Chapter Sixteen
“We still on for tonight?”
Nate left his stick leaning against the arena wall outside the dressing room and focused on Caley. “Yeah. Why wouldn’t we be?”
“I know you have your parents waiting. I want to make sure they don’t feel like I’m taking you away from them.”
No danger of that. Nate got along well with his parents, but after four days together, they needed some time apart. “Trust me. They’ve been here since Monday. We’re all very happy doing our own thing today.”
Caley smiled. She was obviously still riding the high of her beautiful third-period goal, a wraparound which the goalie, a former pro who now coached at the college level, didn’t see until three seconds after the puck hit the back of the net.
“Great. Usual place, or did you want to try the new place the next block over?”
“The usual. Unless the health department’s finally closed it down,” he joked.
Twenty minutes later they met up again in the quiet back booth of a bar that would get progressively rowdier as Friday night wore on.
“So, how was your Thanksgiving?” Caley asked, accepting her drink from the server with a smile of thanks.
Nate strangled a laugh thinking about it.
First he’d bitten off more than he could chew with the cooking, and then he’d had his uncomfortable realization about Aubrey, and then the gratefulness speeches…
. “Nearly averted disaster?” he suggested.
“Next year remind me I don’t need to cook a whole turkey and stuffing and three side dishes plus salad, hors d’oeuvres, and dessert for four people. ”
Caley wiped a bit of something pink and frothy from the corner of her mouth. “Honestly, you managed all that? I’m impressed you’re not still sleeping it off.”
“Ah, well, I had help,” he admitted, realizing his mistake only when Caley said, “Wait a minute, four people? I thought it was just you and your parents.”
“Uh,” he said.
Caley narrowed her eyes and leaned across the table with her arms crossed. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with your recent disclosure to Kelly that you’re not interested in dating seriously right now?”
Damn it. He could feel the heat rising in his cheeks again. He hadn’t blushed this much since he was a teenager.
“So there’s a mystery man! I have to admit, you’ve been skating a little looser for a few weeks. Morgan said you must’ve met someone, but I thought maybe just having the divorce over with….”
He might as well tell her—except for one thing. “Promise me you won’t tell Kelly.”
Caley recoiled, blinking like he’d slapped her. “What? I tell her everything. Why wouldn’t I tell her this?”
Nate closed his eyes. “Because it’s Aubrey.”
There. It was off his chest. And maybe, unlike with his parents, he could tell Caley the whole truth. At least then he wouldn’t have to suffer in silence.
“All right,” Caley said. “Start at the beginning.”
Over the next ten minutes, Nate filled her in on everything—from the first frantic night in Winnipeg to the lazy Monday morning that had led to the whole facade.
“So now I’ve realized that I have feelings for him, but I already asked him to pretend to be my boyfriend to my parents, and changing the rules now would make me an asshole.
We couldn’t date openly anyway, because the show is on the bubble and Jess specifically said don’t change anything.
And if the show falls apart because we couldn’t keep it in our pants, I don’t know what I’ll do. ”
Caley shifted in her seat, biting her lip, but whatever was on her mind, she kept it to herself. “Have you considered talking to Aubrey?”
Nate made a face. “That would be the mature, rational thing to do.”
“So, no?” She raised her eyebrows. “I hate to tell you, but if you think talking to him about quote-unquote ‘changing the rules now’ makes you an asshole, not talking to him at all would be considerably worse.”
“You’re probably right. I mean, you’re obviously right, I’m just bitter because you didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear.”
“Yeah, I’m not known for doing that.” She nudged him under the table. “It’ll work out or it won’t. It’s not going to break you. Two years ago you didn’t know if you’d ever get over Marty. You can handle this.”
Nate exhaled. That was a fair enough comment. He tilted his beer glass at her to accept it.
“And as for the show….” Ah, here it was. “I wanted to talk to you about that. Or, actually Kelly wanted me to talk to you about that. Or, she didn’t want me to talk to you about that—”
Nate nudged her back. “Caley. Take a breath.”
“Right. Okay.” She sat up straighter and looked him in the eye. “Kelly got an offer from another network. One of their MLB commentators was scheduled to retire after the coming season, but he took a spill on the golf course and broke both his kneecaps.”
Kelly had two Olympic softball medals, so that sounded like a dream assignment for her. “Wow. That’s awesome.”
