Chapter 31 Ari
Ari
Ari knew they should have never gone on a fourth date.
The restaurant was too romantic, she was still holding Drew’s hand, and the way he was looking at her made her feel light and heady.
It was a pull she couldn’t quite explain or disentangle herself from.
She’d been attracted to Drew ever since the night they’d met.
He was handsome and funny and made her feel completely at ease.
And at first, that had felt harmless. There was nothing wrong with admiring the face of a good-looking man, laughing at his jokes, or feeling a quiet thrill whenever she caught his eye.
But she was starting to realize that it wasn’t just a girlish crush on a guy she knew she couldn’t have.
Ari liked him. They’d quickly become friends, told each other way too much, and there was a strange untouched intimacy between them that made it feel like she’d known him a lot longer than eight days.
Had it only been eight days? He was wearing a small smile, the candlelight was casting a golden glow onto his face, and he was looking at her with a warm, gentle gaze that made her want to lean over toward him and cuddle up in his arms. It was becoming a lot harder to convince herself that this was all pretend.
She needed to reroute the conversation before she got too starry eyed.
“So, I know why you take photos, and I know why you moved back home, but I could never figure out why you decided to completely leave college. How come you didn’t transfer to a school closer to home?” she asked, hoping the new topic would kill the romance in the air.
“Because I wanted my full attention to be back home with my family,” he said unconvincingly.
“I don’t want to sound insensitive but … that kind of sounds like a cop-out.”
She knew she was pushing too hard, but the story didn’t entirely add up.
His grandmother was ill and he wanted to spend more time with her, which Ari completely understood.
But he had other options and, while he’d been game to play along with her, she didn’t get the sense that Drew was a particularly impulsive person.
He chose his words carefully and assessed it all.
Dropping out of a college course he’d clearly loved seemed incompatible with who she now knew him to be.
“What I mean is, was that Thanksgiving trip back home a split-second decision or the final push?” she asked curiously. He looked at her for a moment as if trying to figure out how much to tell her, but then he took a sip of his drink and sighed.
“You know how hockey means everything to you, so you want to be the best at it?” he asked. She nodded.
“I got it into my head I would never truly excel as a photographer. Not in the way everyone I went to college with would. Typical self-doubt stuff. I thought I was okay but not brilliant enough to make it all the way.”
“You’ve almost got to be a bit delusional to believe you’ll be the one who makes it,” she said, thinking of how many years she had spent trying to convince herself she could.
“Exactly, so when I found out my grandma was sick, I decided to cut my losses and go back home. That way I wouldn’t have to put myself through the slow torture of giving it my all in LA just to find out that I was only ever going to be just okay.”
“So you opted out to stop yourself from getting hurt?”
“Yeah, and it’s the biggest mistake I think I’ve ever made. But I’m going to fix it.”
“You’re going back?” she asked, surprised.
“No, worse. I think I’m going to try to go all in with this,” he said, tapping his camera.
“Try and make it on my own. There’s this job I’m going to apply for using the portfolio I’ve been building up,” he said, sounding excited as he explained the conversation he’d had with Hans Leitner and listed all the opportunities he was going to go for when he went back home to the States.
“I think speaking to you kind of inspired me,” he admitted.
“How?” she asked, surprised. “All I’ve done since meeting you is divulge my secrets and fears.”
“But you did it.” He smiled, squeezing her hand. “In spite of all the reasons you’ve been trying to count yourself out, you made it to the Olympics.”
Ari let it sink in. He was right. She’d been so focused on what came next that she hadn’t really stopped to appreciate how far she’d come.
“Speaking to you has made me realize that I’d rather put my all into something at the risk of failing than keep playing it safe to avoid disappointment. I love what I do so much that I’d rather spend the next ten years being below average for the shot at maybe, one day, getting good.”
Ari knew what he meant; pouring all her time and energy into hockey was a risk.
She had trained every day and dedicated years of her life to strict routine.
But wanting something and working hard for it didn’t entitle her to success, even now.
She was at the Olympics, but that didn’t mean she would play well enough for the next four years to come back.
There would always be someone who could skate faster or hit the puck sooner than her.
There was no guarantee that she would even score another goal again.
But she did it anyway, foolishly faced the odds and decided that she loved what she did enough to risk the real likelihood of failure. They both did.
