thing i've done in the last four years, some part of it was because i knew you'd be proud of me, or i knew i'd get to tell you about it, even if it was just over the phone. tonight's the first time the telling and the doing happened in the same room, and i don't want to go back to the other way. i don't think i can, actually, now that i know what this feels like."

you tilt your head up to look at her properly. "you're not allowed to make me cry again today. i've cried more today than i have in the last calendar year combined."

"noted for the record. no promises." she kisses your forehead, then your temple, then, finally, your mouth, slow and certain, no cameras, no crowd, no distance between you at all just her, and you, and a cup on the coffee table, and three flattened moving boxes waiting by the wall for monday morning.

it's nearly two in the morning when you finally get up to find water, moving carefully around the dark apartment so as not to wake her, and you catch sight of the boxes again on your way to the kitchen really see them this time, three flattened rectangles of cardboard leaning against the wall like a promise abby had been quietly keeping for weeks before either of you said a word out loud.

you think about the flight over the four hundred dollars the doc martens with zero grip on nhl adjacent ice the mascara down your face on national television, now presumably somewhere on the internet forever, a searchable, screenshot-able document of exactly how much you love this woman.

you think, too, about the version of tonight where montreal loses where the horn sounds and it's someone else's celebration and abby comes off the ice not radiant but wrecked, and you're the one who has to find the right thing to say to a woman who gave everything and still came up short. 

you'd have flown home with her anyway you'd have held her through that grief exactly as fiercely as you're about to hold her through this joy the boxes, you understand now, were never really contingent on winning, abby just hadn't found the nerve to say so until a trophy made honesty feel less terrifying.

you fill two glasses of water instead of one, quietly, and carry them back into the dark, and abby stirs when you set hers on the nightstand, blinking up at you half-asleep, hair a wreck, entirely unglamorous, entirely yours.

"you're still here," she mumbles, like it's a small miracle every single time, like four years and one very expensive last-minute plane ticket haven't already proven it a hundred times over.

"i'm still here," you tell her, climbing back in beside her, her arm finding your waist on instinct even half-asleep. "i'm not going anywhere. i'm moving in, remember? you've got the boxes to prove it."

"best trade i ever made," she mumbles, already halfway back to sleep, and you lie there in the dark of an apartment that is, as of tonight, going to be yours too, listening to her breathing even out, thinking that some championships get decided in overtime and some get decided years earlier, quietly, in the unglamorous architecture of two people choosing, again and again, across every missed weekend and broken phone screen and four-hundred-dollar flight, to keep choosing each other anyway.

the walter cup sits on the coffee table in the next room, guarded by nobody, needing no guarding. it isn't going anywhere either. neither are you.

you fly home three days later your actual home, the one you'll be packing up within the month to collect the rest of your life and bring it back to montreal in a series of increasingly absurd oversized suitcases. 

abby offers, more than once, to fly out and help, and you refuse, more than once, on the grounds that she has an entire off-season's worth of media obligations and a body that needs actual rest after a seven-game final, and also, quietly, because you want to do this part alone. 

you want to stand in your empty apartment one last time the supply closet turns into your home office, the shoebox of boarding passes in the back of the closet and say goodbye to the version of your life that was built entirely around absence.

you don't throw out the boarding passes you're not that sentimental, or you are, exactly that sentimental, and you pack them carefully into the same suitcase as your winter coats, alongside the jersey you wore to game seven, still faintly, stubbornly smelling of champagne no matter how many times you've washed it.

your last night in your old apartment, abby calls, as she has every night for four years, except tonight there's a different quality to it less like a lifeline thrown across a distance, more like a preview of a habit you'll get to keep in person soon, a formality with an expiration date you're both looking forward to.

"one more week," she says, and you can hear the grin in it even through the phone. "one more week and then no more calls just you, in the next room, every single night, indefinitely."

"i don't know what i'll do with all that time we won't spend on the phone."

"talk to me in person instead. wild concept. groundbreaking, really." she laughs, and then, quieter, more serious: "i keep thinking about that first flight. the one where you lied about a work trip. i keep thinking, if you hadn't done that — if you'd actually just stayed home like i told everyone you were going to — i don't know if i'd have found the nerve to ask you to move at all. i think i needed to see your face in that crowd to believe i deserved to ask for more."

"you always deserved to ask for more."

"maybe. but it's easier to believe it when the proof is standing in a tunnel in doc martens with zero traction, apparently willing to break an ankle to see you win a hockey game."

"i didn't break an ankle."

"you could have. that's the romantic part."

you laugh, and the call goes on a while longer, the way it always does, except this time, for the first time in four years, there's a concrete number attached to how many more of these you'll have to get through before the distance ends for good. 

seven days you've survived worse counts than that you've survived fourteen months, four missed birthdays, a january loss and a shattered phone screen and a stretch of six weeks eighteen months ago when you'd almost let the whole thing go seven days is nothing seven days is the easiest number you've ever counted down.

the day you actually move in, there's no parade, no crowd, no confetti just a rented moving truck, a building superintendent who clearly has no idea he's letting a walter cup champion carry boxes up three flights of stairs, and abby, sweating through an old college t-shirt, insisting on taking the heaviest boxes herself despite your protests that she just finished a seven-game championship series and possibly deserves a season of not lifting anything heavier than a coffee mug.

"i want to carry the heavy ones," she says, stubborn, hauling a box labeled KITCHEN FRAGILE up the stairwell like it weighs nothing. "i've been asking you to move here for a week. least i can do is not make you do the heavy lifting on the day it actually happens."

by early evening the apartment is a chaos of half-unpacked boxes and furniture in the wrong places, and you both collapse onto the floor of the living room, no couch yet, that's arriving thursday surrounded by bubble wrap and takeout containers, utterly exhausted in the specific way that only moving day produces.

"welcome home," abby says, handing you a plastic fork because you appear to have packed every actual utensil you own into a box neither of you can currently locate.

"home," you repeat, testing the word out loud in this apartment, this city, this version of your life where the word finally means the same building for both of you. "i like the sound of that."

"me too." she leans her head on your shoulder, and through the window behind her you can just make out, in the fading evening light, the skyline of a city that's going to be yours now too the same skyline that held a championship parade for her three weeks ago, that will hold, presumably, a hundred more ordinary tuesdays for the two of you before the next one, groceries and laundry and bad pasta and every unglamorous domestic thing you'd been rationing into six-weekend increments for four straight years.

"i keep thinking about the boarding passes," you say. "i packed them. i couldn't throw them out."

"good. we'll frame one, maybe. the first one. proof of how far we used to have to go just to be in the same room." she kisses the top of your head, settling deeper into the mess of moving boxes and bubble wrap like it's the most comfortable place in the world. "no more boarding passes needed for a while, though. just this. just down the hall, every night, for as long as you'll have me."

"forever's on the table."

"forever's exactly what i was hoping you'd say."

the flight into montreal is delayed forty minutes, and you spend all forty of them watching the arrivals board like it owes you something you know this airport now you know which gate has the good coffee and which one only has the machine that gives you regular when you press decaf. 

you know the exact walk from customs to the taxi line, the weight of your carry-on against your hip after you've done it enough times that your body just knows to lean what you don't know what you have never once gotten used to, in two years of doing this is how to sit still in the last ten minutes before you see her.

your phone buzzes.

abby: still delayed? 

abby: i'm not going to sleep until you're here so just so you know this is your fault 

you: it's air canada's fault 

abby: sure. blame the airline. very mature 

you: i'm literally at the gate. calm down 

abby: i AM calm. i have been calm for 6 months. calm is my whole personality now

you laugh, alone, in a plastic chair, and the man next to you glances over and you don't even care six months that's how long it's been since you've seen her in person not since february, not since a forty eight hour weekend crammed between two of her road trips, a weekend that ended with you crying in a rental car outside pearson because forty eight hours had started to feel less like a visit and more like a wound that kept almost healing before you had to reopen it again.

you didn't tell her that part you told her you'd see her soon you have gotten very good, over two years, at knowing which true things are useful to say out loud the board flips your flight's gate number blinks green. boarding.

you think, the way you always think in this specific fifteen minutes: this is the last time I have to do this leg of it and then, the way you always correct yourself; no it isn't. it's never the last time. that's the whole deal you board anyway you always do.

you met her the ordinary way, if there is an ordinary way to meet a professional athlete through a mutual friend from your grad program, at a barbecue in july, two summers ago, when abby roque was between seasons and mostly famous for things you hadn't followed closely enough to recognize her for.

what you remember first isn't her face, it's that she was terrible at cornhole and did not care even slightly. "you're supposed to be an athlete," you'd said, watching her bag miss the board by a full three feet for the second time.

"i'm an athlete on ice," she'd said, completely unbothered, already lining up her next throw. "this is a beanbag. different sport entirely."

"it's the same principle."

"it is not the same principle." she'd thrown again and missed again grinned like she'd scored. "you want to try? since you clearly have opinions." you'd missed her too worse than her, actually. 

she'd laughed so hard she'd had to put her hands on her knees, and you remember thinking, distinctly, oh, no the specific dread of meeting someone and immediately knowing your life was about to get more complicated.

you didn't know yet how complicated you didn't know she lived in a different country most of the year, that her entire career operated on a schedule built by a league that did not care about your lease or your job or the concept of a normal weekend. 

you just knew she'd asked for your number by the end of the night, badly, tripping over the question like she wasn't used to needing to ask. "i'm usually the one people slide into dms," she admitted. "i don't actually know how this part works when it's — " she'd gestured between you. "in person. real time."

"you're doing fine," you'd told her, and meant it, and have kept meaning it for two years since.

the doubt didn't come all at once; it came in installments, the way these things do installment one: the first time she got called up for a national team camp during what was supposed to be your one guaranteed week together, and you'd said of course, go, it's fine and then sat on your kitchen floor for twenty minutes afterward for no reason you could fully explain to yourself.

installment two: a reporter's tweet, back in her rookie season, speculating about her personal life in the specific breezy cruel way that only sports twitter can manage, and you not being named in it, not being anywhere near it, and still feeling like you'd been the one exposed.

installment three, the worst one: eleven months in, a night where she'd called you after a bad loss and you'd been three drinks into a friend's birthday and hadn't picked up until the fourth try, and she'd said, quiet, not even angry, just tired in a way that scared you more than anger would have sometimes i think i'm asking you to build a whole life around gaps.

you didn't have a good answer for that one you still don't, fully what you have instead is the thing you told her that night, which was true then and is true now: i'm not filling gaps, abby. i'm choosing this. those are different things, even when they look the same from the outside.

she'd gone quiet on the phone you'd listened to her breathe for almost a full minute before she said, okay. okay, i believe you. i'm just tired. you have learned, in two years, that long distance doesn't test whether you love someone.

it tests whether you can keep choosing them on the nights when choosing them costs you something specific and countable: a birthday, a tuesday, a full night's sleep, the version of yourself that doesn't check flight prices out of habit.

you have kept choosing it, have kept costing both of those things are true, and you have stopped expecting one of them to cancel the other out the season had been a hard one before it was a good one.

january; the hit you weren't at that game you watched it on a stream with bad audio, from your apartment, three hours behind, and you remember the specific sick lurch of watching her opponent go down and knowing, before the replay even confirmed it, that abby was about to be the name attached to a headline she didn't want.

