Shane frowned, wincing a little as he pushed off the wall and hobbled closer to me on his crutches. “I did. I—”
“Why are you here?” I asked, cutting him off. Again, I found a mixture of pride and sickness swirling in my gut for my ability to act so unaffected by him.
“By chance,” he answered in a puff of a laugh. “I was just needing some fresh air and then I looked in the window and saw—”
“I mean in Boston,” I rephrased. “Long way to be from Jacksonville in the middle of the season, isn’t it?”
He swallowed, his jaw hardening. “Not exactly in playing shape, am I?”
My gaze flicked down to the bulky, square outline beneath his joggers — a knee brace, I guessed.
“What happened?” I tried to aim for apathetic again, but the words came out breathless.
“Shattered my hip. Tore my ACL. Ended my career.”
The last three words had my eyes snapping to his.
I’d followed him for the first two years of his professional career. Even when it hurt, I couldn’t help myself. I watched every game, every interview. I tracked his stats. It wasn’t until a night that I drank myself into oblivion crying over him that I realized I was only torturing myself. I stopped cold turkey. I hadn’twatched a game since. I’d done everything I could to avoid anything hockey related, in fact, which had been easy enough to do with my own career aspirations.
So I had no idea he’d been hurt.
I felt sick again.
Shane just shrugged, as if it didn’t bother him, as if that wouldn’t be the worst possible thing that could ever happen to him — to lose hockey forever.
“The team sent me here for my second and third surgeries. There’s a surgeon here, Doctor Rovelli, who specializes in catastrophic hip reconstructions and has worked with a lot of Olympians and players from the NHL.” He shrugged again. “Not that I’ll play again. But I guess the team doesn’t want me crippled for life, so that’s nice.”
I didn’t want to show him any amount of sympathy, but it was impossible not to. My heart broke for him, for the boy I once knew and the man I knew nothing of now.
“I’m sorry,” I said simply. I didn’t trust myself to say more.
He nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing hard in his throat. “It’s me who’s the sorry one, Ari.”
I let my gaze fall to the snow covering the sidewalk between us.
People walked by, mutteringexcuse meor so caught up in their conversation and laughter that they didn’t notice us at all. Sometimes they brushed our shoulders or stepped over Shane’s crutch at the last moment. All of them were oblivious to the two strangers they passed, how our world had halted to a stop on this cold December night.
“You look good,” Shane said. “Happy.”
“I’m trying to be.”
He nodded again. “I want to ask you so many things.”
“Why?” I snapped. “Because we’re such good friends? Are we supposed to just hug and catch up like I wasn’t hystericallycrying and begging you not to leave me the last time we were together?”
His nostrils flared, eyes glossing. “I didn’t want to leave.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“I thought I was doing the right thing.”
I scoffed. Because him standing here now — injured, sidelined, his future suddenly uncertain — it was impossible not to notice the timing. Hockey had been taken from him, and only then had he come looking for me.
And maybe that wasn’t fair of me. Maybe grief was warping everything.
But I couldn’t shake the truth burning in my chest: if hockey were still an option, he wouldn’t be standing here.
“You were choosing hockey over me,” I corrected him. “You still would be, if you had the chance.”
