The Girl Behind the Blog
1116 Words
He showed up at my apartment that night, unannounced, hands shoved in his jacket pockets, standing on my doorstep like he expected me to slam the door in his face the second I saw him.
I didn't.
I spent the hours since the equipment room convincing myself.
I imagined the whole thing. The bench, the confession about his father, the way he looked at me like I was worth finding.
So when I opened the door and he was there, real under my porch light, I just stood there for a second, forgetting how doors worked.
"Can I come in?" he asked.
"Yeah. Sorry. Yes."
My apartment wasn't much of a studio . I split the rent with nobody, because Amara had her own place across campus and I'd wanted, for once in my life, somewhere that was only mine.
I watched him take it in, the shot charts taped to the wall, the corkboard covered in prints, the laptop I borrowed from Amara sitting open on the kitchen table with three years of backed-up footage pulled up on the screen.
"You weren't kidding," he said.
"About what?"
"The analysis."
He walked over to the corkboard, studying it, like it might give something away if he looked long enough. "This is better than what the coaching staff has."
"I know," I said, and meant it. It was the one thing in my life I never doubted about myself.
He sat across from me at the kitchen table, and for the next hour I walked him through breakdowns he'd never seen laid out like that before, his tendency to overcommit on the rush when he was tired, the half-second delay in his backhand release that only showed up in the third period, patterns even his own coaches had missed because they weren't watching as I had been, for reasons that had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with a boy I never expected to sit at my kitchen table.
He scrolled back through my laptop at one point, past the analysis files, into the folder where I kept my blog drafts.
"You're IceEyes," he said. Not a question.
My stomach dropped for the second time that day. "You read that account?"
"Every week for two years." He set the laptop down, like it had just gotten heavier in his hands. "I thought whoever wrote it actually understood the game.
Understood "me". I used to wonder who was behind it."
"Now you know."
"Now I know," he repeated, and something about the way he said it pushed a nerve right in me. He was too close, too close for me to mask the yearnings brewing in the deepest corner of my heart.
I told him about my father's ultimatum then, the week, the tuition, the exact number of days I had left to prove I was worth the money he spent keeping me enrolled.
He didn't offer to fix it.
I think some instinct in him understood I wouldn't have wanted that, that being fixed by someone else was its own kind of humiliation I'd had enough of for one lifetime.
He just listened, the same way he had in the equipment room, like listening was something he decided to be good at with me, even if he wasn't with anyone else in his life.
"You'll have your equipment by tomorrow," he said. "New camera, new laptop, whatever else you need."
"Carlson"
"I already ordered it. Before I came here." He said it like replacing three years of stolen equipment was a normal Tuesday for him, and maybe it was, considering what his family had.
Neither of us planned what happened after that.
I won't pretend I didn't want it. I'd wanted it for years, in a hundred versions I wrote down and never meant for daylight.
But the real thing wasn't anything like the journal. It was slower than I expected, and terrifying in a different way, because I could lie to a page.
I couldn't lie to him, not with his hands finding mine across the table first, not with the careful way he asked if this was what I wanted before either of us moved any closer, like my answer mattered more to him than anything else.
I told him yes and I meant it.
He traced a slow line down my spine like he was checking If I was real and not another version of the girl he built out of old photographs and a decade of looking.
"I've been looking for you a long time," he said.
I didn't tell him what I knew, that finding me hadn't fixed anything yet, that Celeste was still out there somewhere deciding what my humiliation was worth to her, that my father was still counting down a week I hadn't come close to winning, that whatever this was between us happened in the wreckage of the worst day of my life and I had no idea what that meant for whether it would survive the next one.
He left a little after two, kissing my forehead at the door like it was something he did every night instead of something that had never happened before in either of our lives.
I locked the door behind him and stood there for a long moment with my back against it, listening to my own heartbeat slow down.
My phone buzzed on the counter. Amara, three texts in a row, the way she always sent them when she'd been waiting up.
“Did he actually show up Cheryl? I swear to god answer me.”
I typed back with my thumb still shaking a little. “He showed up.
He's ordering me new equipment. It's a long story.”
“IT'S ALWAYS A LONG STORY WITH YOU. Tomorrow. Coffee. All of it. I mean it.”
I set the phone down and looked around my apartment.
The corkboard, the shot charts, the laptop still open to the folder where I kept the blog nobody was supposed to trace back to me.
Twelve hours ago I woke up to my sister holding my journal over her head like a trophy.
Now there was a version of my life sitting on the other side of that same day where Carlson Miller knew who I was and hadn't run from any of it.
I didn't know what that was worth against everything still coming for me.
But for the first time since Celeste walked into my room that morning, I let myself believe it might be worth something at all.
I just let myself have the one night before I went back to fighting for the rest of it.
- Writer