she called you after, before the suspension was even announced, voice thin in a way you'd only heard once or twice before. i didn't mean the head. you know i didn't mean the head.

i know, you'd said. i know you, abby. i know.

they're going to run the tape a hundred times and none of it is going to show what i meant.

you'd stayed on the phone with her for two hours that night, mostly saying nothing, because there wasn't anything to say that would fix a suspension or undo a replay you'd just stayed.

you have learned that's most of what the job actually is not fixing things, just staying on the line. february; the forty-eight hours the crying in the rental car. march: a stretch where you didn't talk about the wedding you weren't having, the timeline you didn't have, the question neither of you had asked yet, because it felt like tempting something. 

you'd both gotten superstitious in your own private ways, her about her routines on game day and you about not naming the thing you wanted most, like naming it might make the distance decide to keep it from you.

april into may: the playoffs started, and something in the team clicked the way things click when a whole locker room decides at the same time that this is the year. you watched it happen from four time zones away, texting her !!!! after every win, buying yourself a victoire hoodie you wore only inside your own apartment because you weren't sure yet if you'd earned the right to wear it in public.

you've earned it, she told you, the one time you admitted that. you've been doing this as long as i have. longer, some nights you didn't cry on that call you came close by the time the finals started, you had a flight booked for game seven before the schedule even confirmed there'd be a game seven. 

you didn't tell her that either you wanted, for once, to be the surprise instead of the one waiting on the arrivals board.

place bell is loud in a way that stream audio never captures you're in the family section, three rows up, wedged between abby's mother and a woman you recognize as maggie flaherty's girlfriend, who squeezes your arm the second you sit down and says, you made it. she doesn't know?

she doesn't know, you confirm, and your hands are shaking, and it isn't only nerves about the game, abby's mother laughs at you, kindly. "she's going to lose her mind."

"i'm hoping."

the ice is a different animal in person: faster, louder, closer, the boards actually shuddering when someone gets checked into them, a sound you feel in your sternum instead of hearing through a laptop speaker. 

you find abby before warmups even finish, that specific coiled way she skates, economical, no wasted motion, the same girl who couldn't land a beanbag on a board two summers ago moving through center ice like the ice was built around the shape of her she doesn't see you, you don't want her to, not yet.

the game starts, and you understand within the first period why she always says the games feel longer from the ice than they look on a screen every shift seems to take something out of her that the broadcast never shows you can see it in how she skates back to the bench, head down for exactly two seconds before she lifts it again, resetting.

it's 1-1 after one 2-1 for the other side after two, and you feel the whole building tilt toward dread, feel maggie's girlfriend's hand find yours and grip, feel abby's mother go very still and very quiet beside you in the specific way of someone who has watched this exact daughter play hockey since she was six years old and has learned there's no version of nervous that changes the outcome.

she's fine, you tell yourself, and also, silently, tell her, though she can't hear you. you're fine. you've survived worse than a two-goal deficit. you've survived worse than this, and so have i.

third period, and montreal claws it back poulin first, a goal so clean the whole building seems to inhale at once, then stacey with four minutes left to tie it, and you are on your feet screaming with people you have never met in your life, gripping maggie's girlfriend's hand hard enough that you'll apologize for the bruise later.

overtime you have watched abby play overtime hockey from an apartment four time zones away, pacing, unable to sit, muting your phone so she can't hear you swearing at a screen she isn't even looking at. 

this is different this is close enough to smell the ice, close enough to see her face between whistles, drawn tight with something that isn't fear exactly focus, maybe, the specific narrowed calm she gets that you've only ever seen up close in bed at 2am after a big win, wired and unable to come down yet.

six minutes into overtime, she gets the puck at the blue line you know, before it happens, the way you sometimes know things about her not psychically, nothing that dramatic, just two years of watching someone closely enough that you've learned the shape of her intentions half a second before she acts on them you know she's going to shoot before she shoots.

it isn't pretty, it isn't the highlight-reel goal the broadcast will play forty times tomorrow it deflects off a defender's stick, changes angle in a way that makes the goaltender's whole body commit the wrong direction, and slides in low along the ice like it was never trying to be dramatic about it at all.

the building comes apart and you don't remember standing, you don't remember screaming you remember maggie's girlfriend hugging you, a stranger's arms around you, both of you crying, and abby's mother beside you with both hands pressed over her mouth, and the ice full of white jerseys piling on top of each other, and somewhere in the middle of that pile, sticks and gloves flying, abby roque, who scored the goal that won her team its first walter cup, disappearing under the weight of every person who loves her on that roster.

they clear the ice for the ceremony forty minutes later, trophy presentation, commissioner, cup hoisted overhead in that specific way you've seen a hundred times on other teams' broadcasts and never once expected to watch happen to someone whose hands you've held.

you're not supposed to be down there the family section doesn't get ice access, not during the ceremony, not for security reasons that make sense and that you resent anyway with your whole chest.

but abby's mother, abby's mother, who has apparently done this dance before, who leans over during the trophy presentation and says, low, "there's a door by the zamboni entrance, security knows me, come on." takes your hand and pulls you through a hallway that smells like rubber and cold, past a guard who nods at her like this isn't the first time she's snuck someone somewhere, and out onto the edge of the ice just as the confetti cannons go off.

you have never been cold like this in your life through your shoes, through the borrowed skates you don't have, standing on rubber matting at the edge of a sheet of ice while gold confetti falls out of the rafters and you have also never in your life felt more exactly where you were supposed to be.

abby sees you before you see her you watch it happen across thirty feet of ice her head turning, mid-celebration, cup still cradled in the crook of one arm, and her whole face changing not surprise first, but something that looks almost like relief, like her body had been holding a question for months and had just gotten an answer it wasn't expecting yet.

she skates over and she doesn't set the cup down first, which strikes you later as very her that she'd carry both things at once rather than choose. "you're here," she says, and her voice cracks on it, actually cracks, this woman who once described a suspension in the flattest tone you'd ever heard her use. "you're…how are you here, i didn't — "

"i wanted to be the surprise for once," you say, and you're crying, and so is she, and the confetti is sticking in both your hair, and somewhere behind you a photographer is absolutely getting this on camera and you cannot bring yourself to care even slightly.

"i love you," she says, like it's an emergency, like it can't wait even four more seconds. "i love you, i've been — god, i've missed you so much i started talking to your side of the bed. that's not a joke. i talk to a pillow."

"abby."

"i know. i know how that sounds."

"abby," you say again, laughing now, both of you laughing and crying at once, "you just won the walter cup. can we talk about the pillow later."

"right. right, yes. i just — " she looks down at the cup still in her arm, then back at you, and something settles in her face, some decision arriving that you can tell has been sitting in her for longer than tonight. "actually. actually, can you hold this for one second."

she hands you the walter cup as it is heavier than you expect and colder than you expect and you almost drop it, fumbling, and she laughs a real laugh, bright, breaking through the tears and steadies your arms under it with her hands before letting go.

and then she reaches into the inside pocket of her jersey, the one under her equipment, the one that should not have room for anything but somehow does, and comes out with a small box that she must have you realize, all at once, the timeline collapsing backward she must have had on her, on her body, under her gear, through an entire elimination game, for this exact possibility, on the off chance the season ended in a win instead of a handshake line. "abby."

"let me finish before i lose my nerve, i already almost dropped a national trophy tonight, i don't have room for two disasters."

she drops to one knee on the ice actual ice, in skates, which cannot be an easy thing to balance on, and you will tease her about this exact detail for the rest of your life, but right now you can't do anything except stand there holding a nine-pound trophy and shaking.

"i used to think," she says, "that the hardest part of this was going to be the distance. the time zones, the flights, all of it. and it is hard. it's the hardest thing i've ever chosen on purpose. but somewhere in the last two years i stopped thinking of you as the person i see between road trips and started thinking of you as the person i come home to and home isn't a city. i figured that out somewhere around february, in a rental car outside pearson, watching you try not to cry so i wouldn't feel bad about getting on a plane."

"you knew about that?"

"i know you," she says, simply, and you remember saying almost the exact same words to her once, over the phone, after the hit, after the suspension, i know you, abby, i know and understand, all at once, that this has always been the actual shape of your whole relationship: two people insisting, across whatever distance, i know you, and meaning it as a promise every time.

"so," she says, and opens the box, and her hands are shaking almost as badly as yours, "i don't want to keep choosing you across four time zones anymore. i want to choose you across a kitchen table. i want the ordinary tuesdays. marry me?"

you are holding the walter cup you are crying hard enough that you can barely see the ring somewhere behind you, the photographer has definitely gotten every second of this, and somewhere in the stands, abby's mother is very obviously not filming discreetly at all.

"yes," you say. "yes abby, yes someone please take this trophy before i drop it on your foot."

she laughs, and takes the cup back with one arm, and puts the ring on your hand with the other, both of you kneeling now, ice-cold and confetti-covered and completely unable to stop laughing through the crying, and somewhere in the stands eighteen thousand people who came to watch a hockey game get an entirely different ending than the one advertised.

later many hours later, after the locker room celebration, after she's showered off the champagne someone inevitably poured over her head, after you've both given approximately four separate interviews you don't remember the content of you sit together in the quiet of her hotel room, her still faintly damp-haired, you still finding confetti in unexpected places on your clothes.

she's turning your hand over in hers, thumb tracing the ring like she still can't quite believe it's real. "i had that in my jersey the whole game," she says. "the whole game. i almost took a penalty in the second period and all i could think was do not let this be the game i get suspended in, i have a ring in my pocket."

"you're unbelievable."

"i'm romantic. there's a difference."

"you carried a ring box under hockey equipment through an entire elimination game."

"and it worked," she says, entirely too pleased with herself. "so."

you laugh, and lean into her, and she wraps an arm around you the way she always does, the way that used to only exist in forty eight-hour increments and now, now has an actual future attached to it, a real one, no timer running down in the corner of it.

"i kept thinking distance was the whole problem," you tell her, quiet, into her shoulder. "that if we could just fix the distance, everything else would be easy."

"and now?"

"now i think the distance was just the hardest version of choosing you. i don't think it's going to get easy, necessarily. i think it's going to get different."

"different i can do," she says. "different i've been training for my whole life, apparently. turns out beanbag toss was just the warmup."

"you were terrible at beanbag toss."

"i was terrible at beanbag toss," she agrees, pressing a kiss to the top of your head, "and somehow i still ended up here. so maybe don't count me out on things i'm bad at. i've got a track record now."

outside, montreal is still audibly celebrating somewhere below the window, a car horn, someone singing, the whole city awake past any reasonable hour for a tuesday in the middle of summer that used to be, before tonight, just an ordinary date on a calendar neither of you had circled.

it isn't ordinary anymore you don't think any tuesday will be, from here on you fall asleep still in your confetti-flecked clothes, her hand loose around yours, the ring catching light from the window every time you shift, and for the first time in two years, you don't count down days until the next flight.

she was secure, she was chill, she was, by her own account, "built different" in the emotional regulation department which is why she couldn't explain what was happening to her ribs right now. "you okay?" kk asked, not looking away from the field. "you're doing the jaw thing."

