by Chloe Liese
I recognize Ren’s posture as signifying defensiveness and immediately feel bad for opening my mouth. This happens sometimes. I ask a question, and people hear…more than a question. They hear criticism or judgment or teasing. I’ve given up trying to explain that my brain isn’t wired for that subtlety, that I couldn’t imply those kinds of layers of meaning if I wanted to, because one too many times, people haven’t believed me. They hear excuses, rather than context. So, I stopped trying, and told myself to quit caring when I’m misunderstood.
Now, only those closest to me are trusted with knowing the real reason Frankie has dubious success with sarcasm and picking up on jokes. Why she works resting bitch face and deadpan delivery, wears earplugs at the games, and is obsessively fascinated with Harry Potter, root beer gummies, NHL statistics, linguistics, knee socks, and only wearing gray scale clothing, among many other things…
Autism.
“Ooh!” Willa says. “I call dibs on the music.”
Ryder’s laugh-cough abruptly becomes a groan. “When Willa DJs, I wish my ear doodads didn’t work so well either—oof.”
Willa slugs him playfully in the stomach, then grasps his jaw and plants a firm kiss right on his mouth. “Asshole lumberjack. You’re just looking for a fight.”
He grins and wraps an arm around Willa as she drops back on her heels. “Maybe I am.”
They walk out ahead of us, waving goodnight to the rest of the team and their families. A balmy night breeze slips through the door as they head outside, and Ren steps close to me. Carefully, he unhooks my cane off the bar ledge and, bowing with a flourish, tips it toward me. “Your scepter, my liege.”
I feel a rare smile lift my cheeks. “I have heard rumors that you’re a closeted Shakespeare dork, Bergman.”
“They got it all wrong.” He straightens and smiles. “There’s nothing closeted about it.”
A surprised laugh spills out of me, and Ren’s grin widens, brighter than the California noontime sun. But for once, that sunshine smile doesn’t bother this grump one bit.
3
Ren
Playlist: “For the Time Being,” Erlend Øye
After walking Frankie to her door—complete with a reminder, in her deadpan delivery, that she’s a big girl who can make it from the car to her house—I hop back into the van. She locks herself into her canary-yellow bungalow on 133rd, and I see lights flicker on in the front room before her silhouette shortens as she walks deeper into the house.
Enjoying my super fancy rear-drive cameras, I pull out of Frankie’s driveway.
“Soooo.” Willa grins at me, batting her eyelashes. After Frankie vacated the shotgun seat of the van, Willa hugged her goodbye, hopped into it, and is now curled up, staring at me. Reaching for the volume dial, she turns down Busta Rhymes.
“Thank God,” Ryder mumbles from the backseat. He reattaches his implant transmitters and sits back on a sigh of relief.
“Renny Roo.” Willa leans closer. “We need to talk about Frankie.”
My hands death-grip the steering wheel. “What about her?”
“Uh, about how I like her. I want to keep her. I love her bone-dry humor, she knows everything possible about Harry Potter, including the latest horror that is its author’s Twitter drivel—”
“What did she do now?” Ryder asks from the backseat.
“Just showed that you can write a magical world brimming with complex, label-defying characters and still be a trans-exclusionary feminist disappointment.”
I sigh. “What’s wrong with people?”
Willa shrugs. “Who the fuck knows. Power corrupts. You’d think writing about it would have given her a little awareness.”
Ryder and I grunt in agreement.
“Back to Frankie,” Willa says. “Did you see how she demolished that burger at Louie’s? I want a woman in the family who destroys bar food like me. Freya’s too health-conscious, and Ziggy eats like a bird. So go back to that front door, find your inner Viking, throw her over your shoulder, and tell her she’s stuck with us.”
Willa and Ryder aren’t engaged, but it’s only a matter of time. She’s family now and is clearly making plans for in-laws down the line. Wiggling into a new position, she sets her feet on the dashboard and gives me a saucy grin.
