The Lagoon

Kenna isn't in Room 614 when you get back from the rink. Her skates are gone from under the radiator. So is her stick.

"Lagoon," Tash says, when you text her. She goes every night. Shay told me. Are you finally going to talk to her or do I need to lock you both in a penalty box

You don't answer. You put on your parka and the ugly red toque your mom knit you when you made the national team at nineteen, and you walk.

It's minus fourteen. The air hurts your teeth. Downtown Calgary is all glass towers and ice-blue streetlights, and then you cross a footbridge over the river and the city falls away into a park, bare trees, snow up to the benches, and a frozen lagoon strung with lights like somebody's backyard wedding.

The ice is empty except for one skater.

You hear her before you see her. The hard scrape of an edge, the crack of a stick, the heavy thump of a puck hitting packed snow. Again. Again. A rhythm so steady it sounds like a heartbeat.

Kenna is at the far end of the lagoon in a black parka and no hat, skating in tight circles with a bucket of pucks, firing them one after another into a snowbank like it owes her money. Her breath comes out in white bursts. The string lights catch her face every time she turns.

You stand at the edge of the ice and watch her for longer than you should. You're not proud of it.

She sees you on the turn. She doesn't stop. She takes one more puck off the pile, curls around it, and rips it into the snowbank so hard a chunk of it collapses.

"You following me now, Captain?"

"Tash told me where you'd be."

"Tash is a snitch."

"Tash is a goalie. It's the same thing." You step onto the ice in your boots, carefully. It's rough and uneven, cracked with frozen bubbles. "Shay talked to me today."

Kenna stops.

Not a hockey stop, no spray of snow. She just glides to a halt in the middle of the lagoon and stands there with her stick across her body.

"Shay talks to a lot of people," she says.

"She said you asked out of Montreal. The week after the All-Star game."

The lights hum. Somewhere across the river a car honks, small and far away.

"She said you loved Montreal," you go on, because if you stop you'll never start again. "She said you'd have played there until you were forty. And then all of a sudden you walk into the GM's office and ask for a trade. To Boston. Out of my division." Your voice is doing something wobbly you don't like. "So I'm asking. Why?"

Kenna looks at you for a long moment. Then she laughs, short and humorless, and skates slowly toward you across the bumpy ice.

"You know, I've had that conversation with you in my head about four hundred times," she says. "In none of them did you wear that hat."

"Leave the hat out of it."

"I can't. It has a pom-pom." She stops a stick-length away. Up close her cheeks are pink with cold, her lashes frosted at the tips. "Ask me what you actually want to ask me, Ava."

Your heart is slamming. "Did something happen in Montreal?"

You've been asking it for three years. You've never once said it out loud.

Kenna drops her eyes. She pokes at a frozen bubble in the ice with the blade of her stick. When she speaks again, her voice is different. Lower. All the swagger scraped off it like snow off a windshield.

"I texted you the next morning," she says. "You remember?"

"Last night didn't happen."

"Yeah. I wrote that at eight in the morning after not sleeping at all, because I figured you'd wake up and regret it, and I wanted to say it first so it wouldn't hurt so much when you did." She huffs out a breath that turns to fog. "I was a coward. I thought, if I give her an out, she'll take it, and at least it'll be my idea."

"Kenna…"

"And you wrote back what didn't happen?" She looks up. Her eyes are bright. Not crying. Kenna Ryder doesn't cry in public. Just bright, like the lights are reflecting off something. "Three words. I read them, I don't know, a hundred times. And I thought, okay. She's not even going to pretend it was something. She's going to pretend it was nothing at all."

"That's not…"

"Let me finish. I've been practicing for three years." She almost smiles. "I tried. I really tried. The next game we played, I lined up across from you at the faceoff and you looked at me like I was any other center in the league, and I couldn't breathe. I took a penalty in the first minute just to get off the ice. Six games a season. Six times a year I was going to have to stand across a faceoff circle from you and act like you were nobody." She shakes her head. "I couldn't do it. So I went to the GM. I said I wanted a fresh start. I said Boston. He thought I was crazy."

The cold has gotten into your lungs. Or something has.

"You left your team," you say slowly. "Because of me."

"Because of a stairwell," she says. "Because of an exit sign. Because of the way you laughed when I said the thing about your backhand." She takes a breath. "Because I was falling for you, and you didn't even remember."

"I remember."

It comes out barely a whisper. You're not sure she hears it. You're not sure you meant to say it.

Kenna's stick comes down on the ice with a sharp crack, and she skates the last stick-length between you until her toes are almost touching your boots. She's taller on skates. You have to tilt your head back to see her face.

"Don't," she says, rough. "Don't do that. Don't give me a crumb because you feel bad. I've had three years of crumbs. Every time we played, every handshake line, every time somebody asked me about the great Ryder rivalry and I had to make a joke. I've been trying to get over one kiss for three years. Do you get how pathetic that is?"

Her breath fogs between you. Your faces are very close.

"So no," she says. "I'm not going to pretend anymore. I'm too tired. I'm sharing a room with you, I'm on your wing, Iversen's going to make one of us captain, and I can't do it if I'm lying to you every night across a strip of tape."

She steps back. She looks at you with her chin up, the way she looks at a referee after a bad call. Bracing.

"It happened, Ava," Kenna says. "Every second of it. I've spent three years trying to make it un-happen."

The string lights sway in the wind. The lagoon creaks somewhere under your feet.

"That's why I left Montreal," she says. "Because of you."