Chapter 4
MILES
“Yo, where the hell are you?”
Two finely manicured nails snap in front of my face, jolting me back from wherever I just zoned out. I release the ropes I was holding taut for tricep extensions, realizing that I have no idea how many I just did or how it felt—was the weight too heavy, too light?
I give my attention to my gym buddy, Destiny, who was just snapping at me.
“I—I was in yesterday,” I say.
Yesterday, when I saw the one that got away at the pool. Abby fucking Ashe. At the same resort as me. At the same time. In that red bikini, with legs for days, and a body that time has only made better.
“What happened yesterday?”
“I saw a ghost.”
“Oh hell no, I don’t want to hear any ghost stories,” Destiny says, her slight Jamaican accent slipping out through her words as she adjusts the weight on the machine I was just using, only taking it down ten or so pounds.
Destiny is the Zumba and yoga instructor here at the resort.
We started working out together only a couple of weeks after I moved here.
She likes to get in a workout before her morning yoga class as a “warm-up.” It’s almost offensive that my workout is her warm-up, but I take comfort that she’s a good spot for my lifts.
The gym is empty at this hour; I only ever see one or maybe two other people here in the mornings.
It smells too clean for a gym, which is either a testament to the staff’s attentiveness or the amount of usage the place gets.
It’s a well-maintained gym with a wide variety of equipment—dumbbells, kettlebells, machines, and squat racks.
Destiny and I have already been at it for half an hour this morning, and I’m increasingly having trouble focusing.
I thought coming to the gym would help me get Abby off my mind, but she’s been haunting me since I saw her at the pool yesterday.
“No, not a literal ghost. Just someone from my past—from college is here.”
“An old fraternity brother here on a bachelor trip?”
“Do I look like a frat guy?”
Destiny raises two perfectly shaped eyebrows at me, as if this is her entire point.
“Yeah, okay, fair. But I wasn’t in a frat. I was an athlete.”
“Really?” she says with mock surprise. “Mr. At-the-gym-at-5:30-on-the-dot, works out for an hour and a half every single morning, was a college athlete?”
“And a professional athlete,” I mumble, but Destiny isn’t impressed by me. She never has been. She doesn’t boost my ego, which is both refreshing and annoying.
Destiny starts her tricep extensions, and I sit on a piece of equipment intended for cabled rows.
“Okay, so who was this ghost?” she presses me.
“My college girlfriend.”
And the love of my life.
Abby and I met at the beginning of our junior year of college in a biology class.
She sat next to me, her minty, freshly-sharpened-pencil scent drawing me in immediately.
I eventually learned she smelled like pencil shavings because of her sketching class right before biology.
By the end of that first class, I had her number, and within weeks she was my girlfriend.
“Why are you just sitting there? Do some rows.” Destiny gestures to the machine I’m sitting at, and her tone gets me moving like she’s my coach and I just got caught slacking.
I adjust the weights and start on a set of rows, intentionally focusing on counting.
I can’t keep zoning out, or this will be a wasted workout.
“Did she dump your ass or did you hurt her?” she asks, taking a swig of her water bottle between sets.
“You really cut to the chase, don’t you?”
“You hurt her. I knew it.”
“How could you possibly know that?” I ask, finishing my first set.
“You have the look of a man who has regrets.”
Somehow, I’m not surprised that Destiny can read this on me. She’s the kind of person who picks up on energies; she’s always talking about the other staff members and what positive or negative energies they’re bringing to work.
And she’s right, anyway. I do have regrets. When it comes to Abby, I have nothing but regret.
“Tell me what you did,” Destiny says as she starts on her last set.
“We dated the last two years of college, and she was…god, she was so patient. I loved, lived, and breathed hockey, and Abby never complained about my schedule or how much time we did or didn’t get together. She never complained about my priorities or where she landed. She just…she understood.
“We talked about how we’d handle things when I went to the NHL, what games she would come see. We talked about off season and what that would look like. We talked about marriage and kids. We were…we were planning on spending our lives together. And then I went to the NHL.”
“And where was she?”
“Back in her hometown. She’d gotten a teaching job in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where her parents lived. I went to training camp in Orlando.”
“And you couldn’t hack long distance?” She clucks her tongue at me, a deeply disapproving sound.
“It wasn’t the distance. I—I couldn’t be a good hockey player and a boyfriend. And I chose hockey.”
It sounds lame, even as I hear myself say it, but I really struggled.
My performance was lacking, and I was constantly being called out by the coaches and the other, older players.
A veteran close to retirement pulled me aside one day and told me I was too distracted by my girl, and, like a dumbass, I took his words to heart.
Destiny’s face as she stops mid-extension, her lips curled up judgmentally and daggers shooting from her eyes, would bury me if I hadn’t lived with the regret of my decision for the last decade already.
“I know, Destiny, I know.”
She clucks her tongue at me again and continues her workout. “You did it to her face, right? You got on a plane and flew to her and gave her the respect of a conversation, correct?”
I bury my face in my hands, elbows propped on my knees, and groan loudly. “Destiny, please. I—”
“Oh, I see; you were a coward.”
“I was a coward. It was a phone call. I couldn’t get away because of—”
“I swear to god if you say hockey.”
