Chapter 40
MELT YOUR HEART
Ledger
“Time to confess. Where did your plant daddy side come from?” Aubrey asks as we walk along Robson Street, passing eclectic local shops peddling candles and stationery alongside flashy designer brand-name stores hawking handbags and sunglasses. We’re en route to a dinner place she’s picked out.
She won’t tell us what it is. It’s part of her spoil us plan.
I do want to answer her question, but the more I let down my guard with her, the more I want to let it down.
I’ve still got the wounds from my marriage ending.
On the other hand, can Aubrey really hurt me?
Come Saturday, we say goodbye. I’ll be back with my monkey plants, my mean cat, and the ticking clock of the big decision looming over me.
“Can’t a guy just like plants?” I say, avoiding the topic a little longer.
“Sure, but cigars aren’t always cigars. Why plants?” she presses.
Because my dad wasn’t into them. Because they weren’t sports. Because it was no one else’s thing in my family.
Ah, fuck it. She deserves to know. As we stop at the corner of a bustling street, traffic whisking by on a Wednesday night, I turn to the redhead with the beguiling brown eyes.
They’re big and deep, and they make me open up to her.
“Because they were all mine,” I say with a shrug.
The shrug is for me—resignation to the effect she has on my closed, cold heart.
“When I was a teenager, I needed something that had nothing at all to do with hockey,” I add. There, I said it. “An interest that was entirely separate from the ice.”
“You needed an escape,” she says thoughtfully.
“Yeah, I did.” I scratch my jaw, weighing how far I want to go.
This is getting heavy. This is getting close to the stuff I keep locked up tight.
The nightmares, the twinge in my knee, the sense of dread as the season marches unstoppably closer.
I want to play hockey. Truly, I do. But I want it to be fun.
I just don’t know if it is anymore. I meet her gaze again. “Sometimes I still do.”
“We all do, bro,” Dev says with genuine understanding.
I’m not sure he ever needs an escape from hockey. He’s lived it and breathed it since my dad coached him in juniors, when we were younger, and I helped my dad. Dev was eager, relentless, always ready. There was never ever a day in his life when Dev wasn’t the put me in, coach guy.
I was that guy for a long time.
But I’m different now. Eventually, Father Time catches up to all of us. It’s happened to the greats in football, basketball, and hockey. It’s the one phenomenon no man is immune from.
“We all do, don’t we,” I echo, since it’s easier than pointing out the differences between us. As we cross the street—and maybe it’s psychosomatic—my knee barks, then I look at Dev, spry, five years younger.
Maybe he is right about dog years.
“I think I was expecting you to say your grandma liked plants or you had an aunt who was a botanist,” Aubrey says, picking up the plant thread. “But it’s very you that you found this interest on your own.”
I fight off a smile. She observes me too closely, sees me too well.
That awareness makes my pulse race a little faster.
I do still want to jump over the boards and slam my stick against the puck, but that desire is mixed with others now.
With unexpected new ones. Like this—I want to see her at a game, skate over to her, and press a sweaty, exhausted kiss to her pretty face at the end of a hard-won victory.
Things that’ll never happen.
I shove those thoughts aside when my phone pings with a text. I swipe it quickly, nerves prickling. Maybe it’s Garrett again.
But it’s a text from Hollis, and there’s a video attached. “Hollis sent me something,” I say, intrigued since the thumbnail is him and Jack.
I waggle the screen at Aubrey and Dev, and we stop in front of an awning in front of a bar. I hit play. “Thought you might want to know your cat and I are besties. Check him out,” Hollis says, then strides across my home with my cat riding his shoulders.
“You have a parrot cat,” Aubrey says, awed.
“Evidently.”
“Does he do other tricks?”
“He’s never done a single trick for me,” I grumble, but with begrudging admiration for Hollis’s determination to teach a cat.
A second video lands.
I shake my head, but I’m laughing. I can only imagine what he’s sending now. I hit play once more.