"i don't have a jaw thing."

"you have a jaw thing. mackenzie, does she have a jaw thing?"

mackenzie sitting on laila’s other side with a soft pretzel the size of her forearm, glanced over. "oh, definitely the jaw thing. look at that. that's a whole vein."

"i don't have a vein."

"you have a vein, laila."

laila did not respond, because responding would mean taking her eyes off the field, and taking her eyes off the field would mean missing whatever was happening down there between you and the guy in the yellow pinnie who'd been "coaching you through a throw-in" for the last four minutes despite the fact that you were, objectively, one of the best players on the pitch and did not need throw-in coaching from a man wearing sunglasses indoors outdoors, whatever, the point stood.

you were laughing at something she said head tipped back, hand on your hip, the whole bit of laila's stomach did something complicated and unpleasant.

"she's touching her arm," kk reported, like a sports commentator. "she's touching her arm to demonstrate a throw-in. you don't need hands for a throw-in, you need elbows, my sister is doing this wrong—"

"kk."

"i'm just saying if my dumbass little sister taught me a throw-in that's how bad this guy's technique is—"

"kk."

"i'm on your side! i'm hyping up the jealousy! this is a support system!" mackenzie took an enormous bite of pretzel and said, thoughtfully, "you know you could just go say hi."

"i'm not going to go say hi." laila said this like mackenzie had suggested she set herself on fire. "that's insane. that's — she's in the middle of a game, i'm not going to run onto a soccer field because some girl in a pinnie is standing too close to my girlfriend."

both of them looked at her. "what," laila said.

"nothing," said kk, delighted. "nothing at all, just you called her your girlfriend."

"she is my girlfriend."

"we know that. you're the one who usually goes 'we're not really labeling it' for six months before admitting anything. this is growth. this is character development. i'm proud of you, truly, this is a beautiful—"

"i will leave you here."

"you won't, you drove."

she wouldn't think that was the problem with hanging out with people who'd known you since you were a rookie who cried in a bathroom stall after her first callup as they knew exactly which threats had teeth and which ones were just noise, and this one, clearly, was noise.

on the field, the whistle blew for halftime. 

you jogged toward the sideline, toward your team's bench, and pinnie girl jogged after you like a golden retriever who'd smelled a treat, still talking, and you were still nodding along, polite, easy, the way you were with everyone, because you were, annoyingly, one of the most likable people laila had ever met.

"she's following her to the bench," mackenzie narrated. "this girl has no shame. this girl has never been embarrassed a day in her life."

"i could kill her," laila said, mostly to herself. "i could just with my hands."

"there it is," kk said. "there's the vein."

here is the thing about jealousy that nobody tells you until you're sitting in a plastic stadium seat white-knuckling a lukewarm gatorade bottle; it doesn't feel like anger, not really. 

it feels like fear wearing anger's jacket it feels like what if she realizes she could do better than a hockey player who's gone eight months of the year and smells like a locker room even after four showers.

laila knew, logically, that you weren't going anywhere she knew that you'd flown out to wisconsin in february during a blizzard just to watch her play a tuesday night game against a team that wasn't even good. 

she knew you kept a folder on your phone of screenshots of her stupid interview quotes because you thought she was funny, and that you'd cried actually cried, real tears when she scored her first pwhl goal, from the stands, ugly-sobbing into caroline’s shoulder because laila had asked her to come.

she knew all of that she still wanted to set the pinnie girl on fire.

"can i say something," mackenzie said, halfway through her pretzel, "as, like, a completely neutral third party with no stake in this whatsoever."

"no."

"you are being so normal about this," mackenzie continued, ignoring her. "so normal. nobody would ever know you were internally combusting. ten out of ten poker face."

"i'm not internally combusting."

"your leg is bouncing so hard i can feel it through the bleachers."

laila looked down and her leg was, in fact, bouncing; she made it stop through sheer force of will, which lasted approximately eleven seconds before it started again on its own, apparently unionized against her.

"look," kk said, more gently now, nudging her with a shoulder, "for what it's worth — and i say this as someone who has watched you two be disgusting at each other for a year and a half she doesn't even see her like, look at her face. that's her customer service face. that's her i am being polite to a stranger’s face. you know what her actual face looks like."

laila did know her actual face, the one she wore when she looked at laila, across a locker room or a kitchen or a stupid grainy facetime screen at one in the morning when neither of them could sleep was different, softer at the edges, a little stupid, honestly, in the best way.

she looked for it now, down on the sideline, half-hoping, half-dreading and there it was you'd turned, scanning the stands during a water break, and found her found laila specifically, out of a crowd of a few hundred people and your whole face did the thing. the soft thing. the stupid thing.

you waved and mouthed something that looked a lot like hi, baby. laila’s stomach unclenched about four percent.

pinnie girl, still hovering, followed your eyeline up into the stands, clocked laila six-foot-nothing of professional athlete glaring down at her with the kind of intensity usually reserved for penalty kills and, visibly, made a decision to go stand somewhere else.

"ha," said kk. "ha. did you see that? she saw you and just left. like a little bug like a little bug that saw the light."

"i didn't do anything."

"you didn't have to. you have resting i will end you face. it's very useful, actually, we should bottle it."

-second half, and laila was, admittedly, in a much better headspace, right up until you scored you scored, and the run you did arms out, chest first, straight toward the sideline, straight toward her made something in laila’s chest go warm and a little unsteady, and then you were vaulting the low fence like it was nothing, jogging up three rows of bleachers in cleats like an absolute menace to public safety, and journey barely had time to stand before you'd crashed into her, arms around her neck, laughing into her collarbone.

"did you see that," you said. "did you see that."

"i saw it."

"top corner. top corner, laila."

"i saw, baby, i was watching the whole time."

you pulled back enough to look at her, grinning, sweaty, absolutely glowing, and something about the whole picture of you flushed and thrilled and hers, unmistakably hers, in front of a girl in a pinnie who was watching from the sideline with an expression like she'd just understood something made every last drop of jealousy in journey's body evaporate into something much simpler.

"you're so annoying," laila said, which was not what she meant.

"i love you too," you said, which was exactly what you meant, and kissed her, right there, three rows up, in front of god and the referee and kk who immediately started cheering like she'd personally scored the goal.

"get her," caroline yelled, entirely too loud for a family event. "get her, laila. that's my girl. well that's the other girl. that's both of them, i'm claiming both."

"ignore her," laila said against your mouth.

"always do," you said, and kissed her again down on the sideline, a ref blew a whistle you groaned, dropping your forehead against laila’s shoulder for one more second. "i have to go back."

"i know."

"you're staying till the end, right?"

"obviously." laila tucked a piece of sweaty hair behind your ear, gentle now, all the earlier ugliness gone soft. "go score another one. give me a reason to yell."

you grinned, already backing away, already halfway turned toward the field. "only for you."

"that's my girl," kk hollered again, to absolutely nobody's surprise.

later after the final whistle, after your team's 3-1 win, after you'd showered and changed and emerged from the locker room in sweatpants with your hair still damp the four of you (five, technically, once mackenzie‘s pretzel-induced sugar crash counted as a person) walked to the parking lot together, and kk would not, could not, let it go.

"i'm just saying," she said, for the fourth time, "the jaw thing was insane. i've seen you get checked into the boards by a woman twice your size and make less of a face."

"there was no jaw thing."

"there was a whole event mackenzie, back me up."

"full event," mackenzie confirmed. "documentary-worthy."

you looked between the three of them, delighted, already putting it together. "wait. were you jealous?"

"no."

"laila."

"that girl had no business teaching you a throw-in you clearly already knew how to do," laila said, with as much dignity as she could muster, which was not a lot. "that's not jealousy. that's informed criticism."

"she had a vein," kk said.

"i don't have a vein!"

you were laughing now, properly, doubled over a little, and laila felt the last of her pride crumble in the face of it, because your laugh did that to her, always had, probably always would. "come here," you said, still grinning, holding out a hand. "my jealous girl."

"i'm not jealous."

"sure." you pulled her in anyway, and journey went, because she always would, because underneath the vein and the jaw thing and the eleven seconds of leg-bouncing fury, this you, laughing, warm, undeniably hers was the only thing she'd ever actually wanted to be looking at.

"for the record," she muttered into your hair, "if she teaches you a throw-in again, i'm saying something."

"noted," you said. "my hero." behind you, kk turned to mackenzie. "ten bucks says she's still talking about the vein next week." "no bet. she'll bring it up unprompted at brunch."

"i can hear you both," laila said.

neither of them stopped.

caroline and mackenzie peeled off toward mackenzie’s car with a chorus of exaggerated gagging noises as the second laila’s hand found the small of your back, steering you toward her own car instead of the group. "we're going home," laila announced, to no one in particular.

"bold of you to say that like it's a group activity," kk called after you. "have a normal night!"

"we will not," laila said, and did not look back.

the drive back to her place was quiet in the specific way that meant it wasn't quiet at all your hand on her thigh the whole way, her jaw doing the thing again except now it wasn't jealousy making it tick, it was something lower and more patient, something that had been sitting in her chest since the second she'd watched you score and turn and run straight for her like there was nowhere else in the world you'd rather be looking.

she didn't say anything until the door was shut behind both of you, until your back hit it and her hands were braced on either side of your head. "you know you did that on purpose," laila said low not really a question. "did what."

"the whole game. looking for me every five minutes. the goal celebration. the— " she exhaled, short, like she was trying to find the word and couldn't be bothered. "the hi baby mouth thing."

you smiled up at her, unbothered, entirely too pleased with yourself. "i have no idea what you're talking about."

"you knew i was sitting up there losing my mind over some girl in a pinnie and you decided to make it worse."

"i decided to remind you whose girlfriend i am," you said, hooking a finger into the collar of her shirt, pulling her down that last inch. "seemed like you needed the reminder."

"i didn't need—"

"you had a vein, laila."

"i don't have a—" you kissed her before she could finish, and whatever argument she'd been building collapsed immediately, the way it always did, the way it had every single time since the first time. 

her hands slid from the door to your waist, gripping there like she needed something to hold onto, and you felt the low sound she made against your mouth more than you heard it. "tell me," you murmured, when you finally pulled back for air, "what you wanted to do to that girl."

"don't."

"i'm serious. tell me."

laila’s jaw ticked again, and this time you watched it happen up close, watched the flush climb up her neck. "i wanted to throw her into the parking lot," she admitted, quiet, almost embarrassed by it. "i wanted everyone in that stadium to know you weren't available. i wanted—" she stopped.

"what."

"i wanted you to look at me the way you looked at her like i was just some girl you were being polite to." her hands tightened at your waist. "and then you did the hi baby thing and i just — i wanted to get you alone as fast as humanly possible."

"well," you said, walking her backward until her legs hit the couch and she sat, pulling you down with her so you were straddling her lap, "you have me alone now."

laila's hands found your hips, steadying, her eyes dark in a way that had nothing to do with jealousy anymore. "yeah," she said. "i do."

"so." you rolled your hips once, slow, testing, and felt her breath catch under you. "what are you gonna do about it."

"everything you don't let me do in public," laila said, and flipped you both so you landed against the couch cushions with her over you, her mouth already at your jaw, your neck, working lower with a kind of unhurried focus that told you she intended to take her time proving a point.

