The lake is one of the town's principal attractions.

It makes sense. Lake City is a tourist winter wonderland. People come here for the ski lanes, the snowy streets, the hot chocolate and the frozen lake by the resort. 

The Ice Arenas are a place of hard work and focus, for hockey players and figure skaters to practice. Ludic visits are obviously allowed, but only on free time slots. Bu the lake belongs to everyone. Tourists and locals alike, athletes and first-timers — they are all welcome.

Usually, the place is packed, crammed along the edges with those too hesitant to venture off to the middle. Especially in the winter. But on the first hour of the first day of the new year, it's deserted.

Except for us.

I spend New Year's Eve with my family and most of my friends every year. My parents throw this party for their inner circle at our house, and their friends-slash-business partners all come. That includes the Pruitts, the Sullyvans and the Cabots. Meaning the only one of my friends that is left out is Chloe.

My parents did invite the Wongs for the first couple of years after we became skating partners, but they soon decided to start politely declining, claiming they appreciated smaller and more intimate celebrations for the holiday. My parents still extend the invitation every year, out of politeness, with absolutely no resentment when they don't come.

The Colemans and the Lowells also come every year, along with a handful of other families whose kids hang around the rink. It's Lake City, after all. Not much to do other than skate, ski and play hockey.

Every year, there is champagne and cheerful conversation. My sister exiled herself in her room with her friends for most of it, just as my friends and I did when we were their age. Now, we are expected to mingle, smile, make conversation, but mostly answer questions about what we want for the future — are we going to college, which school do we have in mind, how are practices going, is skating really what I want to do, do I really think I can make it to the Olympics, how long do I think it will take...

We are only required to stay until midnight, though. As soon as the ball drops and the new year is on us, we are allowed to go out. 

That's all of us. The current Brunson High students and the ones who came home for the holidays. Tonight, Nat's brother Nathan, back from Georgetown, was the main supplier of alcohol, and I am actually surprised at how little it took for everyone to get beyond tipsy.

Maybe they were already half-drunk on something else. The giddiness of the new year. It's a strange and wonderful kind of intoxication. All the mistakes from two thousand and twenty are behind us and ahead stand three hundred and sixty five brand new chances to fuck up. Far too tempting of an opportunity to wait. Especially for Mack, judging by the way she was really going for it with Trey Coleman when I sneaked away from the group.

I was surprised at how fast Eli texted me back too.

I reached out to him on a whim. I almost expected him to ignore my text. But he really didn't, and it took almost no convincing from my part to get him to meet me at the lake.

It is clear the moment I see him arrive, with his skates hanging from his shoulders, that he walked the whole way from west Brunson. His cheeks are flushed, his nose tinged the most adorable shade of pink, hands stuffed aggressively in the pockets of his bulky zipped-up jacket, arms tightly pressed into his sides as though to close in the heat. Only the tips of his brown hair peek out from the grey beanie on his head, pulled down to cover as much of his ears as possible.

Judging by how much that alone turns me on, I might be a little too drunk on the new year as well.

There are no greetings between us. We don't do that. We put our skates on in silence too.

I watch him skate lazily around the lake for a while. He stops looking so cold after a while, letting his gloved hands slip off his pockets and relaxing the tension around his arms and shoulders, both made bulkier by the thick parka he's wearing.

I am surprised to admit I would kind of give a whole month's wage to know what he's thinking right now. Eli just has one of these closed-up, impenetrable expressions. Like his mind is a castle, with a vastness of halls and rooms inside, all tucked away behind huge stone walls no one can break through. And I want to break through. I want to invade the privacy of his thoughts and know what goes through his head when he worries about what others say, and what others think. I want to know whether he cares about what I think.

At some point, I stop moving to openly stare. And I don't even notice it. But Eli does and he skates closer, face smoothed into an inscrutable mask.

"Made any good New Year's resolutions?" I ask.

"Not much of a resolution kind of guy."

"Me neither," I say. "No promise is as easy to break as the ones you make to yourself."

For a fraction of a second, he almost smiles. It makes me want to know what's on his mind.

Jesus. Where is all this desperation coming from? I never obsessed about someone else's thoughts so badly, not even my friends. It's tragically embarrassing.

"Did you have to sneak away from a full house to come here?"

Eli eyes me out of the corner of his eye, hands sliding back into his pockets. "Not really," he says. And then, after a while, "Just my brother and me."

