Total pages in book: 111
Estimated words: 107453 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 537(@200wpm)___ 430(@250wpm)___ 358(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107453 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 537(@200wpm)___ 430(@250wpm)___ 358(@300wpm)
A few seconds later, Aubrey tilts her head. “What are you thinking, Dev?”
Oh. I drifted off. “Hockey,” I admit.
“You miss it.”
It’s a relief to just tell the truth. “I can’t wait for it to start. I just want to play.”
I want to dominate. I want to crush the competition. I don’t say those things because I’ll sound like an athlete with a one-track mind.
She smiles, understanding. “See? You do need plants. You need them to unwind at the end of an intense day.”
Is that what I need to balance all this drive? I’m not sure anything could be a strong enough counterweight.
Aubrey nods toward Ledger. “I’m going to join him.”
I let her go, staying back, checking out plants I know I’ll never get.
As she joins him, I watch from a distance. They look good together. I pick up bits and pieces of their convo. He mentions a plant shop he goes to in the city—Late Bloomer. She says she’ll check it out someday. Then, I tune them out, letting them have their moment. Seeing them enjoying each other’s company like this makes me happy enough right here, right now. But I also feel like I don’t quite fit. Like they’re both at a certain place, and I’m not sure I’m there.
Or that I want to be.
No matter how much bigger these feelings for Aubrey grow by the day. No, by the hour.
And really, no matter how big they get, they still aren’t going anywhere after.
40
MELT YOUR HEART
Ledger
“Time to confess. Where did your plant daddy side come from?” Aubrey asks as we walk along Robson Street, passing eclectic local shops peddling candles and stationery alongside flashy designer brand-name stores hawking handbags and sunglasses. We’re en route to a dinner place she’s picked out.
She won’t tell us what it is. It’s part of her spoil us plan.
I do want to answer her question, but the more I let down my guard with her, the more I want to let it down. I’ve still got the wounds from my marriage ending. On the other hand, can Aubrey really hurt me? Come Saturday, we say goodbye. I’ll be back with my monkey plants, my mean cat, and the ticking clock of the big decision looming over me.
“Can’t a guy just like plants?” I say, avoiding the topic a little longer.
“Sure, but cigars aren’t always cigars. Why plants?” she presses.
Because my dad wasn’t into them. Because they weren’t sports. Because it was no one else’s thing in my family.
Ah, fuck it. She deserves to know. As we stop at the corner of a bustling street, traffic whisking by on a Wednesday night, I turn to the redhead with the beguiling brown eyes. They’re big and deep, and they make me open up to her. “Because they were all mine,” I say with a shrug. The shrug is for me—resignation to the effect she has on my closed, cold heart.
“When I was a teenager, I needed something that had nothing at all to do with hockey,” I add. There, I said it. “An interest that was entirely separate from the ice.”
“You needed an escape,” she says thoughtfully.
“Yeah, I did.” I scratch my jaw, weighing how far I want to go. This is getting heavy. This is getting close to the stuff I keep locked up tight. The nightmares, the twinge in my knee, the sense of dread as the season marches unstoppably closer. I want to play hockey. Truly, I do. But I want it to be fun. I just don’t know if it is anymore. I meet her gaze again. “Sometimes I still do.”
“We all do, bro,” Dev says with genuine understanding.
I’m not sure he ever needs an escape from hockey. He’s lived it and breathed it since my dad coached him in juniors, when we were younger, and I helped my dad. Dev was eager, relentless, always ready. There was never ever a day in his life when Dev wasn’t the put me in, coach guy.
I was that guy for a long time.
But I’m different now. Eventually, Father Time catches up to all of us. It’s happened to the greats in football, basketball, and hockey. It’s the one phenomenon no man is immune from.
“We all do, don’t we,” I echo, since it’s easier than pointing out the differences between us. As we cross the street—and maybe it’s psychosomatic—my knee barks, then I look at Dev, spry, five years younger.
Maybe he is right about dog years.
“I think I was expecting you to say your grandma liked plants or you had an aunt who was a botanist,” Aubrey says, picking up the plant thread. “But it’s very you that you found this interest on your own.”
I fight off a smile. She observes me too closely, sees me too well. That awareness makes my pulse race a little faster. I do still want to jump over the boards and slam my stick against the puck, but that desire is mixed with others now. With unexpected new ones. Like this—I want to see her at a game, skate over to her, and press a sweaty, exhausted kiss to her pretty face at the end of a hard-won victory.