Chapter 25
MILES
Abby has been gone a week, Gray leaves tomorrow, and for once in my life, I can name the way I feel about it. Anxious.
I’m not sure I’m ready to be alone with my thoughts again.
I didn’t realize how lonely Cabo has been until I was spending my free time with Abby or Gray.
Destiny is always great company, but that’s once a day for sixty to ninety minutes.
I’ve missed having people I love around me.
I’ve missed the conversation and having someone to laugh with, people to share meals with.
This is the part of moving constantly I thought I didn’t care about.
When I traveled for hockey, I was always with people.
I had my hockey family, and even though I was nursing a heartbreak, I had people in my life to support me.
Once I lost that, my world shrank. And I thought I was doing okay with it, but the way my palms get sweaty every time I think about Gray leaving tomorrow tells me otherwise.
Tonight is our last dinner. We meet at a more casual dining joint for beers and burgers. We order and get our first round of drinks, and it only takes one beer for him to bring up a touchy subject.
“So why did you ask about Dad last week? When we had that dinner with Abby. You asked about him and then freaked out. What happened?”
I pick at the label of the beer bottle. Usually I’m not the one to be so vulnerable with Gray.
I’m the emotional anchor, but after the way he got me through the panic attack, I’m feeling a little more willing to open up, less like I need to be strong for us.
It turns out he can take a turn sometimes.
“Abby had asked me a question earlier that day. About regret. If I’d get to the end of my life or if Dad got to the end of his, would I regret having missed out on a relationship with him?”
“Would you?” Gray asks.
“I don’t know. That’s why it got me thinking. I also thought if you could live with what he did then maybe it meant I was capable of it too.”
“Listen, I’m not going to therapize you because I know you’re going to find someone when you get out of here, but what is it about what he did that you can’t move past even now, fifteen years later?”
“I think the better question is why can you get past it? He broke up our family, Gray. He made you and Mom the laughingstock of our small town. One of the three people I trusted most in the world broke that trust. I thought Mom and Dad were in love and that was a lie. It made me think love was a lie.”
“But you still fell in love with Abby.”
Because even when I didn’t believe in love, I believed in Abby. She was easy to believe in. When nothing else made sense, Abby always did.
“And I was never able to tell her. I felt it. I felt it in my bones and I could never say the words to her. That man’s choices fucked me up.”
“No wonder she doesn’t want to be with you.”
“Wow. Fuck you, Gray.”
Our food arrives, and we dress our burgers with ketchup, stuffing our faces immediately.
I know he has more to say by the way he’s staring at me with a smug smile. Either he’s going to explain himself or I’m going to have to ask him to, like a conversational game of chicken. I hold out as long as I can.
“Well?” I prompt, losing the game.
“She probably does actually want to be with you, but her reasons for wanting time to get to know you before diving into the deep end again were valid for all the reasons she said, and she was too nice to say that you still have so much fucking baggage with Dad. She probably wants to make sure you aren’t going to fuck it up again. ”
The food in my mouth is suddenly more difficult to chew. I finish the bite with effort and set my burger down, but he’s not done.
“You just said to me that Dad’s choice got you so fucked that you couldn’t even tell her you loved her back when you dated the first time. Why the hell would she want to commit to you again?”
“Because I’m not that guy. I can express my feelings now.”
“How does she know that? Did you show her that in the week you spent with her?”
“How was I—”
“Exactly.”
I rest my forehead on my palms, processing his words. It’s not like Abby didn’t say all of this the other night. She did, and a hell of a lot nicer than Gray is saying it now. But this time, I don’t have an anxiety soundtrack in the background.
I always knew that what she wanted made sense—I just couldn’t get past the idea that she didn’t want me as much as I wanted her. I thought if she did, that she would for sure want to date me no matter the risks.
But I broke her heart once. My track record only proves that I’m capable of leaving. Of hurting. And my words don’t speak as loud as my actions will.
Even in my words, I haven’t proven myself to her. I couldn’t tell her I love her because of…this. Because of what happened with my family and the way it broke my view of love.
I’ve held on so tightly to all the things I’ve been feeling since I was eighteen, unable to move past it. Like a mosquito encased in amber, but my amber is resentment.
If I have any hope of a successful relationship with Abby, I have to get out of my encasement.
“When did you get so wise about matters of the heart?” I ask. “You’ve never been in a relationship.”
“Because I keep watching you and everyone else around me fuck them up. Learning from everyone’s mistakes. Plus, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what an idiot you’re being.”
“Stop calling me an idiot.”
“Then stop acting like one.”
I chuck a fry at him. It bounces off his cheek and lands on his plate. He snaps it up and devours it.
We clear our plates, silence descending on us as we eat. I’m glad for it. I want to wrap my mind around all of this.
“He asks about you, you know,” Gray says, leaning back in his chair with a fresh beer, bringing up our dad again. I flinch inside, but curiosity and a desire to be better win out over my grudge.
“Do you tell him things?”
“Sometimes. He mostly just wants to know how you are.”