I can’t afford to even indirectly acknowledge my interest in Frankie, because if I tell Willa, it’s telling the world, which is the last thing I want to do. I change the radio station, so we don’t miss bluegrass hour. “I don’t care how well-insured those feet are, Winnifred. Get them off my dash.”
Willa sighs and drops her feet. “Focus. Talk about Frankie.”
“I’m focusing. On the road.” Clicking on my right turn signal, I check my mirrors and turn off of Frankie’s street onto Hawthorne Boulevard.
“Dude,” Ryder huffs. “Left onto Hawthorne, then right onto Inglewood. It’s so much faster.”
I glare at him through the rearview mirror for a microsecond. “Will you ever not backseat drive?”
“Nope.” Willa grins over her shoulder at him. “When we first moved to Tacoma, we had so many fights because he was telling me my business from shotgun. Now I just let him drive and pretend he’s my chauffeur. It was that or dismember him.”
Ryder smirks. “I didn’t mind fighting in the car with you. It generally led to consequences I was more than happy to suffer.”
“Okay.” I throw up a hand. “This van is a G-rated space.”
That makes Willa snort-laugh. “I still can’t get over the fact that you bought a van.” She sighs happily. “It’s so you.”
“Between the guys on the team and Shakespeare Club, I’m always driving a handful of people somewhere. Plus, it has tons of room for my equipment—”
“And those babies you and Frankie are going to make.”
If I weren’t a freakishly coordinated athlete, I would have crashed the car.
“Willa,” Ryder says from the backseat. “Go easy on him.”
“Easy? I don’t know what that word means.” Poking my shoulder, Willa leans in. “So, tell me, how far do you two go back?”
“She started working for the Kings one year before me.”
“So, you’ve known her your entire professional career. Hm.” Willa narrows her eyes and strokes an invisible goatee. “Interesting.”
“Willa,” Ryder says warningly.
She makes a shooing motion at Ryder, as if he’s an annoying gnat, not a guy built like a linebacker who has no problem tickling her until she pees herself. “And have you or have you not refrained from dating since you signed with the Kings?” she prods me.
I studiously focus on the road. “Like most rookies, I’ve spent virtually every moment since I signed focused on my career.”
“But you’re not a rookie anymore.”
“Doesn’t mean I suddenly have time for romance.”
She scowls. “I don’t buy that. You got your kicks in college, didn’t you? You balanced the demands of Division I hockey, academics, and romance then.”
“I didn’t have a girlfriend in college.” Pressing a bunch of buttons without breaking my focus on the road, I finally find the one that lowers my window. Willa’s interrogation is making me sweat.
“That’s an evasion if I ever heard one. The point is you made time to date. Or, shall I say, for the benefit of your Renaissance romanticism, thou didst woo and court.”
I roll my eyes. “Forsooth, Wilhelmina, sometimes ‘I desire that we be better strangers.’”
Willa scrunches her nose. “Huh?” She works it out and smacks my chest. “Hey, that’s rude. And untrue. You love me. I’m your favorite almost-sister-in-law.”
“You’re my only almost-sister-in-law.”
“Renny Roo, I will not be distracted. You like her, don’t you? It’s why you haven’t dated anyone since you joined the team.”
I stare at the road. Why does it take this long to drive a few miles to Manhattan Beach?
Willa sighs dreamily. “
Gah. It’s romantic as hell. You’re pining for her.”
Ryder pats my shoulder sympathetically from the backseat. I don’t expect him to chime in. He’s the quietest of all of us, and when Willa’s on a roll, there’s no stopping her, anyway.
“Willis.” I glance over at her as we wait at the red light on Sepulveda. “Frankie is incredibly serious about her work. I’ve known her for three years, and in that entire time, it’s been clear that I’m just one of the guys to her, a part of the job. A job with clear rules discouraging staff-player dating, at that.”
Willa stares at me as the light turns green, which saves me from meeting those intense amber eyes. “Interesting answer.” She sits back and opens her window, letting in a new gust of warm spring air.
“Why was that interesting?” Ryder asks.
Willa grins. “Because it really wasn’t an answer at all.”
