I puff my cheeks out. I need to pull myself together.
That night, while I’m doing laundry and triple-checking where I need to be the next morning for the first shift on my new rotation, I find an app to watch the Buffalo-Vegas game on my phone.
I don’t know why.
Yes you do, you lying little sneak, the wedding license I stole from Logan’s suit jacket screams from my bedside table, where I put it when I unpacked.
The white satin dress I got married in is hanging in a place of shame, off the freestanding rack that doubles my closet space in the room I rent in Sloane’s little Culver City bungalow.
Returning to my real life just underlines all the way last night was a mistake.
Watching Logan on the ice—and sitting on the bench, with my father angrily pacing behind him—adds emphasis to how different our lives are.
“Hey, we’re going for a—” Liz pushes my door open as I flip my phone face down on my bed. “Walk,” she finishes, eyes narrowing as she looks from me to the phone and back to my face. “Do you want to come with?”
“I’m doing laundry,” I say, as if that’s not a set it and forget it task I’ve already started. “And studying.”
Liz leans over and flips up my phone. “Studying hockey?”
“Just keeping tabs on the old man,” I say inanely.
She wrinkles her nose. “Don’t get sucked in, babe.”
“Would never,” I promise. To her and to myself.
But after they leave, I find myself cheering as Logan fakes out the Vegas D-corp and funnels the puck to one of his teammates perfectly, delivering it right to the tap for a one-timer that puts them ahead by a goal.
“That’s a second assist for Granger,” the announcer says.“If he partied hard last night to celebrate his birthday, it isn’t affecting his play.”
“If anything, whatever he got up to last night seems to have lit a special fire under him,”his broadcast partner says.
I can’t read anything into that. It’s just chatter.
But my heart still squeezes at the wildly inappropriate fondness I feel.
As if right on cue, the universe delivers to my phone a text message from my mother. If anything will dump cold water on inappropriate fondness for hockey players, it’s my mother’s false cheeriness.
Mom
This is interesting food for thought
What she sends next is predictable, a self-help podcast clip about rewarding partial efforts by family members even if they don’t doexactlywhat we want.
A wild misreading of whatever she thinks happened yesterday at dinner.
Part of me wants to ask her what he said. But the stronger part of me, the part of me that has built a life away from them, reminds me that there’s no point asking, because all they wantis for me to bend, bend, bend, and they will never meet me part way.
I close the messages app without replying, and I turn off the game, too.
Do not fall for a hockey player, Frankie Wilson. Not again. Not ever again.
CHAPTER 11
LOGAN
“Fuck yeah,” I say as my teammates collide into me.
“That’s the way we do it, Lego,” Coop hollers as he thumps my helmet. “Team fucking effort, let’s go!”