"laila—"

"i know." her hand slid under the hem of your shirt, palm flat against your stomach, and she pulled back just far enough to look at you, something soft cutting through the want in her expression. "you're mine. i know you're mine. i just wanted to show you how much i noticed today."

"then show me," you said, so she did slow at first, deliberate, her mouth mapping a path down your body like she was committing every inch of it to memory, like she needed to erase the entire afternoon and replace it with this instead. 

she peeled your shirt over your head and paused there, just looking at you for a second, the same way she had from the bleachers, like she still couldn't quite believe you'd chosen her. "you're staring," you said.

"i'm allowed," laila said. "you're my girlfriend."

"you gonna do something about it or just admire the view all night." that got a laugh out of her, short and surprised, before her expression shifted back into something hungrier. "don't rush me. i've been thinking about this since the throw-in."

"that's so unhinged."

"you have no idea," laila murmured, and then there wasn't much room for talking after that just her name, breathed out against her hair, her hands, steady even now, mapping every place she'd spent the whole afternoon aching to touch; just the low, satisfied sound she made when you arched up into her, when you said her name again like it was the only word you had left; just the two of you, tangled together on a couch that would definitely need to be laundered later, journey's jealousy burning itself all the way down into something that looked a lot more like devotion.

much later, wrapped around each other, her fingers tracing slow lines up your spine, you pressed a kiss to her collarbone and said, "so. still not jealous?"

"i genuinely don't know what you're talking about."

"mm. sure."

"i don't have a vein."

so you watched from a bed that wasn't yours, in a country that wasn't yours, holding a room service menu you never ordered from, watching the clock bleed into overtime.

three periods of nothing, sixty minutes of two goalies playing like the net behind them was the only thing keeping the world spinning correctly and then two minutes and forty seconds into overtime, megan keller five foot eleven, thirty years old, more comfortable on a blue line than she has ever been in her own skin standing still pinched down from the point on a play she had no business pinching down on, took a feed from the half wall, and one-timed it top shelf over a glove that got there half a second too late.

the building didn't just cheer it came apart at the seams you didn't hear the broadcast call it you were already crying, the good kind, the kind that comes up from somewhere under your sternum before your brain has caught up to what your eyes just watched happen, and you were on your feet on the hotel bed like an idiot, screaming at a television that couldn't hear you, and somewhere four miles away megan keller was being buried by nineteen other women in white jerseys, helmet gone, hair everywhere, laughing so hard she looked like she might throw up.

you didn't see her again for six hours there was a medal ceremony, there was an anthem, and you watched her sing every word of it with a gold medal sitting heavy against her chest and tears cutting clean lines through a face that hadn't been off the ice long enough to stop being flushed there was a mixed zone, a hundred cameras, a flag draped over her shoulders like a cape she hadn't asked for but had clearly earned. 

there was a locker room celebration you weren't in, a bus back to the hotel you weren't on, a team dinner you weren't invited to because it was a team thing and you understood that, you did, even as you sat alone in a hotel room in a country that wasn't yours doing the math on how much longer you'd have to wait.

by the time the door finally opened, it was almost one in the morning, and you had fallen asleep with the lamp still on, still in your clothes, your phone resting on your chest where you'd been holding it the way you might hold something that reminded you she was still real.

you woke up to the sound of the card reader clicking green and the door easing open slow, like she was trying not to wake you, like she hadn't already failed at that the second the lock disengaged.

"hey," she said, quiet, from the doorway still in the team tracksuit gold medal still around her neck, because apparently nobody had told her she was allowed to take it off yet, or maybe she just hadn't wanted to. "didn't mean to wake you."

"you didn't." you sat up, rubbing your eyes, and the sight of her hair a disaster, mascara that had been reapplied at some point and had still given up somewhere around hour four, medal sitting crooked against her collarbone hit you somewhere you weren't braced for. "meg. you did it."

"i did it." she said it like she was still checking the words for accuracy like she needed to hear herself say them out loud to believe the tape was real and not something her brain had built for her out of adrenaline and wanting. "we did it."

you were off the bed before you'd decided to be, and she met you halfway, and the medal pressed cold and hard between your bodies when she wrapped you up, face going straight into your neck, and you felt her exhale go shaky in a way it hadn't on any broadcast, in any mixed zone, in front of any camera.

"hey," you said again, softer this time, hand coming up into her hair. "hey. i've got you."

"i missed you the whole time," she mumbled into your skin. "scored the biggest goal of my life and the whole time i was under that pile i kept thinking, she's not here, she's watching this on a hotel tv by herself and i can't even go find her yet."

"i watched every second of it," you told her. "i screamed so loud the people in the next room probably called the front desk."

that got a laugh out of her, wet and small, muffled against your throat. "good. i want everyone in this hotel to know i've got a girl losing her mind over me somewhere in this building."

"you've had a girl losing her mind over you since pwhl preseason two years ago. this isn't new information."

she pulled back enough to look at you, and up close the exhaustion was written into every line of her the kind that isn't about being tired, it's about spending six months building toward one single night and then having that night actually arrive and having to figure out how to be a person again on the other side of it her eyes were glassy in a way that wasn't just the medal ceremony catching up to her.

"i'm engaged to a gold medalist," you said, and reached up to tuck a piece of hair back off her face. "how's that feel?"

"feels like i finally have something worth the ring," megan said, and reached down to find your left hand, thumb running over the band there like she needed to check it was still where she'd left it. "feels like maybe i earned my spot on this side of the bed."

"you earned that a long time ago, keller."

"say that again."

"you earned that a long time ago."

"no — the last name. say it again." her mouth had gone crooked, something dangerous sliding into it under the exhaustion. "i like hearing you call me that when you're looking at me like you want to ruin me."

"meg." you laughed, but it came out lower than you meant it to. "you just won a gold medal six hours ago. you should be sleeping."

"i've been sitting through a medal ceremony, a mixed zone, and a team dinner where coach made everyone do a toast, thinking about exactly one thing," megan said, walking you backward without ever really deciding to, hands finding your hips like they'd been waiting all night for permission. "and it wasn't sleep."

"yeah?" your back found the edge of the mattress. "what was it."

"you know what it was."

"say it anyway. i want to hear you say it after the year you just had."

something in her face went soft and reckless all at once, the medal still swinging gently between you, catching lamp light. "wanted to get back to this room and get my hands on my fiancée. wanted to feel something that wasn't adrenaline for the first time in about eighteen hours. wanted—" 

she leaned in, mouth ghosting the shell of your ear "—wanted you to tell me i did good. wanted to hear it from you specifically, because everybody in that arena was screaming my name tonight and none of it landed the way it lands when it's you."

"you did so good," you told her, voice already unsteady, hands finding the zipper of her tracksuit jacket. "best game of your life. best goal i've ever seen. i'm so proud of you i don't even know what to do with it."

"show me," megan said against your jaw, and you did the jacket came off first, then the medal, which she set with more care than she'd shown any other piece of clothing that night, laying it gently on the nightstand like it might bruise, before her hands came back to you with none of that same carefulness at all. 

she kissed you like the last six hours of restraint had been a debt and she meant to collect on all of it at once one hand fisting gently in your hair, the other sliding under the hem of your shirt to find bare skin, and you felt her sigh into your mouth when she did, like touching you was the first thing all night that had actually let her exhale.

"missed this," she breathed, pulling your shirt over your head between kisses. "missed you. six weeks is too long, i don't care what the schedule says."

"you're here now."

"i'm here now," she agreed, and got you flat on your back on a hotel bed in milan, gold medal glinting on the nightstand like a witness, and set about proving it.

she took her time with you first, always did, always had, ever since the very first night this had started, some rookie-season habit of hers that she'd never broken, this insistence that she wasn't finished with you until you'd fallen apart at least once before she let herself have anything. 

mouth trailing down your throat, over your collarbone, pausing to bite gently at the curve of your shoulder in a way that made your hips jump up off the mattress looking for any friction at all.

"meg—"

"i know." her hand slid down your stomach, fingers hooking into the waistband of your shorts. "i've got you just let me look at you a second."

"you've had six weeks to look at me on facetime."

"not the same," she said, low, and peeled your shorts down, and whatever teasing patience she'd had left in her seemed to run out at the sight of you already wet for her, because her next exhale came out ragged. "god. you weren't kidding about the screaming thing."

"told you."

she kissed down your stomach, over your hip bone, settled between your thighs like she'd never once in her life wanted to be anywhere else, and when her mouth finally found you, flat and slow at first before curling into something with real intent behind it, your hand flew into her hair and stayed there, and the noise that came out of you was nothing you'd have wanted the room next door to hear either.

"meg—" your back arched, heel digging into the mattress. "right there, don't stop, don't you dare stop—"

she didn't she worked you with the same focus she brought to every shift she'd ever played, methodical and unhurried until she found exactly what made your thighs shake, and then she stayed right there, one arm braced over your hips to keep you from squirming away from the intensity of it, until you were coming apart around her mouth with her name breaking in your throat and both hands fisted hard in her hair.

"there she is," megan murmured, pressing one more kiss to your inner thigh before crawling back up your body, mouth wet, eyes dark and pleased with herself in a way that should have been infuriating and was instead unbearably hot. "that's the sound i wanted to hear tonight better than the anthem."

"don't let usa hockey hear you say that."

"usa hockey isn't in this bed." she kissed you, slowly, letting you taste yourself on her tongue, and you felt her shudder when your hand slid down between your bodies to find her, still fully dressed from the waist down, achingly wet through the fabric when you pressed your palm flat against her.

"off," you managed against her mouth. "now. i've waited six weeks too."

she didn't need to tell you twice.

when she finally settled over you, nothing left between you, she paused, forehead dropped to yours, breathing unevenly, gold medal glinting six feet away in lamp light like it was standing witness to something else entirely and said, quiet, almost like it surprised her to say it out loud.

"best night of my life and you're not even talking about the medal."

"i'm not," you agreed, hooking a leg around her waist, pulling her the last inch down into you until you both went still with the fullness of it, breath catching in both your throats at once. "i'm talking about you. always you, meg."

"say my name again."

"megan." you said it like a vow, hips already rolling up into hers, urging her into a rhythm that started slow and did not stay that way. "megan, megan—"

she moved over you like she'd been waiting all season to get back here, one hand braced by your head, the other finding yours and lacing your fingers together against the pillow, ring catching lamp light the same way the medal had, two golds in one room. 

every stroke of her hips pulled a sound out of you that had nothing careful left in it, and she chased the sound like it was the only score that mattered anymore, breath ragged against your throat, murmuring your name and fiancée and mine into your skin in a broken litany that undid you faster than her mouth had.

"i've got you," she said again, when you were close, when your grip on her hand had gone bruising and your back had bowed up off the mattress. "i've got you, come on, let go, i want to feel it—"

you did hard, and loud, and with her name in your mouth, and she followed you over barely a minute later with her face buried in your neck and your name breaking against your skin like something she couldn't hold onto any other way.

afterward, tangled together in sheets that smelled like an italian hotel and sex and the last six hours of the biggest night of her career, megan reached over without lifting her head off your chest and pulled the gold medal off the nightstand, laying it gently across your collarbone instead of hers.

