Page 74 of Rosie and the Beast Next Door

“Max is watching,” she whispered, barely moving her lips.

And with three words, I was plunged right back into the freezing cold reality of what we were doing here. Rosie and I weren’t in an actual relationship. No matter how much I was starting to wish we were. We couldn’t. Not with me leaving. Not with her in love with someone else.

I cleared my throat and backed up a fraction. “Then I guess it’s working.”

“I guess so,” she said. She stared at me for a beat, then stepped out of my loose embrace. “I’d better get back to it.”

I tried to keep my attention on the game, but it was hard with Rosie moving around in the edges of my vision, flitting from table to table like a hummingbird going from flower to flower.

At the first period the score was still zero, and tensions were increasing on the ice. Bret had spent several minutes in the penalty box, and Gage—normally one of the more easy-going players—had already gotten into two fights.

Semi-finals could be like this, and this one was more charged with emotion and energy than usual. To have come this far after losing Shiloh was nothing short of miraculous.

The game started back up again, but the Peaks’ energy had changed. They weren’t as full of fire as they’d been in the beginning, and it didn’t take long for the Snow Hares to get a goal past us. Someone in the restaurant yelled, “No!” and it was exactly what I was thinking.

The rest of my pizza turned cold as I remained riveted on the game, watching a trade of points, until in the last few seconds of the game, the Snow Hares hit the final goal, winning by one.

I watched their team celebrate on the screen as the Peaks skated out to the locker room with rounded shoulders. One of the reporters grabbed Bret before he could skate past him, and asked, “Do you think the Peaks would have won with Shiloh and Dylan?”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that we would have won,” Bret said. He stared straight into the camera, right at me, as if he knew I’d be watching. I sat rooted in the spot, cemented to the chair with a million pounds of weight on my shoulders. One more loss. When would the losses end?

The reporter nodded and began to move the mic away, but Bret took his arm to stop him. The reporter’s eyes widened with surprise as Bret brought the mic close. “But there’s more to life than hockey.”

My phone buzzed with message after message, but I ignored them all, feeling as though I was in a haze. All the sound around me was muffled, and my vision tunneled to the small space of counter in front of me. I needed to skate. Desperately. I just needed to skate.

I didn’t realize my hands were shaking until two soft hands surrounded them. “Let’s go,” she whispered.

I followed Rosie out of the restaurant, holding her hand like it was a lifeline. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. The Peaks had lost before. We’d lost championship games before. But it felt like this time, we’d failed Shiloh. I’d failed Shiloh. By letting my actions get me kicked out of the game, I’d let my best friend down.

We walked in silence, my brain a whirl of regret and sadness. When we finally stopped, I looked up to see that we were at the rec center. Rosie set the umbrella down that I hadn’t even realized she’d been holding over us and pulled a set of keys from her pocket to unlock the door.

“You have keys to the rec center?”

“Another one of my secrets,” she whispered with her finger over her mouth in a shushing motion.

“I thought I knew them all,” I said, the words feeling like they came from far away.

“Secrets are like a field of weeds. You pull one, and several more pop up in their place. Luckily, mine are harmless.”

Were they, though? I thought of her dad, but even that couldn’t push past the wall of numbness in front of me. The air grew colder as we walked through a back hallway I’d never been in before, and then she opened a door.

An ice rink.

This hadn’t been here when I was a kid. I didn’t realize they’d built one. I blinked and the world came into a little more focus. Rosie left my side to approach a closet. It took a few more keys,but she managed to find one to unlock shelves of skates. The familiar scent of leather and sweat met my nose, and I closed my eyes. This here was my childhood in one snapshot.

“It’s named after Shiloh. He donated the money to build it a few years back.” She ran her hand over the counter, where Blaire Ice Rink was etched into the glossy wood.

I felt frozen in place as I stared at his name. His legacy.

Rosie tugged on my arm. “I know it’s not the quality you’re used to, but…” She motioned toward the skates. In my daze, it took me a minute to locate my size. The laces were short, like they’d been skated over a few times and severed the cloth. The leather on the sides was scuffed and peeling from having hundreds of different feet inside of them.

I took my shoes off and put the skates on, feeling like I was finally home. I shot onto the ice and skated back and forth, back and forth, letting the rest of the world disappear in the motion. The cold pricked my arms, and I increased my pace.

Nothing mattered but me and the ice. Me and the sliding motion of my legs carrying me from one side to the other. When I got going fast enough, it almost felt like soaring. Shiloh and I used to close our eyes while we skated and then land unceremoniously in snow piles at the edges of the pond. One of my earliest memories was giggling as I picked myself up from a faceplant, only to see Shiloh land right beside me in his own pile of snow. Our faces had been red with cold, but we did it again and again, finding joy in something so simple.

Shiloh had always been the best at finding joy in the small things. The obvious things like friendship and puppies and donating money to our high school, in his wife and daughter. In making me laugh by doing something ridiculous or daring me and Hudson to do things to get us out of our heads. But he also found joy in the overlooked parts of life too—one of my mom’s cookies fresh from the oven, the handshake we’d takentwo weeks to memorize when we were kids and had done before every game, the fresh scent of the first snowfall of winter.

He hadn’t been perfect. He’d been moody and his dares went too far and he’d been so obtuse about the most obvious things. But he’d been my best friend. And I’d wanted us to win this game for him. But we hadn’t. We couldn’t. We needed him still.

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