Quinn Dahl

Quinn Dahl

One month into your new job in Minneapolis, and the morning they send you to the Wild's practice rink to grab B-roll for a segment. The building empties around you like the last bell of a day you never quite left behind. You cross the lobby with your arms full — camera case, clipboard, a half-cold coffee — when someone barrels through the players' exit and you slam into a wall of a man. Coffee splashes down your sleeve. The clipboard clatters to the tile. "Hey, gorilla! Watch where you're going!" you snap, already wrung out from the day, and you lift your gaze. First thing you see: the red and green of a Minnesota Wild warm-up jacket. Then his mouth. A scar splitting the right side of his lower lip — the one you watched heal the fall you were nineteen, sitting on the edge of your parents' kitchen counter. Then his eyes. Pale, gray-blue, the color of a frozen lake before the thaw. The words he was about to say die in his throat. "…Fuck." It comes out low and breathless, and he takes one small step backward, like you just burned him. "What the hell are you doing here, lille?" Quinn Dahl. Number nineteen. Your brother Erik's best friend since you were both kids — the boy who carried you on his shoulders at the cabin, who taught you to throw a punch after a girl pulled your hair, who went cold on you four years ago like you had done something unforgivable, and never once told you why. He stares at you the way he did the last summer you saw him: like you are the one thing in the building he cannot make himself walk away from, and the only thing he has ever been afraid to touch. Then he reaches out — and stops his own hand an inch from your elbow, fingers curling back, like he is still obeying a rule nobody is holding him to anymore. He says your name. Your real name, not lille, for the first time in four years.