“You know me. I know you. You and I were friends before anything got physical.”
“Yeah, but even then I don’t know if I really knew you.” He shrugs a little, like he’s giving up on something. And he is. On us. “I mean, let’s be honest. We’ve both always been attracted to each other, so that probably made it different than if we were just friends.”
“Did I always think you were good looking? Yes. But I’m not you, Avery. I don’t put on fake smiles or hide my personality to create a fake image to get what I want,” I say angrily. “I’m just me. The same person. All the time.”
“By hiding your past you were showing me the real you? Really?” he challenges, his voice suddenly hard and uncaring. “I might have an image and hide stuff from the public, but I never hid anything from you.”
“You’re right. That’s how I knew exactly how you’d react to this,” I spit as the wind picks up and blows my hair across my face. I angrily push it back.
I went there. Brought uphispast. The way he abandoned his friend who had an addiction to painkillers. If this conversation hadn’t hit rock bottom before, I’ve just dug a deeper pit and flung us both inside it.
Avery stands up, off the hood of the car. “I was young and I was stupid. Cutting myself out of Trey’s life was a stupid decision, and I’ve regretted it ever since. I told you that. But you think I’m that same person. You think I haven’t changed at all?”
“Aren’t you about to do it again?”
He freezes. His whole body just goes to stone, standing there on the curb looking down at me. I let go of the palm tree behind me I hadn’t even realized I was gripping and take a step toward him. I don’t know if this is good or bad. Is he shocked or even more horrified? It finally hits me. This is not going to work. Avery and me. It’s just not going to happen. We’ve messed this up too badly.
“I still like you, Steph,” he says softly. He reaches out like he’s going to touch me, then shoves his hands back in his pockets. “I still want to like you, but I don’t know what to do here. I don’t know how to fix the fact that I don’t know you like I thought I did.”
“I can’t change who I am or who I was. And you can’t either. You need your image, and I don’t fit it.” I take a step back and bump into the palm tree, so I move to the left. I will without a doubt be crying within the next two minutes, so I need to get away from him.
“You fit fine when no one tried to make you fit,” he says, pushing his sunglasses up so I can finally see his pretty eyes. They look so sweet, so hopeful, when he utters his next words. “Why don’t we just date privately?”
“What?”
“You know, like in secret. No one needs to know except our friends.”
“You want me to be your…” I pause to take a breath, but it hurts to breathe, so it’s shallow and stilted. “Your dirty little secret?”
“Not like that. Steph, come on. You’re the one who wanted to keep it private before, so why I can’t I want it now?” he stutters. “It’s just…I’ve got a lot going on right now. The team needs to make play-offs. I need to be focused on that. And I need to find a new company to back my clothing line because the one I had just pulled out. If we play it off like we’re friends, the press won’t make this into an unnecessary distraction. For either of us.”
It has got to be the look on my face that makes his voice suddenly falter and stop.
“We’re not friends. We’re not anything, Avery. Bye,” I choke out before turning and walking as fast as I can away from him. Once inside my building, I march right into the lobby restroom and burst into tears.
Chapter 36
Avery
The thing about hockey injuries is they’re painful, but not relentlessly so. When you tear a muscle or break a bone, it hurts, obviously, but there’s medication and surgery and rehab and a hundred ways you can ease that pain. And you know that, eventually, it’ll be gone completely and you’ll be right back where you were before.
The pain that losing Stephanie has caused is relentless. There’s no medication, no surgery, no way to make it stop. It’s this constant dull ache, and unlike with a sports injury, getting back to where I was before she ripped my heart out makes it worse. Because it’s been four weeks and I’m back exactly where I was before she let me have her. I’m alone with nothing but a career and a brand to fill my time. The salacious articles have subsided. The personal questions in interviews have halted. Everything is back to “normal”—and that makes the ache in my chest worse.
I sit up, throw the covers back and walk across the bedroom to the bathroom. I pass my bag, which I packed at four in the morning when sleep wouldn’t come. We’re going to Seattle tonight to play the last game of the regular season. We have to win it to make the play-offs. It really all comes down to this. If you asked me how I’d feel in this situation a couple of months ago, I would have said there was nothing I wanted more than winning this game and getting the Saints into the play-offs for the first time.
But then Stephanie and I blew up, and I realized there is something I want more than winning a hockey game or turning this team around or more than my goddamn image. I want her.
The problem is I figured it out too late. When she walked away from me at her office that day, I felt numb. Nothing but numb. It took about twenty-four hours for that to wear off and that’s when the incredible ache began.
It only got worse when, after a couple days, I finally grew some balls and went over to her house to see her. Maddie answered the door, her pretty face morphing into a scowl at the sight of me. “She doesn’t want to see you.”
“Come on, Maddie.”
“She doesn’t want to see you. She told me that. I’m telling you that,” Maddie repeated, her voice flat and lifeless.
“I miss her.”
“It’s over,” Maddie replied. “She told me that too.”
