Chapter 17 #3
“Almost a year.”
“And the dark place you mentioned the other day. That was during that time?”
I nod, averting my eyes to my hands. They’re dirty from the lighthouse railing, and I rub at my palm with a thumb.
“The first six weeks after my surgery were bad. I was on crutches and I felt so… I felt so fucking weak. So pathetic. I meant what I said the other day: I would have pushed you away. Those six weeks almost killed me; they would have ruined us.”
“I think you underestimate my tolerance for your assholery,” she says with a smirk. It makes me smile, too. I’d forgotten how well Abby can balance hard conversations with a well-timed joke.
“Maybe. But I’m glad you never saw me during that time.
All I did was eat, sleep, and play Fortnite.
I grew my beard out, didn’t cut my hair.
Everyone was so sick of my shit. After my first physical therapy session, my mom drove me straight to a barber and insisted they cut my hair and shave my beard.
Something about that haircut kicked me into gear and I treated physical therapy and my recovery like a job after that. ”
“You said you got back on the ice, but you left?”
“Yeah,” I say, but the word gets lost in a deep sigh. “I went back, and I tried. I tried so hard to play at the level I was at before, but every couple of weeks, I’d get some pain and have to take a break, do more physical therapy. Eventually my coach benched me and they didn’t renew my contract.”
Abby’s eyes are wide and glossy, a hand covering her mouth.
“The only real dream I ever had for my life was over before it ever really got started.”
“Oh, Miles.” Abby reaches a hand out, taking one of my hands in hers. Her gentle squeeze scrubs away at some of the resurfacing pain.
“Went to another dark place after that, but I got in therapy pretty quick and that helped. I was really lost for a while. Ran into a buddy from high school at a bar one night. He looked exhausted, and when I said so, he said he was in construction and it always left him spent, and I wanted that. I wanted to be so fucking tired at the end of every day that I didn’t have to think about everything I’d lost.”
I give her a meaningful look, because it wasn’t just my career I was mourning then. I thought about Abby more after I lost hockey because I’d chosen it over her, and then I didn’t have that either. I just had regrets and what-ifs.
She rubs her thumb over my knuckles, dropping her eyes to our connected hands. “I thought about that. When you told me on my second night here that you only played for a couple years. It’s part of why I asked if you regretted breaking up,” she says.
“If you had asked me six or seven years ago if I had regrets, I would have said yes with no hesitation. But it’s complicated, because I don’t know how much I believe in regret now.
Not that I think everything happens for a reason, but because now I live my life in a way where I won’t have regrets later.
I learned my lesson. And I don’t know if I would have learned it if it wasn’t for the choices I made as a young, dumb twenty-something. ”
She bobs her head in a thoughtful nod. “And your dad. Do you think you’ll regret not talking to him? At the end of his life. At the end of yours. Do you think you’ll wish that you had mended things with him?”
Her words are a whip cracking in my chest. I did not expect that question, and if I’m being honest, I never really considered it.
No one has ever asked me that because most people know not to bring up my dad around me.
I stopped therapy once we stopped talking about career transition and the topic of my family started coming up more often.
Abby has always been brave enough to talk about things she knows may upset me. She really does have a high tolerance for my assholery.
“I—uh, I don’t know.”
It’s honest and it’s all I can give her right now. But I don’t think that was the point. I think she wanted to leave me with something to think about.
Which I will.
Just not right now.
“I think I’d regret it if I didn’t kiss you right now,” I say and tug on her hand, pulling her in. She lets me guide her onto my lap so she’s straddling my hips. I settle my hands on her thighs and she settles hers on my neck, stroking her thumbs over my jaw.
“You’re deflecting,” she says.
“I am,” I say and lean in to kiss her. It’s a single, soft kiss, and when I open my eyes, hers are still closed, like she wasn’t quite ready to meet the end of that moment.
“I’ll allow it,” she says and covers my mouth with her own in a kiss that dissolves every thought about my family or hockey or loss or regret. All that exists right now is her.
I crush her against me, weaving a hand through her ponytail. Her fingers curl, digging into my neck, and the kiss becomes more insistent, her lips pressing harder against mine.
I’d forgotten what intimacy tasted like.
The way vulnerability can season a kiss, give it a punch that wouldn’t otherwise exist. I had forgotten what it feels like to kiss someone with the same lips you’d used to confess things that usually stay hidden.
My secrets, safe between us, and the solid walls of this old lighthouse.
My wide open heart, safe in Abby’s hands.
The same hands that are traveling down my neck, my chest, and my stomach. In one swift motion, she’s removing my shirt. Without a word, she rakes her eyes over my upper body, her top teeth sinking into her bottom lip.