"what are you doing?"

"you earned half of this," she said, simple, like it wasn't a big deal, like it wasn't the most megan sawyer thing she could possibly have said. "six weeks apart, every facetime at four in the morning your time because of the time difference, flying out here even though i told you not to fight for tickets, sitting alone in a hotel room screaming at a tv. this medal's got your name on it same as mine."

"meg."

"i mean it." she kissed your shoulder, settled back against you, medal cool between you where it had been warm around her neck all night. "gold looks good on you."

"everything looks good on me. i'm engaged to an olympian, i have to keep up appearances."

that got the real laugh out of her the one that came from somewhere unguarded, the one you'd fallen in love with two years ago in a hallway outside a pwhl locker room before either of you knew what you were doing about it and she pulled you in tighter, and for the first time in six hours, maybe the first time in six months, megan felt like she could finally exhale all the way.

"home in four days," she murmured against your hair, already half asleep. "then boston plays before the break's even over. you coming to that one too?"

"try and stop me."

"wouldn't dream of it."

the thing nobody warns you about is that gold medals don't come with an off-switch as megan flew home four days after the ceremony looking like a woman who'd aged a year in a month, adrenaline long gone and exhaustion sitting in its place, and you'd had exactly thirty-one hours with her real hours, apartment hours, hours where she fell asleep on the couch at 7 p.m. with her head in your lap and you didn't wake her because some things a body just needs before the team reconvened and flew out for the two road games that had been circled on the calendar since before the olympic break had even started.

you'd gone to neither work, mostly, and the quiet understanding between the two of you that not every game needed you in the building, that sometimes the biggest support you could give her was a home that felt like home when she finally got back to it.

but td garden td garden was different td garden was the first game back on home ice since megan had scored the goal that got played on every sports highlight reel in the country for a week straight, and the second the schedule confirmed it, you'd bought a ticket before she'd even asked.

you didn't tell her you were coming that had been the plan from the start  megan’s brother in had helped you get the seat, close enough to the glass that megan would be able to see you if she looked, but not so close that she'd notice before the puck dropped and her focus locked in the way it always did.

the arena had a banner up before warmups even started. not an official one those would come later, there'd be a ceremony, there'd be a video board tribute, there'd be a moment where twenty thousand people stood up and screamed her name during a stoppage in play that made her visor fog up in a way she'd deny on record afterward but somewhere in the upper bowl, a group of fans had strung up a bedsheet with megan 🥇painted across it in gold letters, and the second megan skated out for warmups and saw it, her whole face cracked open into something helpless and young, nothing like the composed defenseman the league had built its olympic marketing campaign around for the last six weeks.

she found you in the second period it wasn't a long look  a stoppage in play, a tv timeout, her gaze sweeping the crowd the way players do out of habit more than intent but it caught on you the way it always did, like her eyes knew where you were before her brain had finished processing the rest of the building, and something shifted across her face, soft and surprised and unguarded for exactly the length of a commercial break, before the whistle blew and she had to go back to being a professional athlete again.

boston won 4–1 megan didn't score, but she had two assists and a plus-minus that made the analytics guys on the broadcast use words like complete and whole different level since milan, and when the final horn sounded, the arena did the thing again stood up, all twenty thousand of them, and screamed her name until the sound system genuinely couldn't compete with it, until the gold medal ceremony they ran between the second and third period felt almost like an afterthought next to the noise the crowd made completely unprompted.

you waited for her outside the family room after, the way you always did, and when she came through the door  hair still damp, medal from the actual in-arena ceremony now looped over her the same too-careful way as the one in milan, cheeks still flushed from three periods of adrenaline she hadn't fully burned off yet she didn't say anything at all. just crossed the space between you in about four strides and picked you up like you weighed nothing, spinning you once before setting you back down, both of you laughing.

"you came," she said, into your hair. "you actually came."

"wouldn't miss it."

"i looked for you the second i skated out and i didn't even know i was looking until i found you."

"i saw." you pulled back to look at her, thumb catching a bead of sweat at her temple. "you almost lost it during that tv timeout. very unprofessional, keller. there were cameras."

"there's always cameras when it's you," she said, easy, like it wasn't even a confession, just a fact she'd made peace with a long time ago. "you want to know something? i thought about milan the whole third period tonight. kept thinking, we're gonna get home and it's gonna be like that again, except this time nobody's flying out in the morning."

"no 6 a.m. flight this time."

"no 6 a.m. flight this time," she agreed, and something in her voice went low and certain in a way that made your stomach flip the exact same way it had in a hotel room a country away three weeks ago. "you still up for it? even after watching me get hit into the boards twice."

"you barely felt those."

"i didn't feel anything all night except you looking at me," megan said, quiet, honest, forehead dropping to yours the same way it had in milan. "c'mon. let's go home."

home was a fourth-floor walk-up in the north end that still had a duffel bag of olympic gear sitting half-unpacked by the door, and the second that door shut behind you, megan had you pinned gently against it, medal still around her neck, mouth finding yours like the last three weeks apart had been sitting on her chest the whole time waiting for exactly this.

"i've been thinking about this since the plane landed," she murmured against your jaw, hands already working at the button of your jeans. "every single road game. every hotel room that wasn't ours."

"yeah?" your hands found the hem of her jersey, tugging it up and off, medal swinging loose against your fingers when you set it aside on the entryway table with the same reverence she'd shown it in milan. "tell me."

"thought about getting you exactly like this," she said, walking you backward through the apartment, mouth trailing down your throat while your shirt disappeared somewhere between the hallway and the bedroom door. "against a door. on the counter. doesn't matter where, i just needed my hands on you the second i was allowed to have them there again."

by the time you hit the bed, there wasn't much left of either of you in the way of clothes, and megan settled over you with none of the exhaustion from milan in her this time road-trip energy instead, pent-up and hungry, three weeks of nothing but facetime and time zones behind every touch.

"missed you," she said again, the same two words from three weeks ago, except this time they came out lower, rougher, punctuated by her hips grinding down against yours until you were both gasping. "missed you so much, baby, you have no idea."

"show me instead of telling me," you managed, and she huffed a laugh against your collarbone before doing exactly that working you open with fingers first, unhurried despite everything she'd just said about being hungry for it, until you were writhing under her and begging in a way that had her name coming apart in your mouth long before she ever gave you what you actually wanted.

"megan, please—"

"i know, i know, i've got you." she kissed the words into your skin, replaced her fingers with her hips, and the first slow drag of her into you had both of you groaning at once, three weeks of distance dissolving into nothing the second your bodies remembered each other. "god, i missed this. missed you like this."

she built the pace slow and let it climb, forehead pressed to yours, breath mixing between you, and every roll of her hips pulled you further apart in the best way, her hand finding yours on the mattress and lacing through it the exact same way it had in milan, ring catching the bedroom lamp light instead of the hotel's.

"gonna marry you," she breathed, hips stuttering when you clenched around her, close and getting closer. "gonna marry you and i don't care that the season's not even close to over, i want everyone to know—"

"meg—" your back arched, thighs shaking around her waist. "i'm close, don't stop, please don't stop—"

"not stopping," she promised, voice wrecked, pace picking up just enough to tip you over the edge, and you came apart around her with her name breaking out of you into the quiet of the apartment, no arena, no crowd, no cameras, just the two of you and the sound of her own name in your mouth pulling her over right behind you, face buried in your neck, both of you shaking through it together.

afterward, tangled up in sheets that actually belonged to you this time, in an apartment that actually was home, megan traced idle patterns against your shoulder and let out a long, slow breath like she was finally, actually, fully exhaling for the first time since the puck had crossed the goal line in milan.

"two golds in three weeks," she said eventually, nodding at the medal glinting on the nightstand, catching the streetlight through the window blinds. "the olympic one and the one from tonight's ceremony. i don't know where to put them both."

"put one on the mantle and give the other one to me," you said. "consider it a wedding gift to yourself."

"you're already the best thing i brought home from this whole tournament," megan said, and pulled you in closer, medal light spilling gold across the both of you. "the medals are just souvenirs. you're the actual prize."

"that's disgustingly sweet for a woman who just got done railing me into the mattress."

megan had cried a little the night you told her you wanted to start trying for real, she'd pressed her forehead to yours in the kitchen, both of you still in your going-out clothes from somebody's engagement party, and said, "yeah? really?" like she didn't trust the good thing being handed to her.

that was fourteen months ago fourteen months is a long time to hope on a schedule you'd learned the vocabulary fast luteal phase, cervical mucus, the exact chemical shape of disappointment printed on a plastic stick. 

you'd learned which pharmacies were quietest at ten at night so you could buy tests without small talk you'd learned that megan, for all her ease on the ice, went perfectly still every single month in the bathroom doorway, watching your face instead of the test, because your face always told her the answer before you said anything.

there had been one positive nine weeks in, back in march, you'd let yourself believe it megan had put her hand on your stomach every night like she could will something into staying and then, at a routine scan, there had been a silence in the ultrasound room that neither of you had needed translated.

you didn't talk about march much anymore not because you'd healed exactly, but because talking about it too long made megan’s jaw do the thing it did before a fight broke out on the ice that clenched, protective stillness that meant she was holding something in so it wouldn't spill onto you.

so this time, you were careful you didn't buy prenatal vitamins in bulk or let yourself write anything down. you told yourself, sternly, in the bathroom mirror, that a late period was just a late period.

you told yourself that for four days before you finally bought the test you took it before megan woke up, which in hindsight was probably a form of self-protection or if it was bad news, you wanted the first wave of it in private.

the timer went off soft and polite, like it had no idea what it was about to do to you.

two lines.

you sat with it for a long moment, not trusting your own eyes, and then you cried  hard, the kind that comes from somewhere underneath the actual news, relief and terror in the same breath.

you didn't tell megan that morning, you told yourself it was because you wanted to be sure underneath it was the truer thing; you were scared, scared of her face doing the hopeful thing again, unguarded, only for it to fall apart a second time. 

you thought maybe if you carried the fear alone a little while, you could protect her from it as it took eight days, two more positive tests, and one very awkward phone call with your ob before megan found you sitting on the bathroom floor, tests lined up on the counter like evidence she sat down next to you, knee to knee, and waited.

"i wanted to be sure," you said, voice wrecked. "i didn't want to do that to you again, watching your face and then having to—"

"hey." her hand found yours on the tile. "look at me." you did as her eyes were wet, but she looked steadier than you expected, like she'd been braced for this exact conversation for months.

"i know what march was," she said quietly. "but you don't get to carry this alone to protect me from something that might not even happen but we agreed to do this together. all of it."

