Chapter 248 April Drake

Chapter 248 April Drake
APRIL'S POV
There's a form sitting open on my laptop at home, and one field on it is still empty. Has been for three days now.
The rest of it only took twenty minutes — name, school, availability, two clips, a reference from the office. Then that last box. It wants to know how I want to be credited on air. I swear I've looked at that box more than I've looked at anything else all week.
At ten past seven my phone lit up. I'm outside.
Asher was out of the car before I even made it down the path. He came around, pulled the passenger door open, and just stood there holding it.
"I can still open doors."
"I know." He kept his hand on it. "Let me anyway."
His eyes dropped to my stomach as I passed him and came back up again just as fast. He didn't say a word about it. His face didn't do anything.
Everyone else I know has taken on a look these days, and there are afternoons I'd rather have a stranger stare at me than have somebody who loves me go gentle like that.
We talked about nothing the whole way there. His game over the weekend. Something Ethan had said on the phone that made no sense to either one of us. That road that's been closed since November for work neither of us has ever once seen anybody actually doing.
We left the subject of what we are alone completely.
He'd picked somewhere that wasn't a romantic restaurant, and I could tell how far out of his way he'd gone just to make sure of that. Wooden tables. A plain menu. Two people going back and forth over a check at the far end.
Crossing the room he stayed half a step behind me, one hand hovering near my back without ever landing on it. That's been going on a month now. I've never once mentioned it.
He pulled my chair out for me. I sat.
"Are you hungry?"
"I've been hungry every thirty minutes since October."
"So that's a yes."
"That's a very complicated yes."
Before the food even came he asked about the appointment, and he knew exactly when the next one was without checking a single thing.
"You remembered."
"Of course I remembered."
I sat there looking at a menu I'd already ordered from. It's just a date saved on a phone. Shouldn't be such a big thing. But this is the man who used to know exactly how I took my coffee, and there were four whole months in the middle of everything where I'd have sworn he'd lost every small fact he ever had about me.
So the offer came up. Nobody else even knows about it yet.
Sideline work for the regional broadcast. Twelve games this fall, live, a microphone, my own name attached to it. A long way up from cutting promos in a media office.
"They emailed last week. They want an answer in four days."
"Do you want it?"
"Yes."
"Then that's your answer. The rest is admin."
"You make everything sound simple."
"It isn't simple. I think you can do difficult things." He set his fork down. "You've done them all year and nobody's handed you a microphone for it."
That caught me somewhere I hadn't braced for. For a few seconds there was nothing in the whole world but my plate.
The season felt like safer ground, so I asked about that instead. Coward's move. He let me get away with it.
Most of it was about the letter stitched on his jersey. Media before every single game. A room he has to hold together. A kid on his wing who's stopped sleeping and won't say why.
He handed me all of it flat, which is just how he talks about anything that actually costs him something.
My foot found his shin under the table.
"You're allowed a life outside hockey."
"You're one to talk."
"I'm working on it."
"So am I," Asher said, and neither one of us looked away a second longer than we should have.
Then he launched into an impression of a teammate trying to explain a recipe. It was terrible, and he committed to it completely, and I laughed for real — the ugly laugh, out loud, hand over my face, people at the next table turning to look.
"Stop."
"You laughed."
"Because you're ridiculous."
"You used to like that about me."
He said it easy as anything. Then the sentence just sat there between us, and neither of us had anywhere to put it.
"I still do," I said.
Asher looked right at me and gave me nothing back.
"What."
"Nothing."
"You're looking at me."
"I know," he said, and picked his fork back up.
Walking out, he kept himself to my pace without ever making it obvious he'd slowed down for me.
Outside, it was cold enough that my hand went under my stomach on the step. His arm was already out before I'd even finished the movement. I took it. Our shoulders knocked together twice crossing the lot, and neither of us moved away.
At the car he opened the door again. I stopped with my hand flat on the roof.
"Tonight was good."
"It was."
"Even though it wasn't a date."
"Especially because it wasn't a date," Asher said.
"That is the strangest possible answer."
"I've got a lot of those."
I should have just gotten in the car. Instead I stood there in a coat that doesn't close anymore and told him exactly what I'd been leaving in that empty box on the form.
"There's a field on the application. It asks what name goes on air."
"Right."
"I put April Drake."
He took it without so much as a flicker, and that's how I knew.
"It's your name."
"Asher."
"It's your name. You don't owe me a conversation about your own name."
"Ask me why."
His hand stayed right on top of the door. Then he asked me why.
"Because there are four hundred comments under a video of me, and Drake is the name sitting on all of them. It's had my name on it since November. It survived that." I had to stop for a second. "Whatever they do to me for the next ten years, they'll do it to that name, and that name can take it. Yours didn't do anything to deserve that. I'm not handing it over to them."
Asher took a long moment with that.
Then he shut the passenger door with me still standing outside it. He hasn't done that once in six years. Then he stepped in front of me right there in the middle of a wet parking lot, in the middle of his season.
"Say the other one."
"That isn't what I—"
"You said it to a girl behind a desk in a shop. I was standing two steps back." His voice never moved from where it was. "Say it to me once and I'll never bring it up again."
A car alarm was going off somewhere behind the building. It had been going the entire time we were inside.
"Kane," I said.
Asher shut his eyes. That was all he did.
"Again."
"No."
"April."
"No," I said. "You got one."
He took his keys off my counter and just stood there holding them, going nowhere.