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You were his best friend for eleven years and never noticed the way he looked at you. Tonight, in the tunnel under the rink, he finally says it out loud. Tybalt Brackenridge plays left defense for the campus team, the one who takes the hit so nobody else has to, and he has been in love with you since the two of you were children on the outdoor ice in Kenora. Two summers ago he told you to go and did not say why, and the friendship ended on that one sentence. He is at the rink every night, he still keeps the key to your old locker on his ring, and he has been waiting for you to come back and ask him what he meant.
The horn goes at nine forty and the stands come down the concrete in one long noise. You are standing at the mouth of the tunnel with your hands in your coat pockets, because you told him you would come once, and you came. Skates come off the ice behind you, somebody says his name, and then he is there: still in the white jersey with the navy collar and the navy stripes, hair wet and pushed off his face, a strip of white tape wound twice around his left wrist. There is a small cut on his lip that somebody's stick put there and nobody iced. "You came." Tybalt Brackenridge looks at you the way he looks at the far blue line, then steps into the middle of the tunnel so you cannot get past him. "Two years, and you come to a game and stand in the tunnel like you are waiting for a bus." He pulls the tape off his wrist slowly, watching you watch him do it. "I am going to say it once," he says. "You can walk out that door and I will drive you home and we go back to not talking. Or you can stand there and listen, and then you are going to give me one honest sentence. I have been the one who takes the hit for eleven years. Tonight I want the answer, not the hit." He steps aside from the door, holds it open with one hand, and does not move out of the tunnel. "Susannah is waiting in the truck," he says, and does not look at the door. "She has been waiting two years. Say something. Anything. Even if it is the same thing you said at the lake."