Okay, so maybe I’mreallynot good at keeping in touch.
Aidan
Sorry, you know I’m shit with replying to texts.
McCabe
How are you with reading them? Because if you’ve read any of the messages I sent you over the past eleven months, you’d know that I’ve got a baby and can’t just run out for a drink. And I assume you know that AJ and I are together? She moved in this summer.
I know both of these things, of course, in the same way you know things you’ve only heard about—superficially and without much detail.
Should I have driven back into the city and met McCabe’s baby? Yeah, probably. But I was in constant pain and not good company.
Should I have reached out when the news broke that he and AJ were dating? Or when the Rebels lost the Stanley Cup? Or when I knew I’d be returning to play this season? Yes to any and all of those.
Aidan
Okay fine, I’m a shit friend.
You sure AJ can’t stay with Abby, so we can catch up?
I’m proud of myself for at least remembering his baby’s name. I do follow him on social media, so I’ve seen some photos—most notably the set of photos that he and AJ released right after they went public with their relationship a couple months ago. Abby was in most of the pictures, but she didn’t at all resemble the newborn photos he sent me last September.
McCabe
The ONLY reason I’m saying yes is because I’m your captain and feel obligated to let you know what you’re walking into at training camp.
Training camp is still two and a half weeks away. I know him well enough to know that this means he thinks I’ll need time to adjust to whatever he’s about to tell me.
“Don’t give me that grumpy-ass look,” I say as McCabe slides into the opposite side of the booth at The Neon Cactus, a bar in Beacon Hill where he suggested we meet. I’ve never been here, but with its shellacked wooden walls littered with neon signs and old posters, not to mention the Christmas lights strung around the perimeter of the room, it has a certain old Boston charm to it.
He’s about to reply when a waitress walks up. “Hey, Sandy,” he says.
She nods, seemingly unaffected by the fact that Boston’s star hockey player knows who she is. “McCabe.”
“You know what you want?” he asks, turning his head toward me.
“What do you have on tap?” I ask Sandy.
She looks like she’s barely restraining herself from rolling her eyes. “About forty kinds of tequila.”
My brows scrunch together at her reply. “You don’t haveanybeer on tap?”
“It’s a tequila bar,” McCabe says, sounding pissed off that I don’t know this. He always sounds pissed off, though. “You want beer, you can have it in a can.”
“Uhh...” I pause, and then throw out the name of the first beer that comes to mind because I’m unusually flustered by how foreign this all is... me at a new bar with my best friend who I haven’t talked to in nearly a year, who’s conversing with the waitress like he’s here all the time, and now ordering a margarita instead of a beer.
Once Sandy leaves, McCabe levels me with a stare. “Nice of you to grace me with your presence after going dark for a year.”
How can I explain that this last year was the hardest of my life? That one surgery after another left me in constant pain, that I was unwilling to take any of the hard drugs they offered me after the way my own father succumbed to his addiction to painkillers which finally killed him? That moving “home” was the worst decision I could have made, that not having hockey in my life for the first time ever almost killed me?
“Yeah, sorry about that.”
“What the fuck happened?” McCabe grits out the question through his clenched jaw. The way he looks even more annoyed than usual has me wondering, for the first time, if my not being around this past year was hard onhim.
We’re both pretty quiet guys, both kind of gruff in a way that can easily trespass into asshole territory if we’re not careful. We both played for other teams before coming to the Rebels, andwhile he was here for a bit before me, our similar personalities had us ending up as friends by default. I respect the hell out of the guy and what he can do on the ice, but sitting here now, I realize that maybe I never really knew him that well off the ice.
“I got hurt. You had a baby.” I shrug. “We were both busy.”
