Chapter 15
EVAN
I was going to fly apart if Perry didn’t give me some hint what he was thinking. Did he want this? Would it matter if we were teammates with Alan? Would the attraction take a back seat? Would it ramp up? Did he even want to—
“You know how much I love curling,” he said finally, long after we’d put all our outer clothes and curling stuff away.
“Yeah, I know.” I grinned. “Why d’you think I learned?”
“Exactly my point. You learned because of me. You don’t have to do this because of me.”
“Do you want to do it?”
Silence.
“Pere, you have to talk to me. Plain English. No subtext. No heat-of-the-moment confessions.” I closed my eyes, breathed deep a few times because it was a thing my therapist once told me would help self-regulate, and managed a second of clarity.
“I want it,” I blurted, because it was true. “It sounds like fun.” Because it did.
“It sounds like a lot of work. Practice all the time. Almost constant travel. We may have to move, depending where we base the team, which impacts our jobs.”
“Yeah, but seriously. A chance to be in the Olympics. And Channing’s been so close he can taste it, so he wouldn’t have asked us if he didn’t think it was still possible with us. The Olympics, babe.”
A smile slowly bloomed on his face. “That’d be pretty cool.”
His phone rang. “Robbie,” he said after a glance at the screen, then answered it. “Hey. You’re on speaker.”
There was a loud whoop through the device. Then: “Are you fucking kidding me? You have to think about it? He said you were thinking about it. Why are you thinking about it?”
“I was supposed to tell you to call him. How—”
“We stopped at Tim’s for the ride. They showed up and—you have to think about it? I’m quitting my job, like, tomorrow. What’s to think about? Why are you thinking?”
“The fact we both want to sleep with him,” I piped up.
There was a beat of silence. “All the more reason?”
Perry chuckled. “Guy barely skips a beat,” he muttered to me. “What about your roommate?” he asked louder, for Robbie.
“Honestly, what part of he’s straight do you guys not understand?” The sigh he let out was epic. “And maybe this is exactly what I need to move on. To get away from him and just, IDK, get over it.”
“So you want we should uproot our lives to help you get over a crush?” Perry asked.
“Because we totally would,” I added.
Perry gave me a look, and I smacked a kiss on his cheek.
“You guys, though. Seriously. Are we, or are we not, doing this?”
“You don’t need us.” Perry glanced to me.
I shrugged.
“Plus there’s our team,” he went on. “Shaw, and maybe Darby now. What happens to the team if we all take off on them?”
“You think either of them wouldn’t understand?
” Robbie asked. “Besides a couple of the kids from the Timmins team are moving down to go to the university and they asked Darby if any of the teams in our club were looking for players. So they can easily pick them up and make a new team. A damn good one too, probably, because I know they didn’t win much this weekend, but that’s because they’re kids and inexperienced, not because they aren’t strong players.
Shaw and Darby would be excellent teachers for them. ”
Perry was still watching me.
“Did you wake up this morning thinking you’d ever have the chance to be an Olympic athlete?” I asked.
“Obviously not.”
“This is like sports rags to riches, Pere. I was the awkward kid no one ever picked to be on their team. Not gonna lie. I’d love to grin into a TV camera and tell them all to suck it.”
Perry and Robbie both laughed.
“Yeah,” Perry said at last. “I could probably work remotely sometimes.”
“Were you ever really gonna say no?” Robbie asked him.
“I—no? I don’t know. It feels like a huge deal.”
“It is a huge deal. But a good one,” I assured him. “The dream you never wanted to dream in case it couldn’t come true, but now it can.”
“Maybe.”
“Which is why you were never going to say no.”
“I didn’t want to decide for us. For you.”
“Baby.” I kissed his cheek. “I’m a grown-ass grown-up. I can decide for myself.”
“But you told him we go together.”
“Like rama-lama-ding-dong?” Robbie asked.
“Bye Robbie!” Perry called.
“Bye! Call me tomorrow so we can talk deets.”
“Sure.” Perry hung up and turned to me. “I’m being serious. You have to decide for you what you want.”
“I just told you.”
“You want to stick it to a bunch of people you knew in elementary school?”
“I want to pursue this thing I found out I’m really good at. Like literally Olympic level good, maybe. And I get to do it with arguably my favourite person ever. So kind of a no-brainer.”
“When you put it like that.”
“You’re overthinking it,” I said.
“As I do.”
“Which is why I’m here. To keep you out of your head.”
“I’ll need to be so in my head for this, if we do it. What if I can’t? What if all the people, the press, the pressure—”
“You handled that guy outside the rink perfectly today. Complete honesty, confidence, and crazy cold fuck-off vibes without being mean about it. I was impressed.”
“You’re biased.”
“Obviously. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t do that. Plus you played a tight game. Nothing got to you.”
Perry slumped against the couch and glared at his socks. “What if that was only because you were there?”
“It wasn’t. I didn’t do anything.”
“Held my hand?”
“Not today. At least not like that. Today, you played your game without me. Well. I mean, not like yesterday. Today, you were fire all on your own. That’s why Alan wants us both. For his team. The other, we’re just speculating, but it doesn’t matter as much as this does.”
“It’s so much pressure on you to try and hold me together if I freak out and I know you came through yesterday but you can’t always do that. That isn’t how we really work.”
“I don’t think it will come to that, and anyway, if it doesn’t work out it doesn’t work out but no one ever regrets doing something like this, right? You take your shot and you miss, at least you took the shot.”
He nodded.
“Don’t take it and you’ll always wonder what if.”
Again, he nodded. “You know what it feels like?”
“What?”
He straightened and wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me close. “Feels like that party when I walked into that room and told you to get dressed. I was so freaked out that I even did that. I was sure you’d tell me to fuck off. I mean, you were in the middle of it.”
“But you took your shot.”
“I did. No regrets.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why me? We barely knew each other. Why’d you do that?”
“I wanted you.”
“Yeah, but—”
He put a finger over my lips. “I just wanted you. Because you’re beautiful. Funny. Confident. Smart. Kind. I knew all that about you.”
“You knew I was the barista at your favourite coffee joint.”
“I spent a lot of time in that coffee joint.”
“Stalking?”
“Watching. Mostly working, but also watching. So when I saw you at the party and I knew those frat guys, and what they were like, I decided you deserved better.”
“I wasn’t being coerced or anything. You know that, right?”
“Well, you were drunk, but no, I know. You were into it. And I know you wouldn’t have expected more than a good fuck out of them but…” He shrugged.
“You wanted to be the one doing the fucking.”
“I did. And I decided if I went up there and told you to leave the party with me, and if you did, then maybe I could have that. And here we are.”
“So you know that I got up and left them there and followed you because that’s what I wanted too, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know that when I say I want this curling chance, it’s because I want the chance. And I want it with you. And Robbie, I guess. He can come too.” I grinned. “It’s going to be amazing.”
“It’s going to be a lot.”
“It will. And that’s okay because we’ll be doing it together, and that makes anything and everything doable.”