Chapter Fifteen
Nate had made one major miscalculation about Thanksgiving dinner: how long it would take one person to prepare it.
His mom had always done everything when he was growing up. Now he wanted her to be able to relax, enjoy the sights in Chicago, and come back to a nice dinner. But at this rate, the dinner he’d scheduled for five was going to be more like eight.
Fortunately Aubrey picked up on the first ring.
“Please don’t tell me you need me to go to the grocery store.”
“I don’t need you to go to the grocery store,” Nate said obediently. Then something occurred to him. “Although… you don’t happen to have any wine?”
He could practically hear Aubrey’s eye roll. “Red, white, rosé, or sparkling?”
Yeah, that was a stupid question. “Yes,” Nate answered. “Actually, are you busy?”
“I’m watching the 2019 World Championships in my underwear and eating cereal out of the box.”
Now there was an image. “What kind of cereal?”
“Corn Pops.”
“Good choice.”
Aubrey crunched on some Corn Pops. “So, what’s up?”
Clearing his throat, Nate surveyed the carnage of his kitchen.
A bag of unpeeled potatoes. A similar mound of yams. Unstemmed green beans.
A can of pumpkin filling, a bag of flour, powdered sugar, mace and cloves.
He’d managed to get the stuffed turkey in the oven, but that was it.
Time to swallow his pride. “I kind of need a sous chef.”
“Oh?” The laugh in his voice was obvious. “Parents can’t be trusted in the kitchen?”
“I kicked them out to go sightseeing and enjoy their holiday, but I think I bit off more than I can chew. Or will be able to chew. No chewing will be happening for a long time unless I get some help, is what I’m saying.”
“Mm-hmm,” Aubrey said, crunching a little more.
He was really going to make Nate ask. Fine. “If you’re not too busy, would you mind putting on some pants and helping me out?”
Aubrey let himself in ten minutes later, in a purple T-shirt and sweatpants that said PINK in glitter across the ass. He’d brought his own apron too—a black one with a giant sausage and the legend Size Matters.
“Classy,” Nate said.
“Beggars and choosers, Nate.” Aubrey plunked two bottles of wine on the counter and cracked one open.
Nate coughed. “Feeling a little parched after those Corn Pops?”
“I love cooking with wine,” Aubrey said seriously, taking down a pair of glasses. “Sometimes I even put it in the food.” He poured and then handed Nate a glass. “Cheers. Now, what do you need me to do?”
Nate held up a potato peeler and the can of pumpkin. “Choose your weapon.”
Aubrey selected the peeler—wise choice—and Nate turned on the radio to play in the background as he flicked through his tablet for directions on how to make a pumpkin pie.
“I always preferred apple.” Aubrey had amassed a pile of potato peels the size of a dinner plate.
“What!” Nate turned so sharply he got sugar all over the counter. Oh well, the kitchen was a total loss anyway. “Shit. That seems like the sort of thing a boyfriend should know.”
Aubrey’s brows furrowed. “Yeah, but they probably find out at their first joint Thanksgiving. I don’t think our cover’s blown.”
True, but it didn’t make Nate feel any better. Actually he felt kind of… ill. Maybe he should’ve eaten lunch. He dusted his hand off on his pants and grabbed his phone to send a quick text.
“Hey.” Aubrey bumped Nate’s arm, still frowning. “Look, it’s fine. It’s not like this would’ve come up in casual conversation. We can always say we were too busy having sex to talk pie.”
Jesus. Nate laughed despite himself. “Stop trying to make me feel better, please.”
“Is it working?”
“No comment.”
Aubrey grinned.
With the two of them working and the oven on, it didn’t take long for the kitchen to heat up. Nate ditched his sweater over one of the breakfast-bar stools before he mixed together the pie filling.
“Exactly how many potatoes do you think four people can eat?” Aubrey asked finally, reaching for one of the last spuds. Then: “It is just the four of us, right? You aren’t springing more surprise family members on me?”
Nate eyed the pile. What was the rule? Two per person, two for the pot?
So ten potatoes? Aubrey had peeled fourteen.
“What? No, Emily and her husband brought the baby to visit his family in Vancouver. It’s just the four of us.
” He paused and did some calculations. Even in his prime hockey days, he’d have had trouble putting away more than two potatoes that size. Oops. “You can probably stop now.”
