Page 23 of Zero Pucks

That wasn’t a hard ask. I wasn’t going anywhere until he made me. He set up his chair, then sat down, rolled to my side of the car, and pulled my door open. I stepped out into the dim parking lot, which ruined all the usable bits of my vision, and I followed the shadow of him until I was gripping his shoulder.

“Go slow,” I said. “Take your time. There’s no rush.”

“That’s not going to make this go away,” he said. But he went slow anyway, and I kind of wanted to hug him for it.

The walk toward our front door felt a bit like a goddamn death march. The Darth Vader theme should have been playing on a speaker somewhere. I gripped Boden’s shoulder tight enough to make him hiss, but he didn’t push me off. He didn’t pause though either.

He just kept his annoyingly steady pace to the door. When I heard his keys jangle, my heart leapt into my throat, and my nonexistent knees began to give a phantom tremble. God, I wasn’t going to be able to stay upright. Fuck.

Before Boden could get the key in the lock, the door flew open, and I recognized Ford’s silhouette immediately.

“Unclench your balls. He’s gone.”

His words hit too hard, and between one stuttered breath and the next, I hit the ground.

* * *

I was down for maybe two minutes, but it felt like two hours. I came to on my sofa with my legs up and a cool cloth over my head. Blinking up, I focused my eye on the figure above me, and with the perfect lighting of our living room, I could see Ford.

Unlike Boden, with his small stature and his baby face, Ford was tall and very broad. He was an everyday pretty boy with long hair and hazel eyes. His only flaw—and that felt like a ridiculous term to use—was the little cluster of pimples that always lived in the right corner of his nose.

He had a single, thin scar that ran over the bridge of his nose from the fall that had taken his leg, and his jaw was a little crooked.

But seriously, the man’s face belonged on magazine covers.

“Welcome back.” He smiled and showed off his missing canine, which he hadn’t replaced yet after a puck knocked it out three weeks ago.

“Where did I go?”

His brow furrowed. “You know where you are, right? You didn’t even hit your head.”

I sat up, snorting as I turned my head from left to right to take in the room. Boden was nowhere to be found, and the place was empty. “Seriously, he left? He showed up, said he was my husband, then he bailed?”

Ford shrugged as he flopped down next to me, kicking his foot up on the coffee table. “He panicked after I called you. But he left you a note.”

I held out my hand, and Ford dropped a torn bit of paper folded into a very neat square. It triggered a strange, foggy memory of a bar napkin. I ran my finger over the edge before opening it and holding it close to my face so I could read it clearly.

The handwriting was the same as the Post-it:

I’M STAYING UP ON KITE HILL ROAD IN A VACATION RENTAL. HERE’S MY NUMBER. CAN WE TALK?

-AMEDEO

There was that name again. Amedeo. It was…different. I think I liked it, but it was hard to tell when all of my emotions felt like they’d been thrown into Boden’s Vitamix and left on pulverize for six hours.

“What, um…did he, uh…”

Ford looked at me, his brow raised.

“Did he seem like a serial killer with an amputee fetish?”

His lips twitched. “Uh. No?”

“Okay, but how do youknow?”

“Well, I hit on him at the grocery store. He saw Carol-Ann, and hedidstare, but not in an ‘I want to fuck you and then kill you’—or kill you, then fuck you—kind of way. However serial killers do their thing.”

My eyes widened. “Youhiton myhusband?”

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