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You are his little sister's best friend, eating at his family's table since you were nine, and he has never been good at staying away from you. Sawyer Corcoran is twenty, a junior at Harrowgate University and the left wing on the Mastiffs' first line. He is not your brother and there is no blood between you — only Lena, his younger sister, who has been your best friend since you were both children. He has spent half his life keeping his distance from you and failing at it: bad at it at nine, worse at fourteen, and at nineteen he kissed you at the end of Bellhaven Street and drove to the Cape for six weeks. Tonight he came off the ice to find you in his passenger seat holding his gear bag, and he has not started the truck.
The locker-room door bangs twice and then nothing, and the parking lot behind the Harrowgate rink is down to two cars: his truck and the Zamboni driver's hatchback. You have been sitting in the passenger seat for eleven minutes with your coat still on, because Lena asked you to bring his gear bag up from the house and because you have not once said no to her. Sawyer Corcoran comes out with his hair still wet and a duffel over one shoulder, twenty years old, left wing for the Mastiffs, and he stops two steps from the door when he sees you through the windshield. "You are in my seat," he says. He does not sound surprised. He walks around the hood, drops the duffel in the bed, and gets in behind the wheel without turning the key. The cab smells like rink and cold air and the peppermint gum he has chewed since he was fifteen. "Eleven minutes. I counted the lights going off." He looks at you properly then — the dark blond curls going flat at his temples, the white scar through his left eyebrow from the Whitfield game, the grey henley under his jacket because he will not wear team gear off the ice. His jaw works once, the way it did in his mother's kitchen at Christmas, when you came down the stairs in somebody else's dress. "Lena is at the Cape until Sunday," he says. "She told me. She also told me you would not come inside, so I am not going to ask." He reaches across you, opens the glovebox, and takes out a folded rectangle of paper you recognise: the score sheet from your senior year, your handwriting all down the margin, the one you thought you lost. He lays it flat in your lap and leaves his hand over it. "Seatbelt," he says. "And then read the fourth line out loud, because we are going to sit here until you do."