Unlike most of my peers—and trust me, they hate me for this—playing professional hockey wasn’t my childhood dream. I come from a big Swedish-American family of footballers, as Mom’s side of the family says in Europe, or here in the US, soccer players.
Ryder, who’s next in birth order after me, was playing for UCLA with deserved confidence he’d go pro after, but bacterial meningitis damaged his hearing and equilibrium so severely his freshman year, his career ended there. Freya played at UCLA, too, but hung up her cleats afterward, got her doctorate, and began practicing physical therapy. She didn’t love soccer enough to make it her life, she said. Axel, my older brother, kept up with it through high school and still enjoys playing on a competitive co-ed league.
My two younger brothers, Viggo and Oliver, are both excellent, but only Oliver is playing college level, while Viggo decided not to go to college and now plays competitive rec like Axel. The baby in our family, Ziggy, is eons beyond her high school peers’ skill level and plays for the U-20 Women’s National Team. She’s determined to be on the Women’s Olympic Team one day, and if I doubted her ability—which I don’t—just her persevering nature would convince me that she’ll get there.
As for me, I played and liked soccer. I was good at it. But I never loved it. When I hit high school, I wasn’t close with anyone on the soccer team, and while I excelled at goalie, my heart wasn’t in it. I was a recent transplant from Washington State. I didn’t fit in with the Cali boys, this gangly, dorky, six-foot ginger who liked poetry and live theater, who didn’t feel comfortable talking about girls the way the other guys did, who hated the petty power games and awful way guys treated each other in the locker room and hallways.
During my sophomore year, at some party my parents were hosting, my dad’s colleague took a look at me, apparently saw potential, and asked if I was interested in trying hockey. In his downtime, Dr. Evans coached a league of guys my age and said he’d give me personal lessons, see if I liked it.
There was grace and fluidity to hockey that I’d been missing in soccer, that unfurled inside me the moment I laced up a pair of skates and took to the ice. When I got that stick in my hand, the cool silence of a rink to myself, the puck in front of me, it was like I’d finally found my natural habitat. I came alive skating, playing hockey. I still do.
Every day I pinch myself that this is my job. That I get paid to play a game I love, to be a role model to little kids, and to contribute to my community. I also pinch myself that I get to see Frankie every day I work.
She’s one of the first people I met when I signed. After meetings running through legalese and expectations and schedule and logistics, there was Frankie in the doorway, strutting in with a smoke-colored cane and fresh Nikes in the team’s colors. Looking at her, I felt something slam inside my chest as air rushed out of me, more brutal than any check against the boards.
She sat down across from me, explaining what I’d need to do to cultivate my social media presence, how to tweet and post on Instagram, how to engage, how to complement what she did during practices and games.
My favorite moment was when she gave me a critical once-over and said, “I apologize in advance that I have to say this, but if you post a dick pic on any social media platform or send one to any woman’s inbox, when I’m through with you, you won’t have a dick to pic anymore. Get my meaning?”
She was courteous and entirely professional after that, like she hadn’t just threatened to castrate me, albeit for good reason. I remember trying to listen to what she was saying while struggling not to stare at her mouth. I still struggle with that.
The door to the treatment room swings open, followed by a familiar, “Ren Zenzero.” ZENzehrro is how Frankie says it.
My head snaps up from the massage table. I have no idea why she calls me that. I know it sounds Italian, and I’ve almost googled it a dozen times, but I’m kind of scared to find out what it means. I just know when she uses the word, it rolls off her tongue in a way that makes my whole body tighten, the hair on my neck and arms stands on end. It sounds effortless and emphatic, only further evidence that Frankie is very much Italian, as if her name wasn’t a dead giveaway.
Francesca Zeferino. Though if you call her anything other than Frank or Frankie, she’ll twist your nipple until you burst into tears. Her hair is a sheet of coffee-colored silk that falls halfway down her back. She has forever golden skin that glows like she’s lit from within, big hazel eyes, thick dark lashes, rosy lips, and a ridiculously deep dimple in her left cheek.
