Andrew
“The girl at the bookstore, Danielle,” he says, “what’s she like?”
“Depends on who you ask,” JT says, throwing him a bottle of water from the cooler in the back of his truck.
He thinks could spend his whole life exploring them and never see enough .
“Explain,” he takes a long drink of water before throwing the bottle on the ground. He lifts a board over his head and follows JT down the path. They’re repairing a hole in one of the floorboards on the porch of a cabin that JT had only found out about this morning.
Before JT had even asked, Roscoe, Sokka, and Andrew had jumped into his truck and they were on their way.
“Well,” JT says, moving to the end of the broken board, “if you ask Ainsley, you’ll leave thinking she’s the devil incarnate.”
“That bad?” Andrew asks, setting the new board down and grabbing for the hammer. “She seemed okay to me.”
“Why don’t you just try to get Danielle’s number and you can learn all of this yourself?” JT asks, prying the broken board up with a crowbar. Andy is glad he’s friends with him, because if he wasn’t, JT definitely could have murdered him six different ways and made it look like an accident.
“Are you kidding? Look what happened last time! ”
“You mean when you didn’t realize that the clearly-on-wheels ladder would move when you leaned on it?” JT says, grinning over at him.
“Yeah, yeah. We were both there, we know what happened,” Andrew says, prying the nails out of the opposite end of the board. “I’m off my game.”
“In more ways than one.”
“Dude.”
“My bad,” JT says, lifting his hands in surrender. “Seriously, though, that was tragic. I didn’t even mess up that bad when I started dating Ainsley.”
“She rejected your marriage proposal.”
“The first time,” JT replies, “and we’re married now, so I still got her in the end. When’s the last time you went on a date?”
“Do you mean an actual date with someone I like, or a date with a puck bunny? Because those are two very different styles of date.”
“Both,” JT says, pulling the board up and tossing it to the ground.
“Actual date, at least seven years. Puck bunny date… A year?” Andrew admits. “Maybe longer.”
“No wonder you’re a walking disaster. ”
“That’s just my anxiety,” Andrew snorts. “And I might be a disaster, but I have a great sense of humor. Seriously, tell me about Danielle. I’ll owe you.”
“The only thing I’ll tell you,” JT says, “is that right now, she’s going through a lot. If you’re even thinking about trying to start something, you’d better be patient, and clear on what exactly it is you want.”
Andrew pauses.
Is he ready to put time and effort into pursuing someone, only for it to crash and burn at the end of the summer if nothing comes of it? He’s never even been sure if he’s a relationship kind of guy, and now one girl at a bookstore has him rethinking his whole life?
He starts hammering a nail into the board.
Something tells him that this girl is worth it. He’s not sure what it is, but he has a feeling. A good one, even though he needs to start off by being normal around her first, and he’s not sure he’ll be able to make that one happen.
“I’ve got nothing but time,” Andrew says, finally, “two whole months’ worth. Then I’ll either be back on the ice, or hiding. I guess we’ll find out either way. ”
“Two months isn’t a lot of time,” JT says, “don’t do anything if you’re going to put an end date on it. She’s been through too much.”
“You knew you had four days with Ainsley,” Andrew protests. “I literally have fifteen times that.”
“Ainsley and I had over twenty years of history,” Jamie says, hammering the board into place. “Completely different.”
Andrew takes his truck into town, Roscoe in the front seat, as soon as he and JT get back from the cabins. There’s a bunch of dog-friendly places in town, and as far as he knows, Spine Crackers is, too.
Even if it wasn’t, he could just slap on Roscoe’s ESA harness to get him into places.
He tries really hard not to do that, because there are people who need ESAs more than he does, but technically, Roscoe comes with a written order from Andrew’s therapist as one.
She’d finally come around to the idea when Andrew had first gotten him from a German Shepherd rescuer and said that having him around helped him stay calm .
Andrew isn’t even sure what he’s doing back at the bookstore, and he hates that. Four months ago, he was the best player in the NHL and he had the swagger and ego to back it up, and there was literally nothing stopping him from getting any girl that he wanted.
Whether it was for a night or longer. Not that he had really ever capitalized on the “or longer” option.
His last serious, years-long relationship had been in college, and that had ended in a disaster because she hadn’t been able to handle his travel schedule when he had tried his hardest to make it work.
When he’d gotten to the NHL, he’d kept it to one night only, and those one nights hardly ever happened during the season when all of his focus was on his game.
