“Yeah, but that’s not …” Will’s eyes flash, a storm flickering out in a blink. “Let’s just bounce, okay?” He puts his hand behind my neck and kisses me once more before motoring us out onto the I-190, Kara’s words from last week bleeding into Rowan’s and echoing through my head.
Once he gets what he wants, he moves on…. Will promised we could ax the princess…. Right now he needs you for the team, but after that …
We end up on the American side of Niagara Falls, ten below zero, hours after closing time, no other cars or pedestrians in sight. Ignoring the CLOSED signs, Will pulls into a spot near a pathway that snakes around the water and kills the engine.
“Hudson?”
I take a deep breath. I mean, it’s been less than a month. He hasn’t even tried to sleep with me. And now he’s ditching me? Axing me from the team? He doesn’t say anything for a full minute. Normally, I think the dramatic pause is a great performance technique, but in these situations? No, not a fan.
“Will, I don’t—”
“You okay to walk?” He nods toward the water. “Just for a few minutes?”
I follow him out of the car, gingerly stepping along the icy path. He takes my hand in his and leads us closer to the edge, the roar of water almost deafening.
“I’ve never been here in the winter,” he says. “You?”
I shake my head.
“I thought we should see it,” he says. “I mean, it’s here, right?”
I lean over the rail, staring down into the white abyss. I heard once that Eskimos have, like, a hundred different words for snow. Growing up in Watonka, I’ve been hit with all kinds of snow—fluffy, wet, slushy, icy needles, tiny flakes, blustery whiteout clouds of it—but it was always just snow to me. Just like ice was always the rink—Fillmore or Buffalo Skate Club or Luby or Miller’s Pond or anywhere else—it was all just the smooth surface beneath my feet. But here, the river’s eternal mist has encased the world in glass. Every twig on every branch on every tree, the railings and the paths, the lampposts—all of it sparkles in the moonlight. And as I look into the deep, white maw of the earth, I see a thousand different meanings, a thousand different words.
Even on my father’s blog, in all his pictures and stories, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful and amazing.
I wish Josh was here to see it.
We walk along the path to a lookout, and I scrape a thin layer of ice from one of the signs. “Says here that the Falls erodes about one foot a year. Eventually it’ll crumble all the way back to Lake Erie.”
“Crazy,” Will says.
“No, think about it! All of this …” I spin with my arms wide, scooping up the landscape. “In forty-eight thousand years, everything we’re standing on will be gone.”
“Guess we’re running out of time, then.” Will slides his gloved fingers over my shoulders and leans into a kiss, hot and steamy in the frozen mist.
I pull away slowly, lingering in his arms. “Is this what you wanted to talk about?”
“Maybe.” He gives me that grin, and even though I know he’s hiding something, I’m powerless to push. Talk? What talk? We half kiss, half stumble our way across the ice-slick path back to the car. Will cranks the heat, and we continue our mad race against geologic time in the backseat.
Will kisses his way from earlobe to collarbone, his lips brushing the hollow of my throat, his hair tickling my skin. “I could do this all night.”
“Stop! Stop!” I mock push him away, but my giggling makes him more eager, his fingers strumming my ribs. “I’m serious, Josh—Will. Will, stop!”
He raises his head, mouth turned up in a partial grin. “Did you just call me Josh?”
“Josh? What? No.”
“You did. You went ‘Josh-Will’ and then—”
“I’m cold. My teeth were chattering.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Something going on with you and fifty-six?”
“No!”
Will pulls back, watching me close. “You sure? Because sometimes you guys have this thing, you know?”
“What thing? We don’t have a thing.”
“Like an unspoken … thing. Like there’s this inside joke or something. A thing, you know?”
My heart freezes up, then jump-starts, racing double time. “We’re just friends. It’s not—”
“Forget it.”
“It’s not like that,” I say. “We aren’t—”
“I’m not into sharing, just so you know. If you’d rather be with Blackthorn …” His eyebrow arches again to match his grin, sure and cocky and half-joking, and my stomach flip-flops. In a perfect world … no. We don’t live in a perfect world. And here in the rusty old town of my life, there’s the boy who’s just my friend, who’s hugged me and looked at me a little too long and made me music but never made a move, and the boy who’s always kissing me and calling me beautiful and whispering into my ear, on and off the ice. The boy who’s here with me now, the roar of eighteen thousand years of water behind us softened by the warmth of the car, his breath hot and moist on my cheeks.
“I’m not,” I say. “I mean, I wouldn’t.” Still, my throat feels raw around the words, and I look away.
Will sighs, the levity we shared only a minute ago leaking out through the drafts in the doors. The car engine hums, the windows fogging up in the heavy silence.
“So … what did you want to talk about, anyway?” I ask. “You said—”
“Yeah. Listen, I really appreciate what you did for us this season. We all do. But I can handle the team now.” He refuses to meet my eyes. “The Wolfman. That’s what Don Donaldson’s calling me.” Will stares out the window and shakes his head.
“You’re …” My heart races, eyes water. “You’re kicking me off the ice?”
Will laughs, but it’s hollow and cold. “Don’t worry about your ice time, Pink. I told you that before.”
I don’t even process his words. “That’s it? I helped you guys get this far, and now that you’re Don’s pet Wolfman, it’s over? You got what you wanted, so you’re dropping me?”
Will finally turns to face me. Under the pale light of the moon, his eyes shine, stung. He brushes his fingers across my cheek. “Dropping you? This is just team stuff. It has nothing to do with … with us.” He leans forward to kiss me, but I turn away, my mind spinning.
Once he gets what he wants … Kara warned me that he’d call it off. But he’s not calling it off. Not the way Kara meant, anyway.
“If you’re not ending things between us,” I say, “why do you want me to leave the team?”
“Because you should focus on your—”
“Don’t say it’s about my training. Or that the guys don’t need help. Something else is going on. I’m not stupid. What happened tonight? Something with Dodd?”
He traces lines into the glass with his finger. “Did you see those guys in suits, sitting in the box with Dodd? My father showed up at the end.”
I nod.
“The rest of them were recruiters. NHL Central Scouting.”
“Will, that’s … wow. That’s amazing. Do you think they’re talking to Dodd and your father about you? Trying to set something up?”
“Yep.” Will taps his fingers against the window. “You ever been in a position where you have to make a choice between two things, and both of them are either really good or really bad? Like, it doesn’t even matter what you do, because either way you’ll have to give up something or hurt someone or ruin stuff and …” Will sighs and grabs my hand. “Forget it. I’m totally babbling.”
“No, I know exactly what you mean.” I lean back against the seat and close my eyes, thinking about Dani again. And my mother. The restaurant. Bug. Cupcakes. Skating and training and the Wolves … all the things I’ve been choosing between this winter. All the things that get left in the cold whenever I say yes to something else.
Maybe that’s the lesson I’m supposed to learn from my father, the Avery legacy left with the deed to the diner when he jetted across the country without us. Whenever you make a choice, something or someone becomes the unchosen, and that path vanishes forever, unexplored.