"i'm terrified," you admitted. "me too. but i'd rather be terrified next to you than protected and alone." she pressed her forehead to yours. "okay?" you nodded, and she kissed you, salt and all.

you didn't tell anyone else right away you went to every appointment together, megan rearranging practice without saying why, just "family thing" in a tone that didn't invite questions. 

you held your breath through the six-week scan and the eight-week scan and didn't exhale properly until twelve weeks, when the doctor turned the screen and there it was fast, insistent, undeniably alive.

megan made a sound you'd never heard her make before, gripping your hand hard enough to leave a mark you were secretly glad for. "that's a heartbeat," she said. "that's ours."

in the car after, she didn't start the engine right away. "i want to tell the team," she said. "not today. i just — i want to stop pretending nothing's different when everything's different. i want to celebrate this one out loud. only if you're ready."

you thought about march, about how quietly you'd grieved it, how tired you were of holding hope like something that might break if anyone looked at it too closely. "i'm ready," you said. "let's tell them loud."

megan, once given permission to be excited out loud, turned out to have apparently been planning this for weeks already. "you've had a pinterest board," you accused her, scrolling her phone at eleven at night.

"i have a vision board."

"it has forty photos of tiny hockey skates on it, meg."

"they're relevant." she snatched the phone back, grinning the exact grin she wore before an overtime goal. "i want them to learn to skate before they learn to walk. family tradition."

"we don't have a family tradition, we've been trying for fourteen months."

"exactly. so we're allowed to make one up."

you let her have it you let her enlist hannah and zoe, swearing them to secrecy so severe that hannah started bringing you ginger ale "just in case" subtlety that fooled no one but you, somehow, for almost a month. 

what you didn't let yourself do, even now, past the point doctors call a good sign, was stop being a little afraid. 

the fear didn't leave because the joy arrived as it sat there next to it, quiet, the way grief and hope had learned to share a house since march you'd stopped trying to evict it, you'd just started letting the joy be louder the room was arranged wrong with chairs in a horseshoe, little white lights strung along the whiteboard rail hannah’s fingerprints, obviously.

"sit," megan said, steering you into the center chair. "meg. what is happening."

"patience." she was already failing at her own advice, bouncing on the balls of her feet.

coach méthot cleared her throat. "before line changes, brandt asked for five minutes."

megan crouched in front of your chair and took both your hands, and the room going quiet made your throat tighten in the good-bad way it had been doing for months. "so," she said. "you've probably noticed everyone's been acting weird around you."

"i had noticed, yes."

she reached into her jacket and produced, from her closed fist, a pair of skates small enough to sit in your palm, a number stitched crooked onto the tongue. five her number.

your brain took a full two seconds to catch up, same as it had the first time, except now there was a private history underneath it that only the two of you knew the weight of. 

march sat there too, quiet, not gone, just no longer the loudest thing in the room behind megan, tessa hit a button and the projector flickered on with stolen photos you asleep on the bus, mouth open; you in the training room, hand resting on your stomach without meaning to; you crying at a car commercial as the last slide was just text: coming to boston, 2027.

the room clapped before you'd found any words you looked at the tiny skates, then at megan’s face, soft in the way it only went when she thought nobody but you was watching. "you knew," you managed. "you've known for months."

"since the day you did. i wanted to tell them right away, and you weren't ready, and i have never in my life waited patiently for anything."

"she would not stop talking about it," hannah confirmed. "during drills. during a power play."

"that's a lie," megan said, with no real conviction. "it's really not," said three teammates at once.

you laughed and it broke something loose that had been holding on tight since march, and then you were crying for real, unafraid of it this time megan stood just enough to kiss your forehead, then your mouth, right there in front of the whole horseshoe of chairs.

"team's excited," she murmured. "i'm excited. you carried this — both times — mostly by yourself, longer than anyone in this room understands, and i've never loved you more than i do right now."

"you're not supposed to make me cry harder."

"no promises." she pressed the skates into your hands. "figured they should learn to skate before they learn to walk."

"that's not a family tradition."

"it's about to be." she kissed your knuckles. "we're starting one thursday afternoon in a meeting room that smells like icy hot. i'd say that counts."

around you the room dissolved into chaos cupcakes appearing from wherever they'd been hidden for days, coach méthot giving up entirely on reclaiming her own meeting you sat in the middle of it holding impossibly small skates with megan’s hand warm at the back of your neck, and let yourself think, finally, without flinching: this one is going to stay.

it wasn't a promise the universe had technically made you. but for the first time in fourteen months, you let yourself believe it anyway. "for the record," you told her, once the room quieted, "i was going to tell you properly. candles. something cute."

"you cried on the bathroom floor with three positive tests lined up like evidence, my love."

"i was building up to the candles."

"i don't remember agreeing to a theme."

"the theme is devastating," daryl says, already rifling through your closet with the focus of someone defusing a bomb. "team's out tonight, half the league's gonna be there, and i refuse to let you show up looking like you're hiding from something."

you are, in fact, hiding from something or someone but hilary’s been not-so-subtly building toward this for three weeks now the pointed comments, the have you talked to hers, the way she says sloane's name like she's testing whether it still makes your face do the thing it does so you don't bother arguing then she finds it. 

shoved to the back, tags still on, a deep red thing you bought on impulse months ago and never had the nerve to wear.

"this," daryl breathes, holding it up like she's found a relic. "put this on right now."

so you put on the dress daryl does your eyeliner with the terrifying precision of someone who mainlines highlight-reel focus into everything she touches, and by the time you're both standing in front of the mirror, hairspray still settling in the air, she's grinning at your reflection like she's won something.

"there she is," daryl says. "now we go make hilary knight deeply regret whatever she's been doing for the last three weeks."

"this isn't about hilary."

"sure," daryl says, "and i'm not wearing my lucky earrings for a totally unrelated reason." the bar is loud and warm and full of people you love, and for the first hour it's easy then hilary walks in soft button-down, sleeves shoved up, hair still damp and stops just inside the door when she sees you. 

neither of you moves for a second, she recovers first, says hi to the table, easy and familiar, but when she gets to you her voice changes. "hi," she says just that her eyes do a slow thing, taking in the dress.

"hi," you say back.

it should be awkward, isn't it's just charged, humming, the two of you standing in the middle of a loud bar like you're the only quiet thing in it.

she doesn't stay at your table long neither of you lets it get weird but the song shifts something slow and low, all bass and heat, the kind of song hilary immediately groans at because she knows exactly what it's going to do to the room and somebody from a table over, some friend-of-a-friend with an easy smile, holds out a hand and asks if you want to dance.

you say yes before you can think about why you shouldn't it's nothing, really just a song. 

her hands land at your waist, easy and impersonal, and you let the rhythm take over, hips finding the beat, her front loosely against your back, the kind of dancing that means nothing and everything depending on who's watching.

hilary is watching.

you don't see it happen you feel it, the way a room changes temperature daryl, at the table, has gone very still, drink halfway to her mouth, eyes flicking between you and hilary like she's watching a car crash in slow motion and doesn't know whether to look away.

hilary’s jaw is tight. her arms are crossed she doesn't say anything, doesn't do anything, just watches her hands on your waist and your hips moving to the bassline like she's trying to memorize a reason to stay calm.

she loses it.

by the time the song ends she's already crossing the floor, not fast, not dramatic, just certain the walk of someone who's made a decision. "hey," she says, to you, not to her, it's not unkind but it's not exactly kind either. "can i steal you for a second?"

you go of course you go.

she doesn't say anything until you're outside, the night air sharp after the heat of the bar, string lights over the patio buzzing faintly. "i wasn't going to say anything," hilary says. "i told myself i wasn't going to say anything."

"hilary—"

"i watched some girl's hands on your waist for three minutes and i genuinely considered whether i could get away with cutting in without causing a scene." she laughs, short and humorless, dragging a hand through her hair. "so. i lied to myself. turns out i had a lot to say."

"we're not together," you say, quiet. "you don't get to—"

"i know," she cuts in, fast. "i know. that's — that's the whole problem, isn't it. i don't get to. i gave that up three weeks ago and i've been so stupid about it i let you walk into a bar in that dress and i still thought i had time to figure out how to fix it before somebody else noticed you first."

it's almost 1am by the time you get home, buzzed and tired and still wearing daryl borrowed lucky earrings, when there's a knock at your door three sharp raps, then a pause, like she's giving you a chance to pretend you're asleep.

you don't take it you never do.

hilary’s standing in your hallway, hoodie thrown on over her bar clothes, hair damp from rain she didn't bother outrunning, and she's got that particular tilt to her shoulders that means she's had exactly enough to drink to say something true. "hi," she says. "so. bad idea, probably."

"probably," you agree, and you don't close the door she comes in like she still lives here, which she doesn't, hasn't for three weeks, not since the almost-breakup everyone keeps calling a breakup even though neither of you actually said the words.

she drops onto your couch like gravity finally caught up with her.

"i watched you dance with someone else tonight," she says, "and it was the most honest three minutes of the last three weeks, because i finally admitted i've been in love with you this whole time and just too much of a coward to say it sober."

the room goes very quiet.

"i had drinks with the team before you got there," she goes on. "daryl kept doing the thing where she brings you up like you're a hangnail she can't stop picking at. told her to mind her business. then you walked in wearing that dress and i lost the thread of every conversation for the rest of the night and then somebody else got their hands on your waist and i understood, real fast, exactly how stupid i've been."

"so this is daryl’s fault."

"this is entirely daryl's fault," hilary says, "and also i missed you so much i thought i was going to lose my mind, and i didn't know how else to say it sober."

you sit down across from her not next to her, not yet  and let the silence stretch until it's not uncomfortable, just full. "we didn't even break up," you say finally. "not really. we just — stopped."

"i know." her voice cracks on it. "i kept waiting for you to fight for it. i realized i hadn't fought for it either. quiet felt safer than finding out you actually wanted out. and then tonight i watched someone else get to hold you and quiet stopped feeling safe at all."

"i didn't want out."

"i know that now," she says. "took me three weeks, an embarrassing number of powerplay assists thinking about your face instead of the breakout, and watching some stranger's hands where mine used to be."

you almost laugh it surprises you, how close the laugh is to the ache. "you're ridiculous," you tell her. "i'm drunk," she says. "there's a difference."

"you're also jealous."

"wildly," she agrees, not even trying to deny it. "can i say the real thing now? the thing under the daryl thing and the dress thing and the girl whose name i didn't bother learning thing?"

you nod.

"i don't want space," hilary says. "i want to come home and you're there and it's not an almost anymore, it's just — us. and i want to be the one whose hands are on your waist when that song plays, every time, i don't want to watch that from across a room ever again."

for a second you don't say anything at all, chest gone tight except it isn't sad, it's relief wearing sadness's coat. "come here," you say instead, and that's all it takes.

she crosses the room too fast, nearly catches her foot on the rug, and there's a half-second where you both laugh easy, the kind that used to fill your apartment before the quiet took over and then her forehead's against yours, hands shaking slightly against your jaw.

"i'm not doing the almost thing anymore," she murmurs. "i want the whole thing. loud. embarrassing. daryl having to hear about it constantly."

"daryl's going to be thrilled."

"daryl’s going to threaten to trade herself," hilary says, and kisses you before you can laugh again  slow, certain like she's rewriting the ending she was so afraid of so when she pulls back she's smiling, the real one, gap-toothed and unguarded.

"i'm still drunk," she says. "for the record. in case tomorrow i try to say this was all daryl’s fault again."

"i'm holding you to tonight," you tell her. "sober or not."