“Oh, you think?” Aubrey laughed. “You’re gonna be making potato pancakes for a week.”
Nate’s stomach growled. “I can live with that.”
With the pie done, Nate turned his attention to the green beans, stemming away next to Aubrey at the counter while Aubrey hummed along with eighties dance pop. “So this is your first time making Thanksgiving dinner, eh?”
“Was it the potatoes that gave me away?”
“The fact that you didn’t realize how much help you were going to need, honestly.”
Nate shrugged and tossed another handful of beans into the colander. “Mom always insisted on doing Thanksgiving dinner, just her and Dad. Though now that I think about it, she started the day before with the prep work and the baking. She used to say my sister and I got underfoot. Marty….”
Aubrey bumped his hip. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“No, it’s fine. He was just kind of a control freak in the kitchen. He’s a professionally trained chef.”
“Ah.” Aubrey put down the last sweet potato. “That’ll do it.”
“He didn’t even work in a restaurant anymore when we met—he owned a catering company.” Nate had felt judged every time he so much as reheated leftovers. Which was maybe Nate’s problem as much as Marty’s, in retrospect.
But this Nate liked. Aubrey was easy to work around, maybe because they were used to working together in a different context, maybe because Aubrey was also a professional athlete. Maybe because they were sleeping together.
“Can I ask you something?” Aubrey swept the pile of peelings into the compost bin. “What happened? I mean, you must’ve been happy at one point, or else why get married? But…. Shit, that’s really personal. Sorry.”
“It’s nothing I haven’t asked myself.” Not that he’d come up with a satisfactory response.
He swirled the remaining wine in his glass for a moment to give himself time to think.
Then he picked up a dishtowel to clean up the sugar he’d spilled on the counter.
“Honestly, I think what happened is… I retired.”
Marty might have cheated on him before that, but Nate mostly wasn’t around to notice, and he didn’t want to talk about the cheating with Aubrey. They were having a nice time. He didn’t need to go there.
Aubrey leaned back against the counter, hip cocked, his half-empty glass held at his side. “And suddenly you were spending too much time together, or…?”
“No. I know I make it sound terrible, but we actually got along fine.”
“I mean, you agreed on that travesty of a vase, so….”
Nate swatted him on the thigh with the dishtowel.
“You’re hilarious. I think the problem actually was we had different ideas of what my retirement would be like.
Maybe we just didn’t talk about it enough, or maybe we weren’t listening.
I mean, we had other problems too, but that’s the one that broke us.
I thought, okay, retirement, time to start a family.
Maybe I’d do some work with the team, but otherwise I’d be home a lot.
Only it turns out the whole time, Marty had just been waiting until I hung them up to spring this idea that he wanted to sell the catering company and open a bed-and-breakfast.”
Aubrey winced. “Ah. I can see how that would go over poorly.”
Nate tossed the dishtowel in the general direction of the laundry room.
“Yeah. I was used to having people up in my business in my professional life, but that’s different when you literally live where you work.
We talked about different things we could try, but ultimately he wasn’t any more willing to compromise his dream than I was mine, so we called it quits. ”
“Sorry. That sucks.”
Nate shrugged. “It is what it is. The truth is, we’re both better off. He’s living out his B and B dream with his new fiancé, and I….”
I have you.
Oh shit.
Whatever was between them felt less like sexual convenience and fake dating by the minute. Nate had made himself believe he didn’t want another relationship, wasn’t ready to fall in love again.
Then he’d gone and done it anyway, and he’d put himself into a position where he couldn’t tell Aubrey about it.
“I’m happy for him,” Nate stumbled to cover.
“It’s not like my biological clock is ticking.
I have time to figure out what I want.” Which is great, because it’s apparently right in front of me and I didn’t notice, and now I’m fake dating it.
“It turns out I wasn’t really completely ready to retire anyway. ”
Aubrey was giving him a calculating look, but he didn’t overtly call bullshit. “You don’t exactly strike me as the type to take well to sitting around doing nothing.”
“Spoken like someone without a six-month-old niece.”
Aubrey made a face. “You know what I mean. Going from working and traveling October through June to stay-at-home husband and dad is a pretty big shift.”
“Yeah,” Nate conceded, because Aubrey was right, even if Nate suspected that the B and B plan would have involved a lot of work for him in some capacity—landscaping or cleaning or greeting guests. Maybe giving horseback tours. Marty had always wanted to keep a stable.