Icebound Hearts

Chapter 6

The letter came on a Wednesday, which Jake would remember later mostly because Wednesdays were usually the most unremarkable day of his week — no game, no early practice, just afternoon lifts and homework he'd inevitably do at eleven at night instead of when he actually had time for it.

His dad was waiting at the kitchen table when Jake got home, and Jake knew before he even set his backpack down that something had happened, because his dad had that specific stillness to him, the coiled kind, like a guy trying very hard not to look like he'd been sitting in that exact spot for the better part of an hour.

"What," Jake said.

Ben slid an envelope across the table without a word. University letterhead. A name Jake recognized from every single mock-draft conversation he and Cooper had ever had in the locker room, half-joking, half-not a real D1 program, the kind that actually put guys in the league, not just guys who talked about the league.

Jake picked it up. His hands were not entirely steady, which he noted with some embarrassment, given that he'd stared down slap shots from guys twice his size without so much as blinking.

"Dear Jake — Our staff has been following your development this season with real interest. We'd like to invite you to an official visit this spring, and would welcome the opportunity to discuss your future with our program."

It went on for another paragraph — coaching staff names, a scheduling contact, boilerplate about the university's academic offerings that nobody actually read but Jake had stopped absorbing words somewhere around official visit, his brain doing the thing where it tried to hold a piece of information and immediately started building an entire imagined future out of it before he'd even fully finished the sentence.

"Well?" Ben said. He hadn't moved. His voice had a carefulness to it that Jake recognized the sound of a man trying very hard not to let his own hope show too loudly, in case that jinxed something.

"They want a visit."

"I know what it says, Jake, I opened the mail." Ben said it without heat, but there was something underneath it, something bright and unguarded that Jake didn't get to see very often his dad, for one unfiltered second, looking like exactly what he was, which was a forty-four-year-old man watching his kid get handed the exact envelope he himself had never gotten to open. "This is it. This is the thing."

"It's just a visit, Dad."

"It's not just anything. Programs like that don't waste a letter on a kid they're not serious about." Ben stood, and for a second Jake thought he was going to hug him, which would have been so out of character it might have actually stopped Jake's heart but instead his dad just gripped his shoulder, hard, the same grip he'd used on Jake's shoulder pads a hundred times on the bench between periods. "You did this. You understand that? Nobody handed you this."

"You kind of handed me half of it."

"I handed you habits. You're the one who did the work." Ben's eyes were suspiciously bright, and he turned toward the counter fast enough that Jake understood he didn't want that seen too closely. "We should call your mom. She's gonna want to hear it from you, not from me texting her at work."

Jake nodded, and sat down at the table with the letter still in his hands, and felt — underneath the part of him that was undeniably, genuinely thrilled — a second, quieter thing arriving right alongside it, something that took him a minute to even correctly identify, because it didn't match the moment at all.

It felt like dread.

He turned the letter over once, like there might be different words on the back, words that explained why the biggest thing he'd ever wanted, the thing his whole life had apparently been pointed at since he was six years old on ice too big for him, had just landed in his hands and made his chest go tight in a way that had nothing to do with excitement.

He didn't say anything about that part. Not to his dad. Not that night.

--------------------

He ended up at Frost & Bean around eight, not because he needed coffee, but because his house had gotten too loud with his mom's phone calls to relatives and his dad already drafting a mental itinerary for the visit, and Jake had needed, badly, to be somewhere that wasn't that.

Ellie was behind the counter, and he clocked this before he'd even fully processed it Maya was sitting at the far end of the marble counter with her laptop open, a stack of photo prints beside her, hair up in a loose knot, completely unaware yet that he'd walked in.

"Thompson," Ellie said, in the specific tone of someone who had absolutely clocked something in his face and was choosing, for now, not to comment on it. "Usual?"

"Yeah. Thanks."

Maya looked up at her name being half-implied and caught his eye across the shop, and something in his face must have shown more than he meant it to, because her expression shifted almost immediately from casual acknowledgment to something more like actual attention.

"You look like you got hit by a truck," she said, as he came over, dropping onto the stool two down from hers, not quite next to her, not quite far either.

"Thanks."

"I mean it as a diagnostic question, not an insult. What happened?"

He almost deflected. That was the reflex humor first, always, the same move he'd been running his whole life whenever something actually mattered too much to say out loud. But something about the quiet of the shop, the late hour, the particular exhaustion sitting behind his ribs, made him just say it instead.

"Got a letter today. From a program. They want to do an official visit."

Maya's whole face changed — genuine, unguarded surprise, then something warmer right behind it. "Jake, that's... that's huge. That's the one, right? The one you and Cooper are always half-joking about?"

"Yeah."

"That's not a you look like you got hit by a truck face. That's a good thing."

"I know."

"You don't look like you know."

He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the counter, not drinking it, just needing something to do with his hands. "It is a good thing. It's the thing. It's everything my dad's wanted for me since I was, like, six."

"That's not the same question as whether it's what you want."

He looked up at her, a little startled, because that was that was exactly the sentence sitting underneath everything he hadn't said all night, and she'd just handed it to him plainly, without him having to dig for it at all.

"How'd you know that's the thing," he said quietly.

Maya shrugged, but it wasn't a dismissive shrug, it was the shrug of somebody who recognized a feeling from the inside. "Because I've got an application in my bag right now for something I've wanted my whole life, and I still haven't told my dad about it, and I think if you asked me why, I'd probably say a sentence pretty similar to whatever you're not saying right now."

They looked at each other for a second too long across the counter, in a coffee shop that smelled like burnt espresso and cinnamon, the streetlights outside doing their same orange-stripe thing across the floor, and for the first time since either of them could remember, the silence between them didn't feel like the comfortable, old-friends kind.

It felt like something new, standing right at the edge of being said, that neither of them was quite ready to say yet.

"Order up," Ellie called, entirely too loudly, sliding Jake's coffee across the counter with an expression that suggested she had, in fact, been watching that whole exchange with great interest. "Anything else, or should I leave you two to whatever that was?"

"Nothing," Maya said quickly, gathering her prints together with more focus than the task strictly required.

"Nothing," Jake agreed, a half-beat behind her.

Ellie looked between them, entirely unconvinced, and said nothing further which, from Ellie, was its own kind of loud.