"Oh."

Shit. I didn't even stop to consider that. I heard Eli's hockey friends at The Lodge talking about going out on Christmas day, and someone mentioned Eli spending Christmas Eve with Owen Holmes. The possibility of the Blake brothers spending New Year's all alone didn't even cross my mind.

"I'm sorry."

Eli gives me this sort of indecipherable look. Or maybe I'm just astonishingly bad at deciphering his looks. 

"For what?" He asks.

"Making this incredibly awkward."

He shrugs. "It's fine."

"Seems like what you'd say if it really wasn't fine at all."

Eli shrugs again, but this time he kind of smiles. It's not a happy smile, though. "It's just weird."

"What is?"

"The holiday season." He doesn't look at me as he says that, only down at the ice beneath the blades on his feet. "Without my parents," he adds in a murmur.

I am quiet for a while. Because what the hell do I say to that?

Surprisingly, Eli talks again before I have to figure it out.

"My mom loved this season," he says. "She was big on holidays. And nothing made my dad happier than seeing her happy." His voice is even and quiet, but clear and intentional. And I'm almost a little bit dazed. Like I don't want to move, so as not to scare him into silence.

"The simplest thing," Eli continues slowly, "like buying some crappy ginger-flavored cookies, would make her smile. It got to a point where the three of us — my dad, Elliott and me — would almost kind of compete to see who could make her happier."

There's a long pause in which I have no idea what to say again. But for once in my life it feels like it's not my place to fill this silence.

Eli kind of skims away from me, and I don't know if I should follow him, but he eventually skates back in my direction. He lets our eyes meet for the shortest of moments before looking away. 

"It's just weird without them," he says, voice sounding a little more strained.

I keep my eyes on him, waiting for him to establish the eye contact again. Yet, somehow, I'm still surprised when he does.

"It's like we built our whole family traditions around my mom. Without—" his voice breaks just the slightest bit, making it all the easier for both of us go pretend we don't notice it, "—them, it feels like... I don't know. It's just fucking weird."

I swallow down on an empty throat, which is feeling oddly swollen and dry.

"Did you at least spend a nice time with your brother at home?" I ask, hesitantly.

"He was working today."

"Oh."

Eli looks at me. "I think it's weird for him too." He shrugs. "Sometimes it's less weird if we're not around each other."

I don't even know what to fucking say to that. Which is beyond distressing. When did this start happening to me? It's me, for Heaven's sake! I always have the perfect witty, stupid, or inappropriate thing to say.

Eli's dry laugh cuts through the silence. "Sorry. That was really grim." His eyes are back on the ice.

"It's fine," I say. His eyes don't lift to meet mine. "I just... wish I knew what to say to you."

Eli looks up then. And, God, when did I start getting so taken by sudden eye contact?

"Nobody knows what to say," he mutters.

I clear my throat. "Do you have any other family?"

Was that remotely subtle as a topic change? I don't think so. Does Eli care? I hope not.

He shakes his head. "My dad's parents died before I was born. My mom only had her mother, and she passed a couple of years before my parents. Neither of them had any siblings."

"My father's also a single child," I say. "My mom's got a sister and a brother. And, like, a shit tone of cousins and relatives — honestly I think they just call everyone with a mild blood relation a cousin in Guatemala. Or maybe it's just my mother's family."

I'm rambling. Am I rambling? I feel like I'm rambling.

But Eli is smiling. Softly, almost imperceptibly. 

"Do you keep in touch with all those cousins?"

"Oh, yeah. They video chat a lot. It's actually terrible, because the connection is always shit, they always look grainy as fuck, and everybody talks at the same time, and half the family is called Juan-Something — which should feel racist to say, but it's true, and I think it's like a family name or something — so I guess I'm lucky my name isn't Juan-Liam."

That was definitely rambling. And I actually said to a guy who has no family besides his one brother that keeping in touch with my big family is 'actually terrible'. Mortification alone should be enough to shut me up. But mortification doesn't settle in until I stop talking, and I guess I'm just out of control at this point.

"My mom's the only one who knows the names of everyone. Even my grandmother is starting to mix people as they keep multiplying, and that's a lot. Just last year, I think I got three new cousins."

Eli snorts.

I squeeze my eyes shut, letting my head tilt back. "That was bad. You didn't need to hear all that. You probably don't care."

"I rarely do, when you're talking," Eli says softly, but I know it's a joke. 

