“There’s no playing pretend when it comes to you,” he cuts in. “And yeah, Oak may play for the Knights, but the only reason I came to New York was to seeyouplay.”
My mouth goes drier than the goddamn Sahara in the summer, and I gape at him wordlessly. Because, fuck, what am I supposed to say to that? How am I supposed to react?
So I just say the first goddamn thing that comes to my mind.
“You hate hockey.”
“But I loveyou,” he counters instantly, a little smile forming. “Which means I was gonna be at your rookie debut, regardless of where or when it was.”
Those three goddamn words leave his mouth so freely, but they slice through me like the blade on a skate, leaving me wincing from the pain of their impact.
“But we’re not together. We’re not—”
He shakes his head, immediately rejecting the implications my statement holds.
“That doesn’t matter. You’ve shown up for me, time and time again, well before we went and complicated things. There’s no way I wasn’t gonna do the same. Not when I know how much this means to you.”
“Well, thank you. I…” I trail off, once again at a loss for words.
For a moment, we just stare at each other, neither of us saying anything, and yet so many unspoken emotions pass through the scant bit of space between our faces. I can almost read each one in his expression too; the fear, the uncertainty.
The longing I know my own features must be reflecting back at him.
“I miss you,” he whispers, his voice cracking.
I hear the pain in it, and it’s a pain I understand more than I care to admit. Because I miss him too. The same way I’d be missing my hockey stick while defending the net. The way I’d miss a limb if it were suddenly severed from my body. I fucking miss him every minute of every day. That hasn’t stopped since we last saw each other at his brother’s wedding.
But just like then, it doesn’t seem like a good idea to give life to those thoughts and feelings. All that would do is breathe hope into a hopeless situation.
And that’s a cruelty neither of us deserve.
“Logan…” I trail off, feeling my lips contort into a grimace. “I can’t.”
“You can’t?” he repeats, a frown forming.
“I can’t have this conversation again. I mean, did you forget the way it fucking broke us both last time? And from where I’m standing, nothing has changed since then, so—”
“Except so much has changed,” he insists, his hand reaching out and wrapping around my wrist. “Baby, the only thing that hasn’t changed is me loving you.”
Fuck.
Any variation of those words has the capacity to kill me where I stand, and I don’t think I can take it. Not tonight, when my emotions were already running so high without him standing in front of me. So I pull from his grip and shake my head, doingmy best to keep it together, despite only wanting to hold him.
“Logan, I have a flight back to Chicago to catch. I—”
“Then just take this. It’s the other reason I’m here.”
He holds out a sketchpad for me—one I hadn’t noticed he was holding until now. But I immediately recognize it as the same one he’d had on him my senior year of college.
My hand shakes ever so slightly when I take it from him, almost as if it’s a live grenade, before flipping open the cover. And again, I’m hit with a sense of recognition as I stare at the first page—one I’ve seen before, if only for a few minutes.
“It’s the one-shot. The same one I worked on back when we were…” Logan trails off, and I glance up to find him watching me intently. “I finished it over the summer after you moved out. And, um, I actually submitted it to this contest a couple months back, after getting some help translating it.”
“You did?”
He nods while gnawing at his lower lip. “Yeah. Um… It won, which means it’s getting published. It won’t be printed until February, so this is all I have for right now, but I wanted you to have a copy. I just didn’t know when I’d have another chance to see you again, and I thought the original would be better than nothing.”
The ache in my chest has grown with every word, but it has nothing on the way a vise clamps around my heart to hear he’s finally doing what I always knew he could.
