Years of experience with her reactions had my shoulders relaxing. Her teasing tone let me know I was off the hook for keeping her out of the loop.
As much as I wanted to let her go on about the non-existent pet in her life, my thoughts homed in on part of her sentence.
“You love Macie?” I kept my eyes locked on her face to see if her expression would confirm her words.
“That is not the point here, but yes,” she replied primly, before sticking out her tongue for the second time in less than five minutes, and ruining her chastising tone. “Don’t try to distract me. I know you don’t want to be here. We’re talking about why I’m hearing all of this essential intel so late in the game.”
A quick glance around the dining room confirmed no one I recognized from the Hammerheads’ organization was anywhere near us.
My brain knew that no one from the team would be in the flipping Tim Horton’s next to the arena on one of our very precious off days. Most of the guys were sleeping off the hellish practices that we’d been enduring for weeks.
Coach Wilder was nothing if not a taskmaster, determined to get all of his players in the best position to be called up to the NHL.
“I was just so fucking embarrassed! I couldn’t make myself type out the text,” I admitted.
“God knows you’re allergic to picking up the damn phone.” Kait’s eye roll alluded to what she thought of as my near-clinical loathing for phone calls. “It’s not like you’d call me and tell me if something was wrong. But, I’m here now. So spill it.”
“Ugh, fine. We were supposed to be watching some tape after hours. He’d noticed I’d been struggling with a couple of the drills and practices. He found me one day after a particularly humiliating effort on the ice and offered to go through tape with me, just one on one, thinking that it might help me to work without the rest of the offense around us.”
“Wait. He asked to see you after hours? Did he make you uncomfortable in some way? Because you can say ‘no’ to absolutely anything that feels wrong.”
I opened my mouth to say that the only reason my parents could afford their mortgage and groceries was because of the salary I was making with the Hammerheads.
And that fact meant there were a lot of things I couldn’t say no to. But I took her point. Safety and consent were essential in every interaction.
Ash had never put me in a position where I’d felt anything but comfortable and in control. Shy, yes, but still comfortable.
“Don’t even start with that obligation to Frank-fuckhead-Kelly bullshit.”
Her gaze remained fierce. The hand that had left the table was now gripping the edge of it with her fingertips, as if it were the only thing keeping her from jumping up and going to give Ash’s non-existent slight a piece of her mind.
“No, no, no. Kait, listen, he’s amazing! He said that I shouldn’t feel bad. I shouldn’t pressure myself to the point where I think I’m not improving. He wanted to give me every opportunity to take my game to the next level.”
“As if you even want to fucking be here in the first place. Goddamn Frank Kelly making his son clean up his messes,” she muttered.
Her voice was so low, I could barely hear it. I didn’t know if she realized that she’d spoken the words out loud. Not that I hadn’t heard them from her a thousand times over all the years of our friendship.
Choosing not to get into talking shit about my dad, which would lead us nowhere, I ignored the jab. Experience had taught me that opening old wounds was the fastest route to chronic, gnawing stomach pain and exhaustion that took weeks to shake.
I couldn’t stand the idea of her thinking poorly of Ash. He had done nothing wrong. It was me, all me. I’d made things weird.
“So, what happened is we ended up in his office super late in the afternoon to go over the tape. It was just so fucking boring watching the same plays over and over again, as if something new was going to click for me. When it didn’t, Ash didn’t call me out on it, he just continued to analyze the plays in a calm tone, not forcing me to offer any observations.”
“Okay, so he was, like, being friendly, trying to make you feel comfortable. I’m not clear on the problem here unless he did something inappropriate to you?”
“No, nothing like that. He was perfect. It’s just that I’ve been so tired with all the extra practice. I fell asleep on his goddamn shoulder and didn’t even have the courtesy to wake up. He just let the video play out on his laptop and scrolled on his phone while I slept. He eventually had to shake me awake to kick me out of his office.”
My stomach dropped through the floor in memory of how embarrassed I’d been when I realized I didn’t want to move from the heat of his shoulder. My nerve endings lit up throughout my belly and my lower abdomen at the thought of being back on that couch again with Ash.
“Caden, listen, I really don’t think this is all that bad. You’re human. You’re not a machine. There’s no way he thinks poorly of you just because you fell asleep. Has he been weird since?”
I wished I could tell her that Asher’s behavior had changed toward me, but nothing had changed. He was just the same friendly, warm person that he’d been since the day we met. He was encouraging and just as committed to my success as he was to the rest of the offensive line.
Something about that thought made a sour feeling form in my stomach. How could he be acting the same way toward me when I felt like everything had irrevocably changed?
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just can’t get over it. It’s like my brain forgets for a second. Then I go back to that moment. It’s as if I’m reliving it in my mind over and over again. I can’t figure out why I’m so embarrassed or why it matters so much that I can’t let it go.”
“Caden.” She hesitated, and the hand that had gripped the table came to rest on both of my hands. I’d been wringing them as I explained the situation. “I kind of don’t want to say this out loud because I don’t want to upset you more than you already are. But, do you realize you sound exactly like you did whenyou used to talk to me when something was going wrong with Andrea?”
