Page 4 of The Pucks We Freeze
It wasn’t love at first sight. More of a familiar ache, a dangerous pull I’d carried since high school.
Later that night, I found her on the dock.
Everyone else stayed up at the fire, too drunk to care what happened next. But she was there. Barefoot with her sweatshirt sleeves pulled over her hands and legs dangling off the edge of the old wooden slats.
I didn’t ask to sit beside her. I just did.
We talked. Stupid things at first—music, the game that weekend, what she was majoring in. Then something shifted. She got quiet. That kind of vulnerability that rarely shows up unless you’re sitting in the dark with your feet hovering over a black lake.
“You ever get tired of pretending everything’s fine?” she asked, voice barely more than a breath.
I stared across the water, moonlight scattering like shattered glass. “All the time.” I turned to her, meeting her uncertain eyes. “What if tonight, you didn’t have to pretend? No masks, no worries, no past, or future.”
Her brow lifted, that flicker of disbelief dancing in her gaze.
I slid my hand along her thigh, warm from the day’s sun. “One night when you can turn your mind off.”
She caught her breath, eyes following my fingers as they traced her skin. Then she nodded, slow and deliberate.
“One night,” she whispered. “No feelings, no expectations.”
I let my hand drift higher. She leaned back on her palms, legs parting without hesitation. She didn’t laugh or pull away. She simply stayed.
When I woke the next morning and my arm swept across the empty mattress, she was gone.
I told myself it was as we agreed. One night, no expectations. She didn’t owe me anything. Maybe she needed space, or perhaps she was protecting us from whatever neither of us intended to feel.
Then the days passed into weeks. She didn’t reach out, and then I heard she’d left for school in Braysen, South Carolina. She didn’t even bother to look back.
Not until she was suddenly standing in the kitchen again.
I hadn’t seen her after that night. Not even when our parents exchanged their vows. Seeing her now, I watched her piece it together, eyes locked on the wedding photo like it couldn’t possibly be real. Her mouth opened, then closed, like she struggled to find the words.
And I didn’t have the words to offer her either.
I just stood there, watching the girl who once let me hold her like a secret now look at me as if I were someone she barely remembered.
Something had settled in her then. Not anger, exactly. Just… distance.
She didn’t say much after her dad went to lie down. Just stood there in the den, staring at the wedding photo on the mantel as though it didn’t make sense. It was as if she were waiting for someone to explain how the hell this all happened.
I didn’t know what to say. What could I say? She wasn’t just some one-night stand who disappeared as though nothing happened. She was the only girl who made me feel something real for the first time in my life, and I’d been haunted by it ever since.
And now, somehow, she was the one person I wasn’t supposed to want.
Even then, standing in the thick of it, all I could think about was what it felt like to hold her. The way her body fit againstmine. The taste of her lips. How she kissed me like she meant it, even if she left before the sun came up.
She’d been in my head ever since. Quiet, steady, like a ghost that never really left. How nothing existed between us then but heat and wanting.
Now, all that was left was silence and tension thick enough to choke on.
I told myself I’d let it go. Told myself once again on Saturday, when I passed her in the kitchen.
She was already halfway out the door by the time I saw her. Hoodie zipped up and her camera strap slung across her chest. She didn’t make eye contact, just nodded like we were still classmates passing each other in the hallway. As if we hadn’t once shared a night that’d been stuck in my head ever since.
She didn’t stop walking, and I didn’t even try to stop her.
It was Sunday now, and the weather was turning fast. The snow started slowly, with only light flakes that barely stuck at first. By mid-afternoon, it was thick and heavy and piling up fast. One of those late-season storms that sneaks up on you and forces you to cancel plans.