“This could all fail, miserably. There’s a significant chance that I’m going to become one of those failed artists who spends the rest of his life talking about how he peaked at twenty-two,” said Drew. He was joking, but she could hear the undertone of fear.
“And I could become a jaded former hockey star who spends the rest of my life talking about how I went to the Olympics once but got so in my head that I didn’t enjoy a single match,” she said, feeling the fear, too.
“One day, we might look back on our lives and wish we’d made smarter, safer decisions. Because you know what? It might not work out,” said Drew.
“But I’d rather be able to say I tried.” She nodded.
She knew that they were both thinking the same thing. The truth hung between them. Unspoken but deeply felt.
“So why are we wasting time?” Drew asked, sitting back in his chair and really looking at her.
She was going to ask him what he meant, but it became crystal clear as soon as she saw his eyes. They were wasting time. Drew and Ari seemed to go against the odds in every other aspect of their lives, so why did their relationship feel like a bigger risk?
“Because we know too much about each other,” she said, gripping on to flimsy reasons.
“Some people spend months trying to get to know someone as well as we do,” he said.
“Exactly, it’s not supposed to be like that. In a normal relationship, you’d start to spot the potential problems over weeks, months, or years.”
“Isn’t it better that we already know, then?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why?”
She thought about it for a moment.
“It’s like buying a used car.”
“And am I the used car in this situation?” he asked, amused.
“We both are.” She smiled, knowing how unromantic she sounded.
“If you buy a new car, you expect it to be perfect, so you get disappointed when a problem comes up on the road. But if you buy an old car, you expect it to have issues. So, when the radio breaks, the engine fails, or the wheels fall off, you’re just grateful it lasted longer than you thought it would,” she said.
“I never thought a girl would liken me to a faulty old car on the fourth date,” he laughed. It was a ridiculous metaphor.
“I don’t mean it in a bad way. I mean that I’m not talking to you and looking for reasons why it won’t work out like I would on a regular date.
We both already know why it might not work out.
So, I guess my worry is, what if…” She paused midsentence, opened her mouth, then closed it.
She couldn’t bring herself to say what she was silently thinking out loud.
“But what if it does work out?” he said.
“Exactly.”
“That’s what you’re worried about?” he asked softly. She just nodded. He gently took her hand from the other side of the table. “I like you, and I’m pretty sure you like me, too. Isn’t that a good enough reason to try?”
“I don’t know.…” she began, because a hundred thoughts were swirling in her mind all at once.
“Can you give me one good reason why we should leave this date and never see each other again?”
“We have less than ten days before the Games end.”
“That’s more time than we had on New Year’s.”
“When it ends—” she began.
“If it ends,” he interrupted.
“When it ends, Drew, we’re going home to opposite sides of the ocean, remember?” she said. His smile wavered for a moment but then it lifted.
“Okay, fair. But a lot of really great, life-changing things end. That’s no reason not to start.”
“It could get messy,” she said.
“Let’s be honest,” he laughed. “It already is.”
She racked her head for more reasons, but they all seemed weak. As Drew looked over at her with that soft, gentle smile, her mind listed reasons to stay. They sat in silence for a moment before he nodded, quietly let go of her hand, and sat up in his chair.
“We should take that photo you wanted,” he said. “But not for the internet, just for us. It will either be a good story one day, or something to remember each other by.”
As Drew asked a waiter walking past if he could take a photo of them, Ari quieted the voices in her head telling her not to get her hopes up.
She shuffled her chair closer to Drew’s, and he did the same until they were side by side.
He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and they turned toward each other at the same time, their cheeks brushing for a fraction of a second before they both gently pulled back.
Ari heard the click of the shutter and felt the pace of her heartbeat go up.
The waiter gave the camera back, but neither of them moved.
“Do you remember those photos you took of me on New Year’s?” she asked, giving in to the pull.
“Yeah, I printed them this morning so I could give them to you.”
“Where are they?”
“Back at my hotel.”
“Can we go and see them?” she asked.
He looked over at her. Up close, she could see the tiny flecks of gray in his bright brown eyes and the way the skin around them softened as his expression settled into understanding.
He nodded and paid the bill. Then they stood up, grabbed their coats, and headed out into the snow together.
Ari knew it was a bad idea. But surely it couldn’t hurt if she’d already accounted for the ending?