Instead, Carrie is working through her burgers—yes, burgers—chips and queso sprawled across the table in front of her. I’ve seen this woman eat a whole pizza after enough alcohol. While she waits for me to organize my thoughts, she offers me soft, encouraging smiles, and kind eyes.
If I wasn’t waiting to find my mate, I could easily see her as someone I might have wanted to pursue. Instead, we’ve become close friends . . . that occasionally sleep together.
Her stepdad is a werewolf, so she knows all about shifters and how important our mates are. She loves to hear about our legends and the Moon Goddess, having decided she’s also waiting for her own mate out there somewhere.
After a minute or two of comfortable silence I spill the beans. I tell her everything; running from my responsibilities, burying myself in football, not speaking to my family, hating Arizona.
My parents live in North Pole, Alaska where they are the resident Santa and Mrs. Clause of Christmas town. Yep, Christmas town. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Christmas.
On top of that, the men in my family have been the Arctic Guardian of the shifters for thousands of years.
I couldn’t imagine being stuck there for my entire existence, playing Santa, and answering to so many people.
I found football and used it to run away, and now I’m no longer sure I made the right decision.
It takes me a solid hour to get through it all, but now that I’ve just dumped my entire life story in piles on the table between us, I almost feel lighter. But I’ve also never been so exposed. I haven’t told anyone this much before. There’s still so much I’ve left out.
She nods, continuing to eat her chips and queso, the taco burgers long since devoured. “Your conscience caught up with you,” she says calmly as she pops a dripping nacho into her mouth.
“What does that even mean?”
She releases a breathy laugh, “It means exactly what you told me. You ran from your family. You ran from your responsibilities. You buried yourself in football, but now that you’re stagnant and have no next step to immerse yourself in, the weight of all your decisions is pressing down on you as heavily as the desert heat.”
Looking at my hands in my lap, I let her words sink in. She’s completely right. I miss my family. Riddled with guilt fornot accepting my responsibilities, and leaving them on someone else’s shoulders, racks my brain. Football no longer feels like the escape it once was. In this terrible climate, it feels like a prison sentence. But I was young and immature and threw myself into something that could take me away from it all.
And it worked.
I was given a full ride football scholarship to play in Ohio. I loved it there. The atmosphere in those college games can't be compared to the national games I play now. You’re fighting for so much more in college. You spend your college athletic career fighting to prove your worth. You’re trying to show the nation that you’ve got what it takes to play in the pros. I played all four years and was selected in the first round of the draft by the Rays and have been playing for them since. Once you’re drafted, the only thing you have to fight for is an annual trophy. There’s no next step to fight for. Sure, there are records to break, endorsements to earn, and titles, but even as I begin to accumulate those, they’re no longer scratching the itch.
I’m homesick and my heart needs something to fight for.
All this time spent running, distracted me from having the time to miss everything and everyone back home.
When I finally look back up at her, she’s smiling and is collecting her things. “It looks like you understand what’s going on now. It’s up to you how you deal with it.” She hitches her thumb over her shoulder. “My Ryde should be here any minute, I’m gonna head home.”
She knows she could have stayed over, but I understand her desire to be home, in her own space.
Once she’s gone, I stare around the large, lavish condo seeing now how cold it is. Not in the way I enjoy the cold temperatures.This cold is a lonely kind. Empty, it mirrors the homesickness I’ve finally been able to name.
2
Anya
What do I do now?
Staring at the politely worded denial letter, I read and re-read it, wishing I had waited until this evening to open the envelope.
I knew there was a slim chance of being drafted into the women’s professional hockey league. They only drafted four women this year, but a piece of me still held out hope. I don’t even know who I am outside of hockey anymore.
Growing up with workaholic parents who never cared, or showed up to anything, I threw myself into the things I loved. My whole world revolved around softball and hockey. When it was time to go to college, I had a choice to make. I chose the one that called more to my heart. Hockey.
There’s something about the cold. The ice. The wind in my face as my skates fly me across the rink. The constant movement and focus.
The last three years have been surreal. Playing for one of the best women’s college hockey teams in the country has been more than I could ever ask for. Somewhere in the back of my mind I’ve always worried that I would lose hockey, but I held out hope that I could make it . . . while secretly desiring to give it all up and do something crazy, somethingmore. I don’t know what that could be, but I figure if it’s meant to be, it will be, and I’ll know what it is when I see it.
I should have spent more time thinking about my back up plan. About what I wanted to do with my life outside of hockey. I majored in sports management so that I had the option to stay involved with the game, managing and mentoring other athletes after retirement. I never intended to use my degree immediately to support other people living my dreams.
For so long, hockey came first. It was always there for me when no one else was, so it was natural for me to make it the priority in my life. I had my teammates, but I didn’t really have any friends.