❄︎ you work in the team's front office media, ops, whatever puts you in the building every day but not usually rinkside the two of you cross paths for the first time in the hallway outside the locker room, you with an armful of folders, her fresh off the ice with her hair still damp

❄︎ she holds the door for you without thinking twice, and you almost drop everything trying to say thanks

❄︎ someone official finally introduces you two weeks later at a team function — "abby, this is [name], they handle our—" and abby's already not listening to the rest of the sentence

❄︎ she remembers your name immediately. you don't find out until later that she asked a teammate what it was again, twice, just to make sure she had it right

❄︎ from day one it's not subtle on her end, even if she thinks it is

❄︎ you, on the other hand, spiral quietly — convince yourself it's just professional friendliness, that she's like that with everyone

❄︎ she is not like that with everyone

fluff (reader down bad edition):

❄︎ you start finding excuses to walk past the locker room hallway on your breaks

❄︎ you know her practice schedule better than you know your own meeting calendar

❄︎ you've read her last three post-game interviews more times than you'd like to admit

❄︎ she starts leaving little sticky notes on the equipment bag you drop off — "thanks :)" — and you keep every single one

❄︎ you write her an anonymous note the first time, just a few lines, tucked in her locker before a game

❄︎ you spritz a little of your perfume on the note without totally meaning to

❄︎ she smells it before she even opens it and it's the beginning of the end for her

❄︎ her teammates notice her holding the note like it's something precious and will Not let it go

❄︎ you keep leaving them — never signed, but you always use the same perfume, half on purpose, half too nervous to stop

❄︎ she starts trying to guess who it is out loud in the locker room, and you have to bite your cheek to keep from smiling when you're standing right there

❄︎ one of her teammates straight up sniffs the air near you at a team event and goes quiet, staring at abby with a look

❄︎ abby has NO idea her teammates are two steps ahead of her

❄︎ you start signing the notes with a single initial, just to give her something

❄︎ she keeps every one in a shoebox in her locker — organized by date, like they matter

❄︎ you get so bad at hiding it that you talk to a coworker about her "hypothetically"

❄︎ said coworker already knows exactly who you mean

❄︎ you learn her favorite pregame snack and "coincidentally" have it on hand when you see her before a game

❄︎ she notices she always notices

❄︎ you rehearse casual hallway conversations in your head before you actually run into her

❄︎ you never once say the smooth thing you practiced

❄︎ she thinks it's endearing, not that you'd ever believe her if she told you

❄︎ you start associating her perfume-note days with a very specific, very obvious kind of good mood

❄︎ her teammates start a betting pool on when she'll figure out who's leaving the notes

❄︎ one teammate almost blows your cover on purpose, just to speed things along

❄︎ you get caught staring during a practice you had zero professional reason to be watching

fluff (once they're official):

❄︎ abby finally corners you after a game — no interviews, no teammates, just her — and asks if it's you, and you don't even manage to lie

❄︎ she keeps the shoebox even after you've told her, because it's proof of how long she'd been waiting for you to catch up

❄︎ she starts leaving her own notes back, tucked into your bag when you're not looking

❄︎ her teammates take full, insufferable credit for "getting you two together" even though they did nothing but tease

❄︎ she walks you to your car after night games even when it's out of her way

❄︎ she introduces you as her person now, not just a coworker, and says it like she's been waiting to say it

❄︎ she still keeps a bit of your perfume on a jacket she "borrowed" and never gave back

❄︎ mornings together are unhurried — she's the big spoon, always, no negotiation

❄︎ she texts you play-by-plays of boring meetings just so you'll laugh

❄︎ she shows up to your office with coffee exactly the way you like it, no reminder needed

❄︎ her teammates ask you for relationship advice now, like you're the expert

❄︎ she gets nervous introducing you to her family, more nervous than she's ever been on the ice

❄︎ she keeps your old anonymous notes in her wallet, worn soft from being carried around

❄︎ she's competitive about everything except you — with you, she just wants to be soft

smut (18+, mdni):

❄︎ abby likes to remind you, physically, that she noticed you long before you noticed her back

❄︎ she takes her time — slow, deliberate, watching your face the whole way

❄︎ calloused hands from stick work, and she knows exactly how to use them

❄︎ she loves pinning your wrists just to feel you arch into her

❄︎ she likes when you're the one who initiates — after all that time when you were too shy to say anything, she wants you sure now

❄︎ aftercare is non-negotiable, always — tracing patterns on your skin, murmuring against your hair

❄︎ she still smells like your perfume sometimes after, from months of note-leaving turned habit

sfw hcs ❄︎

❄︎ keeps a running photo album titled something dumb like "her" — mostly blurry candids of you laughing at something off-camera.

❄︎ always orders for you before you even sit down, memorize your usual without meaning to.

❄︎ falls asleep on facetime mid-sentence during road trips and you just let the call run.

❄︎ superstitious — has to touch your hand before warmups or she feels off all game.

❄︎ sends you random hockey memes with zero context, just "thought of you."

❄︎ shy about showing you her highlights, downplays them even when they're genuinely good.

❄︎ remembers the exact day you met and brings it up every year like a holiday.

❄︎ a menace with your pets, talks to them in a voice reserved only for them and you.

❄︎ keeps your favorite snack stocked in her locker room bag "just in case."

❄︎ competitive over dumb domestic things — who does dishes faster, who remembers the grocery list.

❄︎ tucks little notes into your bag before road trips.

❄︎ always the first to apologize after a dumb argument.

❄︎ loves lazy sunday mornings more than anything — no phones, bad reality tv, just you.

❄︎ gets emotional talking about the future, tries to play it off but her voice goes soft.

❄︎ texts her mom about you more than she'll ever admit.

❄︎ keeps a spare toothbrush and your skincare stuff at her place without ever asking if that's okay first — just does it.

❄︎ learns your coffee order, your ice cream order, your "bad day" order, all separately.

❄︎ gets genuinely giddy showing you off at team events, hand on your back the whole night.

❄︎ bites back a smile every time you say something dumb and endearing, tries to look unaffected.

❄︎ leaves the porch light on for you even when she knows exactly when you're coming home.

❄︎ matches her schedule around your classes/work without making it a whole thing.

❄︎ loves when you fall asleep on her during car rides, drives extra careful so you stay out.

❄︎ remembers small details from stories you told once and brings them up months later.

❄︎ gets nervous asking you to family events, more nervous than she is before a playoff game.

❄︎ keeps a shared playlist that's somehow 90% songs that remind her of you.

❄︎ will absolutely throw hands (verbally) if a teammate says something dumb about you.

❄︎ loves teaching you hockey terms, gets way too excited when you actually remember them.

❄︎ surprisingly domestic — likes cooking with you even though she's mediocre at it at best.

❄︎ gets shy the first time you tell her you love her, has to look away before saying it back.

❄︎ keeps ticket stubs, movie tickets, dumb little mementos in a drawer she thinks you don't know about.

❄︎ texts "landed safe" every single road trip without fail, no matter how late it is.

❄︎ loves slow dancing in the kitchen for no reason at all.

❄︎ gets protective in crowds, always has a hand somewhere on you without thinking about it.

❄︎ remembers your family members' names, birthdays, inside jokes — better than some of your own friends do.

❄︎ genuinely thinks you're the funniest person alive, laughs at your jokes even the bad ones.

❄︎ keeps your voicemails saved, listens to them on long bus rides.

❄︎ gets flustered when you show up to games in her jersey, tries to play it cool and fails.

❄︎ loves being the little spoon on off days even though she'd never admit that publicly.

❄︎ writes handwritten cards for occasions instead of buying gifts, says it feels more like her.

❄︎ gets weirdly proud introducing you as her girlfriend, says it a little louder than necessary.

❄︎ keeps snacks in her car specifically for you, never eats them herself.

❄︎ always double-checks you made it home safe before she lets herself fall asleep.

❄︎ loves when you steal her seat at restaurants just to sit closer to you.

❄︎ gets quietly emotional watching you do something you love, even something small.

❄︎ remembers your ex's names just so she can be quietly smug about being better.

❄︎ keeps a countdown, mentally, to your next visit whenever she's on a long road trip.

❄︎ loves lazy morning showers where nothing happens, just talking and coffee breath.

❄︎ tells you she loves you mid-argument sometimes, just to soften both of you up.

nsfw hcs ❄︎

❄︎ loves slow mornings just as much as frantic post-game energy — unhurried, soft laughter between kisses.

❄︎ gets wrecked by voice, whispering in her ear is basically a cheat code.

❄︎ thighs are a whole thing for her, giving and receiving both undo her fast.

❄︎ surprisingly vocal once comfortable, though it took a while to get her past the shy phase.

❄︎ loves being pinned, likes testing whether you'll actually hold her there.

❄︎ gets clingy after, wants to be tangled up in you instead of given space.

❄︎ teasing goes both ways, she turns it into a whole game every time.

❄︎ blushes if you compliment her body mid-act, even well past the shy phase by then.

❄︎ loves shower moments, slow and warm, hands mapping you out unhurried.

❄︎ weirdly responsive to gentle scalp touches, melts every single time.

❄︎ big on eye contact, wants you looking at her especially when things get intense.

❄︎ adrenaline from a win turns her a little untamed, chasing the high with you.

❄︎ loses her confident edge fast the second you take control, goes soft and pliant.

❄︎ loves lingering morning-after cuddles, refuses to get up even with practice looming.

❄︎ embarrassingly needy for praise, fishes for it without meaning to.

❄︎ protective aftercare ritual every time — water, blankets, quiet check-ins, no exceptions.

❄︎ loves being talked through it, needs the reassurance even when she's fully confident otherwise.

❄︎ gets desperate fast when you use her full name mid-act.

❄︎ loves marks left where her jersey collar sits, likes knowing they're hidden in plain sight.

❄︎ gets shaky when you take your time with her, patience wrecks her more than urgency does.

❄︎ loves when you laugh breathlessly against her skin mid-act, says it's her favorite sound.

❄︎ big on slow, drawn-out teasing when she's the one in control — loves watching you squirm.

❄︎ gasps embarrassingly easily when caught off guard, tries to play it cool immediately after.

❄︎ loves being told she's doing well, visibly relaxes into it every time.

❄︎ gets bratty when overstimulated, all bite and no actual resistance.

❄︎ loves lazy, unhurried sex on off days just as much as frantic post-win energy.

❄︎ surprisingly gentle when the roles flip and you need softness instead.

❄︎ loves being the one to initiate after a stressful day, works out tension that way.

❄︎ gets clumsy and giggly early on, settles into confidence the longer you're together.

❄︎ loves your hands on her jaw, tilting her face up, small thing that gets her every time.

❄︎ responds instantly to being called a good girl, no matter how composed she was seconds before.

❄︎ loves marking you in return, possessive in a way she rarely voices out loud otherwise.

❄︎ gets a little rough when jealous, works it out physically rather than with words.

❄︎ loves slow build-up more than instant gratification, savors every step.

❄︎ surprisingly loud when finally let go, tries and fails to muffle herself every time.

❄︎ loves being held down gently by the wrists, more about the feeling than actual restraint.

❄︎ gets shy asking for what she wants, has to be coaxed into saying it out loud.

❄︎ loves aftercare conversations, the quiet debrief where you're both just talking softly.

❄︎ gets desperate for skin contact after, needs to be touching you somewhere at all times.

❄︎ loves when you take control unexpectedly, throws her completely off guard every time.