Anger bubbles up in my chest, gurgling up into my throat, but I swallow it away.
“Yeah, well…actions have consequences and I don’t pity the ones he’s enduring for his selfish choices.”
It’s all I can manage without letting my anger spill out of my mouth. It’s the best I can do, given that I have no idea what else to do with all the fire burning in my chest.
“I don’t think you know this,” Gray says.
He wants me to ask, “Know what?” He’s baiting me. But I lost the last round of chicken, so it’s his turn. I stare him down, finish a beer, and order another one, picking at the last of my fries before he finally breaks.
“He was going to leave earlier.”
“Dad? Was…what?”
Gray nods, taking a pull on his beer.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“He was going to leave your sophomore year of high school. Mom asked him to stay. She said you would need him because of hockey. That you would need his help navigating college recruiters and contracts and making the best decision for your future.”
And I did. I was young and dumb and I had no idea what I was looking at.
All I knew is that one day, I was just a kid playing hockey and the next thing I knew, colleges all over the country wanted me to come play for them.
They were making big promises and offering large amounts of scholarship money and I had no clue what I was doing.
My dad was there for every step of it, in every conversation, at my side any time I visited a school and heard out their coaches.
He helped me pick a school. I had the experience I did because he helped me get there.
He set me up for success because even though he wasn’t there when I was navigating NHL recruitment and contracts, everything he taught me then was still relevant years later.
There were a lot of times I’d wished he’d been there to help me decide about my career, but I was in a bad place and wanted nothing to do with him.
All of my insides feel frozen. I have to remind myself to inhale and exhale. I can’t process that he almost wasn’t there for those years, that he was going to leave sooner and changed his mind.
In the end he left anyway, but knowing he stayed for a while…for me…it’s really messing with my head. I can’t figure out if it changes anything for me, or what it means, but if I wasn’t going to get a therapist before, I definitely am now.
“Like, should he have cheated on Mom with another woman? No,” Gray continues as I reel.
“And that was shitty and he knows that. But he stayed when he could have left. Was it selfish of him to eventually leave, yeah, maybe. And for at least those two years, when you needed him. He wasn’t selfish.
He and Nancy didn’t really see each other for those two years so he could be there for you. At least you got that.”
Those last words are laced with a bitterness I don’t usually hear from Gray when it comes to our dad.
It’s the first hint of any emotion besides acceptance that I’ve seen from him about it.
I feel for him, and not for the first time.
My chest hurts thinking about how he had to navigate high school without Dad, without me.
Maybe this is why he put aside the hurt.
I had good years with Dad while Gray was left wanting.
But that is only one of the things I’m having to process, as Gray is literally rewriting history for me.
When Dad told us that he and Nancy had been having an affair and he was leaving, I didn’t ask for details.
I didn’t ask how long they had been sleeping together or when they started or if they took a little break so Dad could focus on his family.
I didn’t care. Dad was leaving because he was a horrible person, love was a lie, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Maybe he made a choice to stay with the family for a few extra years, but ultimately, he chose himself. His new life.
“He still ended up leaving. He still made the selfish choice at the end of the day.”
“I don’t disagree with you, dude. I’m just saying, there was, in all of that fuckery, at least an ounce of effort on his part to be a good father to you.
And that maybe it’s something to think about while you figure out your life.
I’m not saying forgive him and make amends.
You should have all the information, though. ”
“How do you know this?”
“I talk to Mom and Dad. I have conversations with them about things, including the things that happened that you don’t talk about. You’re literally the only one who doesn’t—who refuses to speak about it. The rest of us are having conversations. Maybe you should try it.”
This is also news to me. I thought no one was talking about The Affair.
The Mistake. But maybe Gray is right. If it ever got brought up, I was the one who shut it down.
I didn’t allow it at family dinners or in private conversations.
If I was nearby, no one was talking about Dad or what he did to us.
I thought I was doing the right thing by never talking about it, by keeping it tightly sealed in a locked box somewhere inside me where no one would touch it, no one would talk about it, no one would even know it was a problem.
But everyone’s been handling me with care, seeing it for the problem that it actually is and, like Abby, approaching me with caution.
It’s a wonder Abby wants to date me at all, given how bruised and battered I am, and how little work I’ve done in the last eleven years about this one, huge, glaring thing.
I thought leaving hockey and having an identity crisis was going to be the hardest emotional work I’d ever have to put in, but I can see now that it just scratched the surface of what I need to approach to be the kind of man that Abby deserves.
“I’m never flying you to Mexico to hang out with me ever again,” I say, and Gray barks out a laugh.
As we get up to leave the table, I pull him into a hug. We’re not a particularly affectionate pair, the two of us, but Gray has saved me more than once this week.
I told him the vacation was for him because he’s a workaholic who needs to slow down, but it turns out I needed him here for me.
I wouldn’t have gone to the doctor last week if it weren’t for him and Destiny, and I only made it through my first panic attack because he was there to bring me back to myself.
And here he is again, opening my eyes to the truth about myself that might be the start of something new. Something I’ve needed for a long time.