I glance at him over my shoulder to find him shaking his head. Of course, the question prompts him to do just that, and his lips to roll inward when he sees the piece of sketch paper taped there. It’s the same one I gave him for Valentine’s Day almost two years ago, depicting all the very real moments of our fake relationship.
“You kept this? The whole time?”
I nod, feeling my throat get thicker. “I didn’t want to throw away the moments where I was falling in love with you.”
There’s a beat while Cam just stares at the page, tracing his fingers over the lines of art, before he turns me around to face him.
“You really were all in, weren’t you?” he whispers, his gaze scraping over my face, and I nod again.
“Then. Now. Always.”
A smile—the one I’ve come to crave the sight of—pulls at his lips, before he presses a kiss to my temple and taps the page on the counter again.
“You should write one of these one-shot things about us. I look good as a manga character.”
I laugh, shaking my head. “Okay, I’ll bite. Where would you start the story? When this was fake, or when it became real?”
“You gotta start where it all began, Lo. With wall twerking and baton twirling.”
Epilogue
Logan
Eighteen Months Later — June
Stanley Cup Finals, Game Seven: Chicago Blaze v. New York Knights
“You know, you’re gonna miss the whole game if you never look up from your sketchbook.”
My gaze lifts, finding my mother staring down at me with mirth in her eyes. She drops onto the couch near the back of our box, the same one I’ve been occupying since the start of the game, and a flush heats my cheeks when I realize we’re already eight minutes into the second period.
Ah, shit.
My attention flashes to her, and I give a helpless little shrug. “I know, Mom. But I’m on this really big deadline with work, and—”
“We’re in game seven, Logan.”
I glance toward the sound of my father’s voice, surprisedto find him approaching from where he’s been perched on a barstool at the outer edge of the box. He’s barely left the spot all evening, more engrossed in the game between the Blaze and the Knights than anyone else in here.
Gameseven,as he just so aptly reminded me.
“Yeah, I got that, Dad. But my career is just as important as Cam’s is,” I remind him, arching a brow. “And like I said, I’m on a deadline, so…”
My father looks as if he wants to argue, but my mother shoots him a brief, silent look. It’s one I’ve seen her aim at him often as of late—especially with me coming back into the hockey fold last season—and I know it’s meant to tell him to lay off.
And to my surprise, most of the time, it has the intended effect.
“I’m not saying your work isn’t important, because it is. I’m just saying…” He trails off, his attention slicing to my mother, then back to me. “Can it maybe wait until the next intermission? God forbid this is only a once-in-a-lifetime moment for him; I’d hate for you to miss it.”
Guilt lances through me, because he does have a fair point: Thisisthe last game of the season, and there’s no guarantee Cam will ever play in another Final—and even more unlikely for it to be against my brother and Quinton.
With a drawn-out sigh—which is more for posterity than out of actual annoyance—I flip my sketchbook closed and commit myself to watching the rest of this game without opening the damn thing again. Though, if I’m being honest, it could probably wait until we’re home from New York entirely. The submission I’m working on has been “done” for weeks now, but with it being the first of my own work I’ll be handing over to my publisher at the end of the month, I’m trying to perfect it as much as I can.
And if this game goes the way I’m hoping it will, there won’t be any time for me to work on it for the next week. After all, thepost-win celebratory fuck just for getting into the Finals lasted almost two days, so I can only imagine how long it’ll be if they actually win the damn thing.
The sacrifice made for love, Logan.
As if spending days on end getting naked and sweaty in every room of our apartment could ever be a sacrifice.
