“Of course.”
“Done.”
We finish up our game, sneak around the guy who wanted to show us pictures of his ceramic clown collection—hello, childhood nightmares—and head for the door.
“If Nick pulled his head out of his ass and realized he loves you, would you take him back?” Maren asks nonchalantly, as though she’s not inspiring that stupid hope that pokes its head up like a baby bunny out of a fluffy blanket in spring.
“Why would you say that?”
She eyes me.
I eye her back, but harder, which means I’m totally going to win, because none of my friends can stand it when I’m not sweet and congenial.
She totally breaks first and looks away while we troop into the parking garage. “It’s just—he doesn’t apologize. Ever. To anyone. And he keeps sending you presents. And calling. And putting in effort. Nick doesn’t do effort. And if this season is any indication, he’s about done with hockey. Because it would be too much work to get better.”
“That’s not fair. He works hard.”
“Doing the bare minimum. He’s getting old for a goalie. He can’t skate by on natural talent anymore.”
“Hockey is his life. He’s not going to fade into obscurity because he’s getting older.”
I’m not arguing because I think she’s wrong. Not exactly, I mean.
It’s more that if I start to consider that Nick could be approaching retirement, and if he’s realizing it too, he’ll need something in his life to fill the void.
And maybe that’ll mean he’s finally ready to settle down.
But if I let myself think there’s hope, then I’ll quit looking for someone else. I’ll put my own dreams of a family on hold, and he’ll stay in the league another five or six years, and I’ll be approaching forty before we have any babies.
I know it’s not trendy or modern city woman-ish or whatever to want babies, but it’s biological to want to belong, to want family, and I refuse to apologize for wanting something beyond my career. And my pets. And my friends.
And now I feel guilty for wanting more when I actually have a really good life.
Maren shakes her head. “This would be so much easier if there were some legitimately interesting men in this dating pool.”
“You don’t know anyone at work?” I ask her.
“Nope.”
I mentally run through my patient list. Just because I don’t want to date someone who brings their pets to the clinic doesn’t mean I couldn’t set Maren up.
But the only person coming to mind is a client with a particularly testy cat, and Maren’s allergic.
A red sports car screeches to a halt next to Maren’s Bolt. The driver rolls down his window, whistles, and then flicks his tongue at us.
“Dude, you’ve got broccoli stuck in your teeth,” Maren says.
His eyes go wide and he flings himself back in the car to check himself out in the mirror.
She passes her Bolt and heads down the aisle, possibly on her way to pretending like the jacked-up truck is hers, but more likely, just hoping the dick will get bored before we head back inside.
Felicity dated enough weirdos before Ares that we all got a little paranoid about even letting guys know what kind of car we drive.
Luckily, this guy actually does have something stuck in his teeth, so he speeds off before we’re more than two cars past Maren’s.
“I’m getting more serious about that domestic partners thing,” she tells me.
I squeeze her hand. “So long as you don’t sing in the shower.”
We both laugh, but I’m not feeling all that light-hearted.
The sad truth is, I miss Nick.
And hearing the hesitation in his voice tonight—I think he misses me too.
But how do you find forever with a guy who doesn’t even know it’s an option?
We climb into Maren’s car, and she starts the electric engine. “You going to the game Friday night?” she asks me.
“I…kinda have really great tickets,” I admit. “You want them?”
She studies me with a wry smile. “How many tickets?”
“Four.”
I have thirty sets of four tickets to Thrusters games. All courtesy of Nick.
All practically front-row.
He had to have paid a fortune to resellers to get them. It would be absolutely shitty of me to not make sure they got used.
“How great?” Maren asks.
“Close enough to smell their blood in a fight.”
She studies me for a minute before she turns her attention to backing out of the parking spot. “I have not-so-great tickets. What say you give yours to Muffy and your Aunt Hilda and those two guys you met at the wedding the other night, and we hang out in the nosebleed section?”
I contemplate the conversation between Muffy, Aunt Hilda, Josh, and Sean, and then I contemplate Nick watching it all, since the seats he got are practically extensions of the Thrusters’ bench, and I crack up. “I love you,” I tell Maren.
She smiles. “May we someday find men who love us as much as we love each other.”