At the same time, I feel bad for nervously switching the topic. It just hits me now that Eli doesn't talk about his family at all, even with his friends from what I gathered, but he did mention it now. And maybe I should have sucked up my own discomfort and let him keep talking. Can I go back now?

I can definitely try.

"Do you miss them?"

Eli looks at me, almost like he didn't get the question at first. Then he shrugs.

I wince. "That was a really stupid question." I fight the urge to apologize again. "I bet you get a lot of those."

"Probably would, if people didn't tiptoe around the topic so much."

"For the record, because I got a feeling I'm past trying to be subtle, I'm trying my best not to tiptoe, but I think I'm doing an epic mess."

Eli's smile almost feels kind of genuine. "It's okay. I don't know what to say either. Guess that's why people tiptoe."

"Should I awkwardly change the topic again and ramble some more about my mother's relatives?" I ask, circling around him and spinning to a stop in front of him.

"Definitely not."

"Yeah," I laugh. "Had the feeling that was the wrong move. Bragging about my big, prosperous family was probably a little too in-your-face, right?"

"Not really," he murmurs. "You shouldn't feel guilty for having a family." He shurgs. Again. "Dean and Owen get weird about that too sometimes. It makes me feel worse. Like I should avoid reminders that my parents are gone, so you don't feel guilty that yours aren't."

He looks at me, l waiting for a reply.

I bite down on my bottom lip, letting out a slow breath. "I can't even imagine... losing both," I confess.

That's why it's so hard to know what to say, and what to do, and how to be around Eli when we're talking about this. I never lost my parents. They're both perfectly alive and sound of health, totally at my disposal to complain about all the unbearable ways they just love me too much. How can I be understanding of something I don't think I could possibly understand, even if I wanted to?

Eli is silent for long enough that I start to believe he won't reply. But he does.

"At first it didn't feel completely real," he says. "Because my brother didn't have the means to keep me, they sent me to that foster family in Orofino. I knew why I was there, but not being in Brunson made it... easier to ignore, I guess."

"What were they like? Your first foster family?"

"Fine." Eli shrugs, and I'm starting to get the idea that's a nervous reflex. "They had a daughter a few years younger, but she was really shy around me. I wasn't really chatty either. Just kind of spent that summer in my room. They left me alone most of the time. Even let me keep a few clothes before Owen's parents took me in for the school year."

"Did your foster family know about the car crash?" I realize after asking that out loud that I only assumed it was a car crash, because that was the most popular story among all the rumors. "It was... a car crash, right?"

Eli purses his lips, looking down. "Yeah. They went out to dinner in Moscow. Some car hit them from the side, pushed them off the road."

I can't even begin to imagine that. Having my parents leave one night, happy and clueless, to have dinner together outside of town. Then have my whole life change because, what, someone texted behind the wheel?

"Do you know who it was? The other driver?"

He shrugs again, and it's especially stiff and jerky this time. "Maybe a drunk driver... or maybe just a really shitty one... Knowing who was in the other car isn't going to bring my parents back, so who the fuck cares."

His words are hostile, but his tone doesn't rise or fall. It throws me off in a strange way.

"I thought maybe you would," I admit softly. "In your place I think I'd want to know what happened. Understand..."

"Whatever. They're dead, and they'll stay dead."

He sounds so melancholic I don't even know what to do with it. I think maybe, if he had snapped or raised his voice, I could have apologized and moved on. But that tone leaves a disconcerting aftertaste.

And I know I shouldn't do what I'm about to do now, even though that's the sort of pattern the two of us have been establishing. But there's this silence now. And this time I don't know how to let it hang in the air comfortably. So I lean in to put our lips together.

Eli jerks away tensely almost immediately. His eyes do a quick take around the lake to see we are still alone, covered in the near dark. I can feel him relax then, only partially. And when I lean in again, he lets me kiss him, so we can both ignore the thing we don't know how to talk through.

***

I imagine the people who've been dying to know more about Eli's background enjoyed this chapter...

... and I imagined the ones that wanted healthy, wholesome bonding might have had some issues.

I did warn this wasn't going to be like the relationship in Heart and Soul!

How do you feel about the communication between these two so far? And Eli's story? (I know some of you have felt deprived in that area!!) What about the way Liam handled this conversation?

If you liked this chapter, please consider voting or commenting. As always, thank you so much for reading!