“High five,” Hollis says to the cat, who’s sitting across from him at the kitchen table. The cat lifts his paw and high fives my cousin.
“Ohhh! He is the cat charmer,” Dev declares.
“Dude, you’re killing me,” I say to the video.
Hollis turns to the camera almost like he’s heard me. “Sorry,” he says with zero contrition. “Should have called it the high paw.”
He smiles and the video ends.
“Your teammate is too charming,” Aubrey says to Dev, then to me, she asks, “And the cat? Is he named Jack because he has only one eye? Like Calico Jack the pirate?”
“No. It’s short for Jackass because ever since I adopted him from Little Friends Animal Rescue, he’s been a jerk,” I say, feeling terrible now I named him that.
Aubrey pats my back. “Maybe you should have named him Calico Jack. Maybe he’d have liked it more to have a badass pirate name.”
I heave a sigh. “You might be right.”
With her other hand, she taps her chin for a few seconds. “When did you get him from Little Friends?”
“Couple years ago. At the Hockey Hotties calendar fundraiser in the park.”
“I remember that! That’s when Trina and the guys announced their relationship,” she recounts.
“And distracted the media with their romance,” Dev adds.
“Now everyone’s used to hockey throuples,” Aubrey says with amusement, then she meets my gaze again. “So you got a cat that day? Was it…sublimation?”
I scrunch my brow. “For…what?”
“Trina said she thought you were checking me out then,” she teases, giving my back a bit of a squeeze now.
I flash back to that day. To noticing Garrett’s little sister in the park. To thinking she was off-limits, but so damn pretty too. “Trina’s right,” I admit. “But then I met Marla shortly after, married her quickly, then lost her just as quickly.”
Timing. It’s really everything, isn’t it? Maybe if I hadn’t been so worried about her being Garrett’s sister, I’d have said something that day. But maybe not. “Guess I should have swooped in before Aiden did.”
There’s regret in my tone.
In Dev’s sigh, too, when he adds, “And I was with Eva.”
Aubrey goes quiet for a few seconds, maybe contemplating her own what-ifs as well. Wondering what it’d have been like if we’d all connected when we were truly free.
“Well, one good thing came out of it. Or two, really. I started volunteering with Little Friends, and you got a cat. Who’s probably getting a new name very soon.” That’s Aubrey. Looking on the bright side.
“Calico Jack,” I say, trying that on for size.
She doesn’t let go of my back for the rest of the block. I want to walk all night. But when we reach the corner, we’re clearly at the place Aubrey picked out. I crack up at the orange name written across the window in a vintage font. Melt Your Heart. “You did it,” I say to her, impressed.
She smiles proudly. We’re standing in front of a grilled cheese restaurant that she found for my friend. “Let’s make it National Grilled Cheese Day. It’s your cheat day, Dev,” Aubrey says.
Dev drops his head, shaking it in delight, perhaps trying to hide his smile but utterly failing. “I’m all in,” he says.
I bet there’s a double meaning there.
We go inside, and my pulse kicks up again.
I want to kiss her. I want him to kiss her.
I want to tell her that taking me to that plant shop and taking him to this grilled cheese joint is just doing it for me.
Making me feel like I could escape into her.
Because of what she does for me, for him, and for us.
Feelings are such dangerous fools though. Best to focus on food instead.
Ignoring the mushy thoughts and the squishy things she’s doing to my heart, I order a gouda on sourdough while Aubrey picks a cheddar and apple, then nudges Dev, who’s perusing the chalkboard menu. “Get the Ultimate. You can do it,” she goads.
He draws a deep, fortifying breath, then nods a few times. “All right. I’m going in.”
After we order, we grab a table in the corner. The place is pretty empty. Aubrey glances around, then something flashes in her eyes. A decision, maybe? Like something’s been on her mind, but she wants it off her heart too?
“The bird on my ankle?”
“Yes?” I ask.
“I said I got it for my dad. And that’s true.
I did. Just to remember him by. But also to remember things he said.
His words about being happy and doing things you love.