“That’s what I said.” The server dropped off their usual order of poutine, and Caley dove in and gestured with a forkful of cheesy fries. “I think she’s a little worried about what you’ll say.”
“She shouldn’t be. First of all, it’s business, not personal. Second of all, of course I’m happy for her.” He thought that might be the end of it, but Caley’s body language said there was more she wasn’t telling him. “Caley, what’s going on? You’re being weird.”
“I’m not being weird,” she protested. “Just, I had something on my mind I wanted to talk to you about, and I was kind of banking on Thanksgiving small talk as a lead-in. Only that didn’t happen, and now I’m trying to figure out how to circle back without a huge non sequitur.”
Nate quirked up a corner of his mouth. “How was your Thanksgiving, Caley?”
“Kelly and I are having a baby.” The words came out in a tumble, full of so much love and enthusiasm Nate didn’t have to ask how she felt about it. “I’m due in May.”
“Oh my God! Congratulations.” That explained why she’d ordered the fluffy pink thing instead of a beer. They both stood up so they could hug.
Caley flung her arms around his neck and squeezed. “Thank you so much for introducing us,” she whispered fiercely. “I’m—you know I love Carter like he’s my own, but we wanted a bigger family, and I just… I guess it was the right time.”
He kissed her cheek. “I’m so happy for you both. For all three of you,” he corrected.
She pulled away and took his hands in hers. “I’m glad to hear that, because we have a tiny request.”
“Of course.” They sat back down, and Nate grabbed a forkful of fries. “Shoot.”
“We want you to be the godfather.”
“Aubrey, come on in.”
He stuck his phone in his back pocket and followed his therapist into her office, fighting the urge to fidget. “Thanks for squeezing me in. I know it was last-minute, and with the holiday….”
Theresa raised an eyebrow that said a lot about how well she knew him. “And with the holiday, lots of people need emergency therapist appointments. That’s why I keep the Friday after Thanksgiving free.” Which you know because I’ve mentioned it before every major holiday went unsaid.
Aubrey nodded distractedly and folded himself into the U-shaped armchair across from her desk. He normally sat on the couch because he liked to sprawl dramatically. Today he wanted something at his back.
He wanted a place to start talking too, but the situation seemed so big.
“I thought you were supposed to be in Hawaii this week?” Theresa said casually as she filled her water bottle from the cooler.
Well, there was his opening. “I was. A friend—” Fuck. He was paying for her time, and the whole point was to talk to someone. If he wasn’t honest, the whole thing was for nothing. “Nate asked if I could stay and pretend to be his boyfriend after his parents basically caught us having sex.”
Theresa didn’t react to that right away, which wasn’t unusual. It wasn’t her job to react to things. Instead she finished filling her bottle and walked back to her desk, where she sat with her feet up. “I see.” Here it comes. “And how does that make you feel?”
Aubrey sighed and pointed to the jar at the corner of her desk.
Theresa rolled her eyes, pulled her wallet from her desk drawer, and withdrew a dollar to throw into it.
It was a first-offense-per-session penalty, and every month she donated the proceeds to children’s mental health initiatives. “It’s complicated.”
“The part where you’re sleeping with your colleague, the part where you’re lying to his parents, or the part where you pretend to be his boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
She offered a small smile at that, probably more for Aubrey than because it actually amused her. “Why don’t you start at the beginning? At our earlier sessions, you didn’t mention you and Nate have been sleeping together. When did that start?”
That wasn’t judgment, it was a carefully targeted probe.
But it did the job just the same. “The end of October. It wasn’t a habitual thing.
” He shoved his hands under his legs so he wouldn’t reach for one of the fidget objects on Theresa’s desk.
“There was a snowstorm, and our flight out of Winnipeg got canceled, so we went out to a restaurant we’d both been wanting to try. ”
“That sounds nice.”
That sounds like a date, he heard. Well, it hadn’t been. “The food was really good, and the cocktails were too. We didn’t get drunk,” he hastened to add. “But somehow we got to talking about sex.”
“Work colleagues do talk about sex sometimes,” Theresa said. “Depending on their personal boundaries and the rules of the workplace. It’s not automatically verboten.”
“Technically I think it is, for us.” But that was neither here nor there. “Anyway. I guess specifically we somehow started talking about his sex life with his ex. Which I guess was, um, unfulfilling.”
“He must trust you a lot to tell you something like that.”