The Hockey Captain's Forbidden Girl

Chapter 5: Sunday Dinner

"You didn't tell me Ethan was coming."

"I didn't think I needed to." Mason grabbed a handful of rolls off the counter before Mom could swat his hand away. "He's basically been coming to Sunday dinner since we were fourteen. Why, is that a problem?"

"No." I said it too fast, the way I'd been saying everything too fast for a week now, and busied myself with the plates so I wouldn't have to look at either of them. "Just would've liked a warning."

"Since when do you need a warning about Ethan?"

The doorbell rang before I had to answer that, and Mason went to get it, and I stood in the kitchen with a stack of plates in my hands, listening to my own heartbeat do something reckless at the sound of his voice in our front hallway, easy and warm, greeting my mother like he'd never once been three years of careful distance instead of a regular fixture at this table.

"Ethan!" My mother's voice, delighted, the particular warmth she reserved for exactly two people outside our immediate family — Priya and Ethan — both of them treated like extensions of a family that had never quite closed the door on him even when I had. "It's been too long. Sit, sit, you're too thin. Has Mason been feeding you at all?"

"Mason's diet is exclusively protein bars and regret, Mrs. Harper."

"That tracks," my father said, already laughing, already pulling out the chair across from mine like it was simply understood that this was where Ethan sat, had always sat, three years of my careful absence apparently invisible to everyone at this table except me.

He sat down across from me and didn't say anything, not yet, just held my eyes for one long second before my mother set the pot roast down between us and the whole table dissolved into its usual chaos, Mason reaching for the biggest piece, my father asking about the season, my mother asking Ethan about his classes like she hadn't already memorized his entire academic schedule from three years of exactly this dinner.

"How's the draft outlook looking?" Dad asked, the same question he asked every single time, and Ethan answered it the same easy, practiced way he answered every reporter, except I caught the small, private glance he sent my direction halfway through the answer, like he was checking whether I was actually listening or just performing normal the way I'd been performing it all week.

"Lily's writing about the team now," Mason said, mouth still half full. "Season preview. You should see her notes — she's more thorough than half the beat writers covering the pros."

"I've noticed," Ethan said, and something in the way he said it made my mother glance up, curious, and I felt my face go warm and hated myself for it.

"Have you," my mother said, delighted in a way that made my stomach drop straight through the floor. "Well, that's wonderful. I always thought you two would get along, if you ever actually talked to each other. Lily used to come to every game, you know, before she got so busy with school."

"I remember," Ethan said quietly, and under the table, where nobody else could see, his knee found mine, brief, deliberate, gone before anyone noticed.

I nearly dropped my fork.

"You okay, Lil?" Mason asked, oblivious, already reaching for seconds.

"Fine. Just swallowed wrong."

Ethan didn't look at me again for the rest of that exchange, perfectly composed, answering my father's next question about scouts with the same easy confidence he'd been performing all night, and I sat there with my heart going too fast, replaying the brief, deliberate pressure of his knee against mine like it was the only thing that had happened at this table in the last ten minutes.

Dinner wound down slow, the way it always did — second helpings and my mother's stories and Mason arguing with Dad about some game from three seasons ago neither of them remembered correctly. I offered to help clear plates mostly because I needed somewhere to put my hands that wasn't across the table from Ethan Carter's very deliberate knee.

He found me in the kitchen anyway, plates stacked in his own hands, setting them by the sink close enough that I caught the same cedar and clean laundry smell that had been haunting me since the roadside three years ago and the film room three days ago.

"You've been avoiding my eyes all dinner."

"I've been eating dinner."

"Lily." He set the plates down, careful, quiet, checking the doorway the way we'd both gotten disturbingly good at checking doorways. "Your mom just told me you used to come to every game. I didn't know that. I thought you stopped caring about hockey entirely, not that you specifically stopped coming to see me."

"That's not the same thing, and you know it."

"I'm learning that everything I thought I knew for three years might not actually be true." He said it low, careful, and something in his voice made the whole kitchen feel smaller than it actually was. "I keep learning that lately."

"Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't do the thing where you say something like that and then Mason walks in thirty seconds later and we both have to pretend it never happened."

"Would it help if I said it somewhere Mason can't walk in on?"

Before I could answer that, before I could even decide if I wanted to answer that, my phone buzzed against the counter, and I saw his eyes drop to it too, both of us going still at the same reflexive dread.

Unknown Number.

Ask him about the accident.

I stared at it, and when I looked up, Ethan had already seen it too, his whole face going pale in a way I'd never once seen at the boards, at the film room, anywhere.

"What accident?"

He didn't answer. He picked the plates back up, hands not quite steady, and walked them to the sink without meeting my eyes again for the rest of the night.