But it’s in moments like this, looking down at the ice and knowing I’ll never again have him beside me, that I feel the pain of his absence acutely, that grief clogging up my throat like hair in a drain.
“Now that you’ve admitted you’re having a good time,” Orie says, leaning forward to grab his beer when there’s a break in the play, “I wanted to talk to you about the clinic.”
“I don’t want to talk about the clinic.” I say this with a voice that I’m fully aware is very close to sounding like Eeyore. I don’t care.
Orie laughs, looks up at the ceiling, shakes his head, then eyes me. “Okay—fine. No talking about the clinic for now. Does that mean we can talk about Jules?”
I bark out a half-laugh, half-groan. “Definitely not.”
“You really can’t tell me what the hell happened? She’s like your dream girl, dude.”
“Don’t want to talk about it.”
“Let me help you not fuck this thing up,” Orie nudges me, leaning down and trying to catch my eye. I want the game to start again so he’ll get distracted and leave me alone. “Since she came into your life, you’ve been a lot more fun to be around.”
“Okay, insult received.”
“What is it? Did you forget her birthday? Or—shit, did you argue about wedding planning? Was it?—”
I let out a breath, the words tumbling out of me before I can stop them, “There’s nothing to fix, because Jules and I were never really together.”
Down on the ice, the Zamboni is making the rounds. Orie sits quietly for a moment then says, simply, “What?”
“We were never together.” I reach for my own beer, taking a fortifying drink, not wanting to tell him about this with every fucking cell in my body. But if I explain the real parameters of our relationship, maybe he’ll leave it the fuck alone. “It was all a ploy to get my inheritance. Dad put it in the will that I needed to besettled downbefore the trust could release the funds. I didn’t want to get married, and Jules needed that surgery for her son. So, we made a deal. It was never real, and now it’s over.”
From the corner of my eye, I can see Orie blinking, taking all this in. After a moment, he lets out an amused breath, shaking his head and muttering, “Bullshit.”
I half-expected him to be pissed at me for lying, or to call me an idiot like Alena did when I told her about the plan. What I was not expecting, however, was him laughing into his beer.
“It’s not bullshit. It was fake?—”
“Oh, no,” he twists, putting his arm on the arm rest and giving me a look. “I believe that it was fake. I’m just calling bullshit on the wholeit’s all over, shit. You might have had some sort of weird contract thing with her, but you felt that. You were into her, and you’re still into her, and there’s some stupid ass reason you’re going to let her go.”
I grind my teeth, wondering if it might just be easier to level the guy, rather than talking about it. It’s fine. Our friendship had a good run.
“Don’t even fucking think about it,” Orie laughs, holding his beer up and pointing at me, “I have a surgery on Monday morning, and I don’t want to suffer through a lame ass apology from you. Besides, hitting me isn’t going to make you feel better.”
The last thing I want to do is talk to him about it, but I find the words coming out. The truth about who Jules is to me—meeting her at the gala all those years ago, and not knowing it was her.
Orie was there for everything that happened with Margot. He was there when I got her stupid fucking save the date for a new guy, as though I would want an invitation to the wedding that would start her new life without me.
When I tell him about Jules insisting Gus must belong to me, and allude to how much I do not want to be staring down at results regarding my ability to have kids again, he winces in solidarity.
By the time I finish telling him the whole thing, I feel lighter.
And also, the Blue Crabs are absolutely hammering the Blackhawks, and it’s only the middle of the second period.
“Alright,” Orie nods and nods, looking down at the ice, then he says, holding up a finger, “just for the record, Iamhurt that you didn’t tell me. But I’m still going to give you advice, because I’m a good friend.”
I roll my eyes. “Right.”
“I’ve got a few questions for you.” He sets down his beer, shifts in his seat, and steeples his hands together. “First—when you were with Margot, and you said you wanted kids, did you mean it?”
Swallowing through the lump in my throat hurts. “Yeah.”
“Alright—if you found out after Margot left that the test was wrong, and you could make a baby, would you have wanted to?”
I’d already realized a long time ago that it wasn’t so much about Margot as it was about the future I saw with her. “Yeah.”