So it was for him, but it was also for me to remember those words.
To do those things. Except, I think I messed it all up,” she says, her tone stretched thin.
“What do you mean?” I ask, concerned.
“I told you I only wanted to marry Aiden because my dad thought he was the right guy for me,” she blurts out and she said that at dinner the other night, but the emotions in her eyes tells me there’s more to the story.
“My mom was so sure of it too. I thought I was making them happy. I always wanted them to be happy when I was younger,” she says, barreling on.
I was not expecting this new confessional, but judging from the speed and her vulnerability she needs to share this.
“But when I was in junior high,” she continues, “they went through a rough patch, and I was pretty much the only kid at home. I tried really hard to make them happy. To entertain them. To tell them stories. To cover up the silence. The tension. The way everything felt so strained. Later, after they stayed together, working through whatever it was, I just became that person. Always wanting everyone to have a good time. Making sure everyone has everything they need.”
I get why she’s telling us this. “Are you saying that’s why you took us around today?” I ask, but I’m not mad if that’s the reason. I am, however, intensely curious.
“Because you don’t have to make us happy. I can only speak for me, but I already am,” Dev says.
Her smile is soft, relaxed as she shakes her head.
“I don’t feel that way with you guys at all.
That’s what I like about…this thing. I did feel that way about my family.
I just wanted you to know the deeper reason for why I almost got married.
I wanted to share it since you’ve been so good to me.
I’m glad Aiden showed his true colors, I’m glad you guys were there for me at the church, and I’m glad I’m here now with both of you,” she says, then breathes a sigh of…
not exactly pure relief. More like delighted relief.
“Me too,” Dev says, meeting her gaze with utter sincerity and something else—a look in his eyes I haven’t seen before. One that’s not hard to read at all. A look that says he’s falling for her. “Really glad.”
It feels too easy to say the same thing. Instead, I say, “Then you’re going to sit back and enjoy the hell out of it as we make you happy the next few days.”
“Fine. If you insist, then I’m all in.” Her smile turns a little naughty. “And there are some things I want to try…”
She shares a few of those things, and it’s not my heart that melts this time. It’s my brain.
“Yes. We’re up for that,” I say immediately, certain I can speak for Dev in this regard.
And I need to since he’s speechless.
The naughty conversation ends when a server brings our food. After we thank him and he leaves, I blurt out impulsively, “This will be my last season.”
I didn’t plan on saying that. Hell, I wasn’t even sure this was going to be my last season. Until now. But now feels like the right moment to declare myself, alongside all these other confessions. Just voicing what’s been swirling inside me lessens some of the tension, some of the uncertainty.
I feel lighter. More free.
Aubrey’s eyes are warm as she reaches for my hand across the table and squeezes it. “Good for you.”
“Why is it good?”
“Because you sound ready. Ready is good.”
“Should I have a breakup party?”
She smiles, answering sincerely as she says, “Maybe you should.”
Dev offers me a fist for knocking. “Man, you’ve had a great career.”
I don’t knock back. Instead I push my hands against the table, downplaying it. “Yeah, yeah.”
I feel better, but not completely. Something is still nagging at me. The inevitable what happens next. There are too many choices for life after hockey and that pressure to work hard and be the best—to be chasing the next big thing—has been drilled into me since I was a kid.
But now is not the time to deal with what’s next. There will be plenty of time for that when this trip ends.
We tuck into our grilled cheeses. Mine’s absolutely delicious.
Dev looks like he’s in heaven as he moans around his sandwich, permitting himself this one transgression on his diet, enjoying this moment for all it is.
It’s not what we planned a few nights ago—grilled cheese as part of our Ambushed by Exes club.
It’s grilled cheese for us.
The moments are all you get. They end before you know it, so you have to make the most of them while you’re in them. If that’s the case, and I’m pretty sure it is, I pull Dev aside after the meal. “About those things she wants to try…”
“I’m all ears,” he says.
I tell him my plan.
Later, I’ll pull her aside since there’s something I think she and I can do for him.