Frankie stops at the side of the massage table, lifts her cane, and smacks my ass with it.
“Ow!” I yelp.
John, one of our trainers, is used to Frankie’s authoritarian approach with players. He lifts his hands and backs away. “Just holler when she’s done beating you.”
I stare up at Frankie. “What the heck was that for?”
She scowls. “Your Shakespeare reading club is attending en masse tomorrow. I did not know about this.”
My stomach drops. That was not supposed to get out. A furious blush crawls up my throat to my cheeks. This is one of the disadvantages of having reddish hair. Dad and Ziggy, as the fellow gingers in the family, empathize. You can’t hide your emotions to save your life—you wear them on your skin.
I swallow nervously and slowly sit up. “Who told you that?”
“That is irrelevant.” Frankie leans on her cane and gives me a stern glare. “This was almost a huge missed opportunity. What were you thinking, keeping it from me? Do you know how many ideas I have? In the five minutes since I’ve known, I already—”
“Frankie.” I lean forward, elbows on my knees. With her height, and because she’s right next to the bench, we’re eye to eye, our noses nearly touching.
For just a second, her eyes lock with mine, slivers of bronze and emerald disappearing as her pupils expand. She blinks, takes a step back, and clears her throat. “What?”
“Frankie, that part of my world…it’s private.”
“Why?” She tips her head like I’m genuinely confusing her. Like she doesn’t understand the discrepancy most people would see between who I am here—former Rookie of the Year, alternate captain, Viking on ice—and the part of me that still nerds out on Shakespeare and poetry readings.
“I’m not ashamed of them or my interests, but some of those guys, they’re not into the camera and the spotlight. They’re dorks like me, who find any kind of undue attention too reminiscent of the kind of attention they got in the past.”
Frankie steps closer. “Zenzero, are you telling me that you were a nerd in high school? That you had dorky friends?”
“Yes.”
She gives me a rare smile, and the dimple pops out. God help me, not the dimple right now.
“Are you saying…” Her eyes search mine. “Are you serious? You? You were teased in high school? You were—”
“A misfit. Yeah. And not all of my Shakespeare Club necessarily moved out of that demographic. I don’t want to make them uncomfortable, okay?”
Frankie covers her mouth. “Okay.” It comes out muffled.
“Are you laughing at me?”
She shakes her head. “I’m dying of adorkableness.” At least that’s what I think she mumbles.
I don’t know whether to be offended or amused. “Frankie, how long have you known me? Do I not have weirdsmobile written across my forehead?”
She snorts behind her hand. Another shake of her head.
“Wow. For your job relying entirely on social astuteness, you missed the signs big-time.”
That makes her stop laughing. Her hand falls away. “Sometimes…” She swallows and twists her fingers around a necklace she nearly always wears. It has metal shapes and charms on it that she slips her fingers through, twists and rolls and spins. She does it often, like it soothes her.
“Sometimes I misread people,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t laughing at you. It was a pleasant surprise. I thought the Shakespeare stuff was…an eccentricity. You telling me that this runs much deeper, I’ll respect that it’s private.”
She avoids my eyes, focuses on a piece of lint on her sleeve, and brushes it away.
There’s incongruence between her words and her appearance right now. She sounds fine, but she looks like I just yanked the rug out from underneath her. I feel simultaneously guilty and curious. What is she hiding?
I make to stand, but Frankie sets her hand on my chest and pushes me back with surprising strength. “Back to Shakespeare Club,” she says. “The dork years. I need details. I need so many details—”
“Frank the Crank.” Matt strolls into the treatment room and walks up to her, blatantly interrupting us and ignoring me. He sticks out his hand. “I’ve come to kiss ass and say sorry.”
Rage rolls through me. I still want to throttle him until his creepy brown eyes pop out of his head for what a jerk he was to her at Louie’s.
“Water under the bridge,” she tells him. Frankie takes his hand and flinches as he squeezes too hard.
Andy and Kris stroll in, breaking the tension of the moment. Matt releases her hand, just as Kris pulls the elastic on Matt’s shorts and releases it with a snap.