“My ego is going to get too big for this room to hold if you don’t stop looking at me like that,” I say.
“I can’t help myself. Look at you. You look like you were made in a lab.”
“Like a Steve Rogers situation? Or more like Bruce Banner?”
“Who? What?”
“Captain America? The Hulk?”
“You’re just saying words I don’t know,” she says.
“Are you serious?”
“Is this really what you want to be talking about right now?” she asks, stripping off her own shirt.
“We can argue about Marvel later,” I concede, and slide my hands up her ribs, slipping my thumbs under the elastic of her wide-band sports bra.
“You’re wearing too many clothes,” I murmur as I plant a trail of kisses along her shoulder, sliding the bra strap to the side.
“You can change that, if you’d like,” she says.
“I would like.”
As I slip the bra over her head, with her arms raised, I catch a glimpse of black on her side just above her ribs. I thought I saw something yesterday at the pool, but I had tunnel vision and it didn’t really register in my mind at the time.
But now, as I hold her arm up to get a better look, she resists, leaning and twisting away from me.
I catch her gaze.
“What are you trying to hide?” I ask. “Is that a tattoo?”
Her cheeks go bright red, and she folds her arms protectively across her chest, one hand stretched out on her side. To her credit, she maintains eye contact with me.
“It is a tattoo. Can I see it?” I ask. “Is it something embarrassing? Did you lose a bet?”
Her mouth opens like she might say something, but then she bites her bottom lip like she thought better of it. She moves her hand from her side, shifting her other arm back to reveal the tattoo.
It’s small, no bigger than a quarter and easily hidden by her arm or a thick strap. It sits a few inches under her armpit, at the top of her ribs.
One number. Two digits.
My heart sputters in my chest.
33.
My hockey number.
My eyes snap back up to hers.
“Abby, is this…”
She nods, her forehead wrinkled. She chews on her bottom lip, uncertainty set deep in those gorgeous ocean-colored eyes.
“Abby, when did you get this?”
My randomly assigned jersey number on the Orlando Storm was 86, but my number on my very first jersey in youth hockey and the number I carried through my college years was 33.
“I was… I was going to show you at Thanksgiving. But…”
We spent the whole summer after graduation together, her at my place, me at hers.
We drove hours for day trips to the beach, and I helped her set up her first classroom when August rolled around.
Before I went off to training camp in September, we’d made vague plans to see each other over Thanksgiving, whether that meant she would fly to me or me to her, whatever it was.
We promised we’d never go more than three months without seeing each other in person.
We broke up after two months. Before Thanksgiving.
I trace the faded numbers on her ribs with the tip of a finger. “Tattoos are…permanent, Abby.”
“I thought I was going to marry you, Miles.”
I thought I was going to marry her, too.
“You could have gotten it covered,” I say.
“I thought about it. A million times.”
“And your ex? Surely he didn’t like that you had this. Your college boyfriend’s hockey number.”
“He didn’t know.”
“He didn’t know about the tattoo?”
“He didn’t know it was…for you. I told him it was my lucky number.”
“So he just thought you were insanely superstitious?” I ask.
She barks out a laugh at this. “I guess so,” she says.
That Abby never told her ex the real meaning of the tattoo is really fucking with me right now. I’m just trying to process that she has it at all. That’s she’s had a secret tattoo for a decade. A secret tattoo…for me.
“Hazel knows about it?”
“Hazel went with me to get it. She thought it was stupid, but supported me and never once said ‘I told you so’ after you broke up with me.”
“Do you regret getting it?” I ask.
Her smirk is paired with a small huff of laughter. “Sometimes. But the tattoo represents who I was at the time I got it. Plus, you were my first love, and even if I didn’t have that tattoo, you are marked on my life in a permanent way.”
They’re her words, but they land true for me too. Abby isn’t just a marker in my life, though; Abby is the standard. It doesn’t matter how many dates I went on over the last decade—I spent every one of them searching for her in every woman I met. No one measured up. No one compared.
There was no one who made me feel as safe or seen as Abby did, especially at a time in my life when no one felt safe and I didn’t want to be seen.
Of course, Abby isn’t the same girl she was a decade ago.
She’s more. More of everything she was then.
More patient. More kind. More thoughtful. More beautiful.
And now here is she is, half-dressed and on my lap in a lighthouse in Cabo, looking at me like she’s waiting for something.
Maybe she’s waiting for me to say something, but I’m at a loss for words. I am not, however, at a loss for how to communicate everything I’m feeling right now.
I know exactly how to tell Abby how I’m feeling.