Even in the rare times he hadn’t stuck to the rules of his own making, there had almost never been a girl that he considered for more than a couple of months. Certainly, never one he’d bring into the NHL fold.
Now? He doesn’t even know how to talk to a woman without putting a foot in his mouth.
Or knocking over a ladder, apparently .
He’s in Lake Placid for anonymity, but he’s starting to wonder if that was his best move, if only so he could have spared himself that first interaction. If she’d had any indication of who he is, it might have been helpful.
Or maybe it would have made it worse because people have their preconceived notions about him.
Maybe she would have told him she wanted him dead for losing the Stanley Cup. And he would have run out of the store and never left JT’s basement again because nowhere in this world is safe. She knows where JT lives, though, so that probably wouldn’t have kept him hidden.
His breathing picks up. Roscoe nudges his hand with his nose. He’s literally thinking about a girl he’s spoken to exactly one time finding him and murdering him in his sleep.
In the mountains.
Over a hockey game.
Because his life has turned into a horror movie and he doesn’t know how to move on.
Five things you can see. Four you can touch. Three you can hear. Two you can smell. One you can taste .
He digs his thumbnail into his index finger, waiting for his pulse to steady as he grounds himself.
He’s been using the mental strategy more often than usual, and he’s thankful he has it to fall back on.
Especially when he’s unsure of what he’s doing, which seems to be more and more frequent these days.
Andrew parks his truck in the front of the store, and lets Roscoe out before clipping his leash on and heading inside. He spots the ‘Help Wanted’ sign with the yellowing edges in the window, and it gets the wheels in his brain turning as he steps inside.
The little girl that he saw run in the other day, tears streaming down her face, is sitting at one of the café tables coloring, with a muffin on a plate in front of her beside a glass of milk.
She’s humming, and looks up just as Roscoe practically pulls Andrew’s arm out to get to her.
The dog is not subtle at all.
“Roscoe, wait!” Andrew says, planting his feet against the dog’s strength. Roscoe stops on a dime and the little girl squeals with laughter.
“He’s pretty!” she says, but she doesn’t move from her chair. “Can I pet him? ”
“Of course!” Andrew says, signaling for the dog to sit. Roscoe immediately sits, and he thinks that the dog is trying to show off because he’s never responded to a command that quickly. “Thank you for asking, that’s really good manners.”
“Mama always told me that, no matter how bad I want to, I can’t just pet a dog because I don’t know them,” she says, shrugging. “I have to introduce myself, first.”
The little girl hops off her chair and approaches slowly, holding her hand out for Roscoe to sniff. The dog’s tail starts wagging a mile a minute, and he stands up and starts licking all over her face.
She squeals and throws her arms around his neck, giggling as he keeps licking her.
“I think he likes you,” Andrew says, squatting down so he’s eye level with the girl. He grins at his dog’s antics before taking his collar and making him sit again.
“What’s his name?”
“Roscoe,” Andrew says. “after –”
“Roscoe P. Coltrane?” the girl asks, eyes going wide. “From Dukes of Hazzard ? ”
“How do you know about that show?” Andrew says, laughing at her reaction. He didn’t even know they put reruns on TV, let alone that an elementary schooler would know what it was.
It had been one of his favorite shows for as long as he could remember, his parents had always let him stay up late to watch it. It was either Dukes of Hazzard , or NHL games, and that was just about all that was on in the house past seven at night.
“How do you know about that show?” she counters, folding her arms over her chest. “My dad said no one else watches it.”
“I think he had to say that,” Andrew says, raising an eyebrow conspiratorially, “it’s like a secret club.”
Her eyes get even wider, if that’s possible. “A secret club?”
“A secret, secret club,” he says with a nod, “and you and I are members. So, we can’t tell anyone.”
“I promise I won’t,” she replies.
“Pinky swear?” Andrew asks, holding out his pinky.
“Pinky swear,” she says, wrapping her own pinky around his. “My name is Harper. I’m six years and nine days old. ”
Andrew grins, doing quick math in his head. “My name is Andrew, but you can call me Andy. I’m thirty-two years, two months, and seven days old.”
He stands to his full height.
“I saw you working hard coloring when I came in,” he says, “and I don’t want to keep you from it. I just came to get some coffee.”
“My Aunt D makes the best coffee.” Harper says, bouncing up and down on her toes, “at least that’s what the grown-ups say when they come in. I can go get her!”