“I’m not jealous,” he said, though he could admit to himself that he definitely was a little bit. “I just wish you would’ve told me you were going to be around.”
“I’m here now,” she said, looking up at him. Her eyes caught the waning sunlight and glowed. “Isn’t that enough?”
He nodded, face splitting in a grin. “Absolutely.”
She beamed back. “Good.”
“So, did you sign the guy?”
She nodded, satisfaction at a job well done lighting her face. “I have to bring him the contract in the morning.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “Proud of you.”
“Thank you,” she said, smile turning shy.
A moment later, the pager buzzed in her hands.
Once they were seated, drinks in front of them and food ordered, Mitch asked, “How did you even end up as a headhunter anyway?”
Lexie laughed, a little incredulously. “I’m still not entirely sure, to be honest. I have a business degree from Michigan State. At the start of my last semester of school, there was this big job fair they held at the Breslin Center that Amelia and I both attended. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with my life at that point. I just knew, since I had grown up with parents who were venture capitalists, that a business degree made a lot of sense. I just never really planned for what I would do once I got it.”
“You’ve mentioned before that you moved around a lot,” Mitch said. “That had to be hard.”
Lexie waved him off. “It was, but that’s not the point of this story. The point is, there was an employment recruitment company recruiting employees—trust me, the irony of that statement is not lost on me—and I thought, headhunting? Why the fuck not? So I interviewed a few days later and they hired me on the spot. I actually started working for them before I even graduated. Turns out I’m really good at it.”
“That doesn’t surprise me one bit,” Mitch told her. “How did that all work while you were still in school?”
“There was a woman that took me under her wing. Taught me everything she knows. During the week, I would go to classes, study, and work at their office in Lansing. Pushing paper and answering phones. That type of bullshit. Paying my dues. Then on the weekends, we’d jet across the country.”
“Didn’t that get stressful? Trying to balance all of that?”
She shook her head vehemently and took a long swallow of her beer. “I was made for this kind of lifestyle,” she told him.
“In what way?”
“I grew up traveling constantly, for starters,” she said. “And I don’t like being stuck in one place for too long. It makes my skin itch.”
Mitch had often experienced that same sensation, and he told her so.
“What was your childhood like?” She asked.
Not great,he wanted to tell her. Instead, he said, “It was okay. I grew up in Georgia, near the Florida state line. My parents had me young, so my dad worked while my mom stayed home with me. When I was old enough to start school, she started taking classes at the local community college. She got her accounting degree, and now owns her own accounting firm in Ann Arbor.”
He couldn’t, wouldn’t, tell Lexie about those dark years when his father chose to drink away their money instead of taking care of his wife and son. When their neighbors would take pity on him and his mom and invite them over for a warm, home-cooked meal. How embarrassing that had been for him.
How his father would beat up on him, and when Mitch got big enough to start hitting back, he threatened his mother to keep Mitch in line.
“How did you end up in Michigan, then?” Lexie asked.
This wasn’t a conversation he was prepared to have with her tonight. It brought up far too many bad memories.
If he hadn’t been picked up by the US National Team Development Program in Ann Arbor when he turned fifteen, if he and his mother hadn’t moved to Michigan, leaving his piece of shit father behind, Mitch would not be where he was today.
And his mother would probably be dead.
So he told Lexie the truncated version, without all the sad sack bullshit about how hockey had saved his life.
But hockeyhadsaved them.
