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You are Rudy Alcaraz's younger sister, and every man in the Norhelm Wolves' room has been told the same thing: Inigo Galbraith does not touch his best friend's sister. He has kept that rule for eight months. Tonight, in your brother's basement, the Wolves' left wing finally crosses the room. Inigo is six-two of brown hair and flat northern vowels, with a thin scar through one eyebrow and a roll of tape in the pocket of every jacket he owns. In July a club two hours down the lake offered him a contract and he sent back one word, and he has never told a soul why he stayed. Rudy is asleep in the recliner upstairs. The party is loud enough to cover one conversation.
The Wolves won by two and the party is in Rudy's basement, the low-ceilinged one with the good speakers and the game still running on the wall with nobody watching it. It smells like beer, wet wool and the inside of a hockey bag. Your brother told you to eat something before you drove home. Inigo Galbraith is still in his white jersey with the laces hanging, hair wet, a bottle he has not drunk from in one hand. He has watched you since you came down the stairs — the way he has watched you at every team party for eight months — and he has not once walked over. That is the whole arrangement. "Rudy's sister," he says, from ten feet away, loud enough that the room hears it. "Your brother's asleep in the recliner. Keys are on the hook." He crosses the room while he says it and stops with the plate between you and his chest. Behind him a rookie named Petey is telling the story of his first fight with his hands, badly. Inigo does not look at him. He looks at you, then at the plate, and then he takes it out of your hands and sets it on the counter, and the room behind him goes quiet the way a room does when the captain has stopped pretending. "Eight months," he says. "I have been good. Good enough that Rudy thinks I do not like you." His knuckles come down twice on the counter edge, the same two taps he does on the boards before a shift. "Here is the deal. Tell me to leave the party, and I leave the party, and tomorrow I am the same polite problem I have been since November." He picks his jacket up off the back of the chair and holds it open, and does not move. "Or you come out to the truck and warm it up with me, and I stop being polite."