❄︎ surprisingly patient teasing you back, loves drawing it out just as much as receiving it.

❄︎ gets embarrassed by her own noises sometimes, hides her face even mid-act.

❄︎ loves being praised for good behavior specifically, thrives on it more than anything physical.

❄︎ gets needy and handsy the moment the hotel door closes after road trips.

❄︎ loves slow morning-after intimacy, unhurried and quiet before the day actually starts.

❄︎ surprisingly responsive to soft compliments mid-act, gets flustered every single time.

❄︎ loves when you take the lead completely, relaxes the second she doesn't have to think.

❄︎ gets emotional sometimes mid-act, has to pause and just hold you for a second.

three weeks that’s how long abby had been gone, first a road trip with the victoire, then straight into camp with team usa, no real break in between you’d gotten good at being alone, or at least good at pretending you kept busy cooking meals you didn’t really taste.

left her side of the closet exactly how she’d left it because moving her things felt like admitting she wasn’t coming back soon some nights were fine but some nights you found yourself sitting on the floor of the bedroom just to feel closer to something that smelled like her, and you hated how much that helped tonight is one of the harder ones.

you’re at a coffee shop a few blocks from the apartment, laptop open, headphones in, waiting for her call because she said she’d have a few minutes between meetings.

when her face finally pops up on screen you feel your whole chest loosen. “hi, baby,” she says, and even through a screen her voice does something to you. “hi.” you hate how thick your own voice sounds. “how was today?”

“long. good, but long.” she rubs at her eyes. “camp’s wearing me down a little.”

“you sound tired.”

“i am tired.” a pause. “i miss you a stupid amount.”

“i miss you too.” you laugh, a little wet. “i’ve started talking to your side of the closet. it’s getting concerning.”

“don’t replace me with a hoodie.”

“no promises.” you talk for a while about nothing important, bad camp food, a teammate’s terrible joke, whether you fed the fish enough this week. it’s easy, familiar, the kind of conversation that doesn’t need to be about anything because just hearing her voice is the point then the connection stutters.

her face freezes mid-laugh, pixelated, one hand stuck halfway through pushing her hair back. “abs?”

“— sorry,” her voice comes through anyway, choppy but there, even though the picture doesn’t move. “wifi’s bad in here, one sec —” the frozen image glitches again, a smear of color across her cheek, then holds.

you can still hear her, muffled and warm, talking like she doesn’t realize the video’s stuck. “can you hear me?” her voice again, and you almost laugh at the absurdity of her still, silent face while her voice keeps going.

“i can hear you, i just can’t see you moving, your video’s stuck —”

“that’s so annoying,” she says, and you can hear the smile in it even though the frozen screen doesn’t show it. “hang on, don’t close it, i’m gonna try switching networks —”

“okay, i’m not going anywhere —” and then, from behind you; “good. because neither am i.” you turn around so fast you nearly knock your coffee off the table, and there she is. actually there.

jacket still on, bag over one shoulder, phone loose in her jacket pocket where she must’ve dropped it the second she came in because her frozen face is still sitting right there on your laptop screen, glitched mid-laugh, her real voice now coming from an entirely different direction.

“abby—”

she doesn’t let you finish crosses the space between you in two steps and picks you straight up off the ground, spinning you once and kisses you right in the middle of it, the whole world tilting sideways, her mouth on yours while your feet are still off the ground and the coffee shop blurs past in one dizzy turn.

when your feet finally touch the ground again you’re both laughing into the kiss, breathless, her hands still gripping your waist like she isn’t ready to let go yet. “you’re supposed to be at camp —” you manage, between breaths.

“i got an early flight,” she says against your lips, still not fully letting you go. “wanted to surprise you.”

“you’re insane. you’re actually insane — your face is still frozen on my screen, i thought you were glitching—”

“i was hiding behind the counter,” she admits, grinning. “the wifi excuse bought me like forty seconds.”

“forty seconds to what —”

“to get here.” her hands come up to frame your face instead, thumbs tracing your cheekbones like she’s checking you’re real. “hi.”

“hi,” you breathe behind you, your laptop is still open, her frozen face still stuck mid-laugh on the screen, utterly upstaged by the real thing. “i can’t believe you did that,” you say. “i can’t believe the wifi excuse actually worked.”

“i was distracted. i was busy talking to a frozen picture of you.”

“and now you get the real thing.” she laughs again, softer this time, and pulls you back into her — properly, arms wrapped all the way around you, chin resting on the top of your head.

❄︎ steals your hoodies and somehow convinces you they were always hers

❄︎ practices run long, the first thing she does when she gets her phone back is text "u up?"

❄︎ loves seeing you courtside in her jersey

❄︎ pretends she doesn't notice you cheering loudest until after, when she can't stop smiling

❄︎ points you out during introductions if she spots you in the crowd

❄︎ jogs over to hug you before talking to anyone else after the final buzzer

❄︎ melts completely if you tell her you're proud of her 

❄︎ all confidence until you compliment her, then suddenly can't look you in the eye

❄︎ if you're wearing her chain, she's staring at you every few minutes

❄︎ obsessed with taking candid pictures of you

❄︎ your camera roll is mostly blurry pics she took when you weren't looking

❄︎ "look at me real quick." snap. "that's my new lockscreen."

❄︎ remembers every small thing you mention in passing

❄︎ your favorite drink shows up without you asking

❄︎ your favorite snack is already in her car

❄︎ shows up with food on your rough days and acts like it's nothing

❄︎ surprisingly soft the second it's just the two of you

❄︎ everyone else gets loud, confident kk

❄︎ you get sleepy-morning-voice kk hiding her face in your neck refusing to get up

❄︎ hugs you from behind whenever you're cooking

❄︎ doesn't matter that she's making it harder

❄︎ "i'm helping." "you're not." "emotionally, i am."

❄︎ ridiculously competitive over literally anything — board games, mini golf, card games

❄︎ loses once and immediately demands best two out of three

❄︎ if you win, she's accusing you of cheating

❄︎ your biggest hype woman, no contest

❄︎ every accomplishment of yours becomes her favorite topic for days

❄︎ "that's my girl," said with zero self-awareness of how often she says it

❄︎ smiling before you even respond when someone compliments you

❄︎ loves introducing you as her girlfriend

❄︎ not because she wants to show off okay, maybe a little

❄︎ road trips are basically concerts with her

❄︎ screaming lyrics while driving, expects you to match energy

❄︎ learns your favorite songs even if they're nothing like her usual taste

❄︎ always reaching for your hand at red lights

❄︎ silence with her never feels like it needs filling

❄︎ sometimes you just exist in the same space and it's enough

❄︎ never interested in "winning" an argument

❄︎ would rather fix it than be right

❄︎ always checks in after

❄︎ "you okay now?" "come here."

❄︎ game day has a routine she never breaks

❄︎ good luck kiss, forehead touch, "see you after i win"

❄︎ stubborn about injuries, acts like it's nothing

❄︎ secretly loves the attention when you fuss over her anyway

❄︎ asleep within ten minutes if you play with her hair after practice

❄︎ randomly looks over and smiles for no reason

❄︎ "what?" "nothing." "...you're just really pretty"

❄︎ gets shy saying "i love you" first even after saying it a hundred times

❄︎ keeps a running mental list of your favorite things without meaning to

❄︎ will drive across town for something small if it makes your day easier

❄︎ laughs at her own jokes before she even finishes telling them

❄︎ gets quietly proud watching you talk about something you love

❄︎ still gets butterflies like it's the first week, months in

mature / intimate hcs ❄︎

❄︎ switch, but leans sub more than people would ever guess

❄︎ gets nervous the first time even though she talks the big talk

❄︎ once she's comfortable? different person entirely

❄︎vocal as hell, whimpers she tries to swallow and can't

❄︎ gets embarrassed by her own sounds sometimes, hides her face in your neck

❄︎ worships your body, actually worships it, hands everywhere like she's memorizing you

❄︎ huge beggar, will full on whine your name until she gets what she wants 

❄︎ away games hit different, she's needy the second she's back

❄︎ wakes you up in the middle of the night just to touch you 

❄︎eats you out like it's a competitive sport, refuses to lose 

❄︎ gets so into it she forgets to breathe for a second 

❄︎ obsessed with your thighs, always got a hand there

❄︎ loves marking you up, gets a little smug looking at it after 

❄︎ rough hands but always gentle with your face 

❄︎ manhandles you without even realizing she's doing it 

❄︎ checks in constantly — "you good?" "this okay?" — can't help herself

❄︎ favorite position is backshots, she's obsessed with the view 

❄︎ second favorite is missionary because she wants to watch you fall apart

❄︎ gets possessive in bed, grip tightens if she thinks you're distracted 

❄︎ loves overstimulating you just to hear you beg her to stop

❄︎ never actually stops 

❄︎ bad practice days turn into the roughest sex you've ever had

❄︎ good game days turn into slow, drawn out sex where she takes her time

❄︎ talks a lot of shit in the moment, goes soft the second it's over

❄︎ aftercare obsessed, doesn't let you move until she's checked on you properly 

❄︎ gets shy about aftercare though, acts like it's not a big deal

❄︎ loves your hands on her, guides them where she wants them

❄︎ strong grip, could probably pin you with one hand 

❄︎ loves pinning you anyway, likes seeing you try to get out of it

❄︎ teases mercilessly, drags things out until you're begging

❄︎ can't handle it when you beg though, gives in almost instantly

❄︎ loves your reactions more than her own, watches your face the whole time

❄︎ gets competitive about how many times she can make you finish 

❄︎ always wins that competition 

❄︎ loves morning sex, slow and lazy before either of you are fully awake

❄︎ also loves rough shower sex, has definitely almost slipped once

❄︎ big fan of pulling your hair, always asks first though

❄︎ loves when you scratch her back, wears it like a badge of honor

❄︎ gets loud when you're not expecting her to be

❄︎ tries to stay quiet in situations where you can't be loud, fails miserably

❄︎ whispers in your ear the whole time, filthy stuff mixed with soft stuff

❄︎ gets emotional sometimes mid-sex, tells you how much she loves you out of nowhere

❄︎ loves eye contact, chases it if you look away 

❄︎ has a praise kink she'll never admit to out loud 

❄︎ melts a little every time you tell her she's doing good 

❄︎ loves your legs wrapped around her, keeps them there on purpose

❄︎ gets a little rougher if you tease her about being soft for you 

❄︎ soft laugh turns into something else entirely once things start 

❄︎ loves slow build ups, teasing you for way longer than necessary 

❄︎ also loves when you skip the teasing and just tell her what you want

❄︎ gives you anything you ask for in the moment, no hesitation 

❄︎ remembers what you like without you having to remind her 

❄︎ gets nervous trying new things but always down to try 

❄︎ loves when you take control every once in a while, surprises her every time 

❄︎ never actually minds losing control like that 

❄︎ tells you you're beautiful mid act, breaks the mood in the best way

❄︎ loves lazy cuddles right after, doesn't want to move for a while 

❄︎ always the little spoon after, no matter how dominant she was minutes ago

❄︎ falls asleep almost instantly, worn out and content

❄︎ wakes up still wrapped around you, first thing she does is check you're okay