“Are you sure that’s not aiming a little too high?”
“Have you seen the way Ares looks at Felicity?”
I sag in my seat, because yeah, I have.
And I’ve seen the way she looks at him.
And even if Nick does miss me, I can’t see him ever falling so desperately in love with me that he ever thinks of me before hockey.
“Maybe we’re looking too hard,” I say quietly.
“Or maybe we’re not looking hard enough.”
Or maybe we’re just not the kind of women who inspire men to fall that hard.
Maybe I should settle for being number two in Nick’s life.
It’s not like I’m going to get a better offer.
Twenty-Three
Nick
Losing sucks.
Losing a home game on a Friday night after losing a game on the road Thursday night sucks worse.
The worst part, though?
It’s my fucking fault again. We were up by one with four minutes left on the clock tonight. Want to guess what happened?
I happened.
I fucking happened.
“Shake it off, Murphy,” Zeus says as we head out of the dressing room after the reporters have finally cleared out. “Shit happens. We’ll get ‘em next time.”
Says the guy who did everything short of blocking the shots for me. Dude’s sporting a busted cheek and probably a few bruises in places he won’t talk about.
“Yeah,” I grunt.
Ares claps me on the shoulder. He’s in a purple T-shirt with a cartoon dinosaur trying to grab its own tail with its short little front legs, and a message that says to Always Tail Your Keep Up.
Dude has the weirdest wardrobe, but Felicity digs it, so whatever.
“Let it go,” he tells me.
On cue, the entire offensive line bursts into that song that gets stuck in my head for days on end.
When you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, so I sing along louder than all the rest until Coach pops his head out into the hall and threatens to institute mandatory cartoon princess movie night once a week if we don’t find better music.
Dude’s pretty relaxed most of the time, but his daughters’ taste in movies gets on his nerves sometimes.
We all split as we hit the parking garage, but Lavoie catches up with me before I get to my Jeep. “Grab a drink?” he asks.
No, I don’t want to grab a drink. I want to go home, to my condo, and text a friend who’ll read my mood and suggest a movie and then randomly whisper your feet are prettier than daisies in a garbage disposal because she has this hilariously twisted sense of humor that catches you totally off-guard just when you need a distraction from yourself.
But I don’t have a fucking friend tonight, because she’s ignoring my texts and calls again, and she wasn’t sitting in the seats I got her, but her cousin and her aunt were.
Nor do I have a home, unless you count my parents’ basement as home. And I haven’t had any luck in getting any leads on new apartments downtown either.
My real estate agent tells me I’ve been blacklisted. It’s going to take a fucking attorney to get me a place downtown.
“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s get a drink.”
Jaeger, Klein, Sokolov, and The Bear catch up to us, and we book two Lyfts to get the four blocks to Chester Green’s.
We could walk, but it’s not always safe on game night.
Win or lose.
The first thing I see when I walk into Chester Green’s is Kami. She’s bent over laughing at something, her brown sugar hair tied up in a messy bun, simple diamonds sparkling in her ears, a Thrusters jersey swallowing her slender shoulders. She’s sitting between her cousin and Maren at the round gold couch in the back corner. Two guys are smushed into either end, all vying for her attention with blatant lust in their eyes.
I swear the one in the Thrusty shirt is drooling.
My chest clenches like it’s a gong taking a bruising from a hammer.
The cousin. Muffy.
I need to pay her a visit.
Find out what it’ll cost me to get her to set me up on a date with Kami.
Lavoie grabs me by the back of the shirt and hauls me down the bar to where a half-dozen bunnies are already making room for us. We wade into the crowd, and the six of us are suddenly separated by a sea of perfume and jerseys so small, they’d fit better on toddlers than on full-figured women.
“Hey, honey.” A bottle blonde with a plunging V-neck pushes her boobs to my bicep. “Tough break tonight. You’ll get ‘em next time. I’m Anni with an I. Want me to make it all better?”
“I’ll help too,” a redhead says in a throaty voice on my other side, also now under boob attack, though so is her Thrusters’ shirt, which looks like it might pop under the strain of being too small to contain her knockers. “I’m Jami with an I and a heart for a dot.”
“I have a heart too.” Anni winks. “Two, but you can only see one if we go somewhere private.”