I knit my eyebrows together, grimacing with guilt.
Destiny just shakes her head at me and gestures that I should continue my set of rows. I do as I’m told.
“And you had the balls to talk to her yesterday, I am assuming?”
“When you say it like that, you make it sound like a bad thing.”
Destiny lets the weight plates slam down a little too hard.
My gym buddy is built like an athlete. She’s got a mix of muscles that genetics and a lifetime of exercise have afforded her and curves that would make any man turn their head to admire with the kind of attitude that would make me think twice about getting in a fight with her.
“You probably tried to flirt with her already.” Destiny props a hand on her hip and tilts the nozzle of her water bottle into her mouth.
“I can’t help myself,” I say with a smirk.
“I know,” Destiny says pointedly.
She waits for me to finish the set and then we swap places. I adjust the weights and do another round of tricep extensions to make up for the ones that I wasn’t paying attention to. She adjusts the weight for her own rows and starts her first set.
The first time I saw Destiny in the gym, I did try to flirt with her, but her vibes were a billboard screaming that she was not interested, so I never tried again.
She told me later she “likes her men with feminine energy and her women with masculine energy.” Fortunately for me, she was happy with a gym buddy, and now we work out together a few days a week.
I’m here seven; she’s here three, but occasionally sneaks in a fourth.
I usually like to work out alone. I feel more focused, more grounded if I start my day with a workout, and other people can sometimes be too distracting.
After hockey, there wasn’t a lot in my life that felt like mine. I felt scattered; I had no anchor. My therapist at the time recommended a routine, something with a touchpoint that I do every day, and said the gym could be a good place to start.
She was right. Moving my body again got me out of my mind and helped me surface from the dark place I went to for a few years. The gym keeps me out of the dark place. Gray says it’s how I keep my demons at bay.
But Destiny’s company isn’t intrusive. If anything, she pushes me to work harder, and I like that.
She still hasn’t said anything about my flirting with Abby, and I can’t tell if it’s because she doesn’t have anything else to say or if she’s holding back on chewing my ass out.
Maybe trying to flirt with my ex-girlfriend after seeing her for the first time in over a decade wasn’t my best move, but I don’t know how to not flirt with Abby.
She’s always kept up with me conversationally, matching my wit with hers until I make her blush so hard she can’t continue.
It always felt like the best kind of challenge to verbally spar with her, and yesterday gave me a glimpse of that again.
Flirting and charming felt like a better approach than “tail between my legs” penitence. Is that what she would even want after all this time?
“What else was I supposed to do, Destiny? ‘Hey, Abby, great to see you again. Sorry for being an asshole ten years ago, it’s my life’s regret.’”
“That’s a decent place to start,” she says, half scolding me.
I had assumed that Abby would not want to hear from me after we broke up, much less hear an apology. But I thought about calling her all the time, especially after my injury.
My guilt over our breakup intensified after my hockey career got ripped out from under me. When I’d lost everything, including the very thing I’d chosen over her, she was the only person I wanted to talk to and the only one who was entirely out of my reach.
I was plagued for years by thoughts of why I couldn’t have just stuck it out a little longer.
Abby is the most patient person I know—have ever known.
She would have been understanding beyond what I deserved, but she would have stuck it out with me.
Ultimately, it was probably for the best she never saw me like that.
But I’m a different man now. And I am certainly man enough to apologize for the man I used to be. Abby deserved better from me and definitely deserves to hear how deeply I regret the way I ended things.
“You think she’d hear me out? She wasn’t excited to talk to me yesterday. Kept ignoring me to read her book.”
Destiny finishes her last set of rows and leans her arms on her legs, giving me a sour expression. “Probably not. And you probably do not deserve her time, but you could always try. The worst you could do is fuck it up even more.”
“This is quite the pep talk, Destiny. Is this how you lead your Zumba classes?”
“You would know if you came to one,” she says, flashing her pearly white smile at me with a facetious wink.
“Maybe have a class that isn’t in the middle of my workday.”
“You could make it to the yoga class in the morning.”
“I’m bad at yoga. You don’t want me there.”
“You cannot be bad at yoga, Miles.”
“Maybe I’ll come just to prove you wrong.”
“I am never wrong,” she says and takes a swig from her water bottle and wags a finger at me.
“Well, I fucking hope not, because I’m going to take your advice. I’m going to try to find Abby and apologize.”
“And then leave her alone?”
“It’s what I’ve been doing the last eleven years. What’s another week? I don’t even know how long she’s here.”
“Good. That is none of your business, boy.”
Although just the idea of seeing her around from a distance, knowing I would need to intentionally avoid her, makes me feel achy. I feel drawn to Abby, a moth to a flame.
But I’ve already fucked up enough. I don’t deserve her time or attention, and I’m not going to take up too much of it. I’ll apologize to her, clear my conscience, and maybe be able to live the rest of my life knowing even if I couldn’t atone for my sin, I could repent for it.
Fate gave me the chance yesterday and I missed it. I’m not going to go knocking on her room door—that’s too much, even for me. I need to find her again and hope the universe will work in my favor. Again.
Plus, it’s not that big of a resort.
How hard could it be?