Chapter 12 #3
“Yep. Their fiftieth anniversary is coming up next year. Us kids are planning a surprise trip to the Amalfi Coast. They’re going to be so mad at first, but then they’ll love us again.”
She smiles softly. “Fifty years with someone sounds nice.”
I’ve never been against relationships like a lot of the other guys in the singles group chat have been, but I’ve also never been in a rush to settle down.
I haven’t really given much thought to what fifty years could look like with somebody, but now that I’m thinking about it, she’s right. It does sound nice.
Really, really damn nice.
“Anyway,” she says. “Want to give me the grand tour?”
“Oh, right. You might want that, huh?”
After I offered her a room the other morning, it seemed like both of us wanted to get away from the other as fast as possible. Once her pants were dry, we settled on a move-in day, and she left. It wasn’t until after she was gone that I realized I never even showed her around.
I walk her through the apartment, pointing out the secondary bathroom and the room I use to house the hockey memorabilia I’ve collected over the years.
There’s a lot of stuff in there, from commemorative photos to sticks that have too many memories attached to them to get rid of, to all the different jersey iterations I’ve worn.
“Wow,” she says, taking it all in. “This is…wow.”
I laugh. “I’m sure your brother has something similar.”
“I’m sure he does, but I’ve never seen it. Our parents got together when Reed was already in the NHL, so he was long out of the house. As you can imagine, we haven’t exactly hung out a lot over the years.”
“Why is it you two don’t get along again?”
“Honestly? I’m not sure.” She runs her hand over the jerseys I have hanging on a rack.
“I don’t even remember why we disliked each other to begin with.
I mean, I was a tiresome, petulant teen, and he was a young hockey star with a chip on his shoulder.
Both of our families had been broken in one way or another, so maybe we thought we were trying to replace what we once had.
I don’t know. It’s not that I don’t like him, because I do.
I think a lot of it is just that I don’t know him. Not really.”
“And is that why you didn’t tell him you were moving in with me?”
She pauses. “Oh.”
“Yeah, oh .”
She shrugs. “I guess I just didn’t think that was an important detail.”
“You didn’t think you living with your brother’s teammate was an important detail to share?”
She finally looks at me, lips pinched together tightly. “Why didn’t you tell him we were living together?”
“And how do you know I didn’t?”
“Well, for starters, my phone hasn’t burned a hole in my pocket, which must mean you didn’t bring it up to him either.”
Fuck. She has me there.
“No,” I confess. “I didn’t tell him.”
“What? You didn’t think you living with your teammate’s sister was an important detail to share?”
She sounds so bratty, and it reminds me of our first meeting, when she told off that married guy for hitting on her. And I like it. Way too fucking much. So much that it makes me want to kiss her.
Gee, this is off to a great start, Gavin. She’s not even been here thirty minutes and I’m already thinking about kissing her.
“Look,” she says, “we’re grown adults. We can do whatever we want. I don’t need my brother’s permission to live here, and neither do you. Besides, it’s just for a few months, right? Not like it’s that big of a deal.”
She’s right. This is only temporary. Why does Hutch need to know about it? In a few months, it’ll be like this never happened.
Lies, lies, lies.
I push away the voice chanting in my head, not just because I know it’s right, and nod.
“Fine. Then we don’t say anything.”
“Good. Now, can I see the other bedroom?”
I lead her out of the room and into the next. There’s nothing in there except a few boxes left over from when I moved in.
“When you said one room was practically empty, you truly meant that.”
“Yeah, what did you think I meant?”
“I don’t know! That you had an air mattress or something in here and you were just trying to be nice the other night.”
“Uh, no. I am far too old to sleep on an air mattress.”
“I’m not. So, where am I going to sleep?”
“My bed.”
Her eyes widen. “What?”
I chuckle. “We’ve been over this, love. You can have my bed while I take the couch. It’s just for a couple of days until the one I ordered gets here.”
Her gaze softens, her plump lips parting just a fraction. She’s staring up at me like I just told her I rescued a kitten from a burning building, and I both love and hate it.
“You bought me a bed?”
I nod with a shrug. “It’s no big deal. You loved mine so much, so I figured why not? It should come while I’m on the road.”
I can tell she wants to say something else, maybe even argue with me, and I think a part of me wants that, mostly because I love the fire that ignites in her eyes when she does. But to my surprise, she doesn’t.
She just nods and mutters a quiet, “Thank you.”
It does something to me, and it has me wanting to kiss her again—but I can’t kiss her again. Instead, I mumble something about needing a shower and hightail it out of the room before I do something really, really stupid like forget we’re supposed to be just friends.