Chapter 4 #2
She follows, accepting the huge stuffed sloth and snickering. "Not a fan of old monster movies?"
I frown. "No?" I say while grabbing as many bags as I can.
"Oh man. I'm going to make you watch the classic ones."
Mollie seems to have dropped her morose mood in exchange for her usual sarcastic teasing. I'll take what I can get.
We carry her stuff through a password-protected gate, and down the dock to the very end of the row of impressive floating homes.
I call my place a houseboat, but really it’s a palace built on the water.
My home is two stories tall, almost 3,000 square feet, painted royal blue with a matching powerboat parked beside it.
I let Mollie open the neat white gate and cross the real grass, heading in the front door.
Once inside, I get a whiff of cedar, and the specific cold-clean of lake air that gets into everything when you live on the water.
At night, you can hear the dock lines shift and the hull settle.
It’s a sound I've fallen asleep to for three years and still notice every time. In the morning, the light off the water reflects in long moving lines across the ceiling. In the evening, it’s peaceful, the sunset painting everything in a golden glow.
"The door lock code is 55454," I tell Mollie as I lead her inside. "I'll get you the gate code too, since you'll be here for a while." I set her bags down in the living room and turn, catching a sad expression on her face once more. "Shit, sorry. I keep bringing up the fire damage."
Apologizing to Mollie feels unnatural and awkward to me. Having her in my house? Even though I’m basically forcing her to stay here, it’s also torturous.
The lovely object of my fixation is suddenly in my house, taking up space, about to unload her girly shit all over the place. And my heart and dick couldn’t be more excited about it.
Which in turn, makes me miserable. God, I’m like a mopey teenager.
"It's okay." She clears her throat. "Where's Gordie?"
"Gorgeous Gord? He's chilling on the sun deck upstairs. Let me go grab him."
I take the stairs two at a time up to my room. The sun deck is shared by both of the bedrooms up here, mine and the guest room she'll be crashing in. It's the only one that actually has a bed. I use the other spare bedroom as a gym.
I find Gordie sprawled across a sun-warmed patch of deck, his massive body taking up roughly 70% of the available real estate.
His tail starts thumping the moment he sees me.
He rolls over like a puppy despite weighing more than most of my teammates' girlfriends.
I scratch behind his ears and lean down to his level.
"We've got company, bud. Try not to embarrass me."
He follows me downstairs, his nails clicking on the hardwood.
Gordie recognizes Mollie immediately. Tongue lolling, he bounds toward her with zero regard for personal space.
She catches him by the scruff, and something in her face softens the way it always does around him.
Mollie talks a big game about how hockey players are annoying, but she's never pretended not to love Gordie.
"Hey, gorgeous boy." She wraps both arms around his neck, pressing her cheek against his fur. "At least someone in this house is happy to see me."
I’m happy. It’s just complicated. I say, "I made you breakfast. That doesn't count?"
She ignores me. Gordie leans his full weight into her. Her grip tightens and her jaw clenches as she kneels, embraces my dog. I hear her sniffle once into his coat. Then again. She keeps her face buried and her shoulders curl inward like she's trying to make herself as small as possible.
Fuck. I have no idea what to do with a crying woman. Flirting, I can handle. Bickering, absolutely. But genuine tears in my kitchen turn me into the most useless man on the planet. I lower myself onto the stool next to hers and sit there like an idiot for a few seconds before I try.
I spread my hand over her back and rub in what I hope are soothing circles. "Hey. It's going to be okay."
Mollie pulls her face out of Gordie's fur and wipes her nose with the back of her hand.
Her eyes are red and her chin is doing that wobbly thing that means more tears are on deck.
"It's not just the apartment." She sniffles hard and stares at the counter.
"I mean it is, but it's not. I worked really hard to get that place, Thorne.
Like, embarrassingly hard. I budgeted down to the dollar every month so I could prove that I didn't need Beck to cosign my lease or my parents to float me rent. "
I stay quiet because it feels like the right call.
"That apartment was the first thing that was just mine.
Not Beck's little sister's apartment. Not a bedroom in someone else's house.
Mine." She laughs, but it sounds miserable.
"And now I'm sitting in your kitchen wearing your clothes because I literally have nowhere else to go.
It's like the universe looked at my whole independence thing and said, nahhhhh. "
Her voice cracks on the last word. She presses her lips together, pissed at herself for letting me see it. Gordie nudges his massive head under her hand and she scratches him absently while she pulls herself back together.
"Sorry." She clears her throat. "I'm sure the last thing you want is me sobbing all over your dog and dumping my problems on you."
She's wrong. I want to hear every single one of her problems and then fix them with my bare hands. It’s an automatic thought, but so pathetic that I'd rather skate suicides for an hour than say it out loud. Trying to keep my face neutral, I shrug.
"You're allowed to have big feelings about losing your place, Mollie. That's not a crime."
She blinks at me like I've just spoken Mandarin. "Did you just say 'big feelings'?"
"Rosie's been teaching me emotional vocabulary. Don't make it weird."
That gets a real laugh out of her, small and watery but genuine.
She wipes her eyes one more time with the sleeve of my hoodie and gives Gordie a final squeeze before letting him go.
He immediately parks himself at her feet, enormous head resting on her toes, and settles in like he's appointed himself her personal bodyguard.
Welcome to the club, Gord.
Mollie’s been here two days and the house already feels different, better, in ways I'm not going to think about.
The house smells like her. Her shampoo, warm and a little sweet, and underneath it, whatever candle she's been burning in the guest room. Her twelve pairs of Converse are multiplying by the front door. Her aerial silks, something I didn’t even realize that she did for exercise, are in the doorframe.
After a few days of watching Mollie almost crack her skull trying to hang upside down, I reinforced the spot where silks hang in the doorframe for her without being asked.
Because I’m a huge fucking softie on the inside and she clearly needed the help.
Gordie runs inside, barks at me, then gallops downstairs. Mollie gives a loud whoop of laughter as I jog after him. She's standing in the middle of the living room and Gordie has his front paws on her shoulders.
"Down," I tell Gordie, my expression pinching. Gordie drops but continues looking at Mollie, his tongue lolling.
"You're very sweet, aren't you?" she coos to him, petting his ears how he likes. "You scare everyone, but underneath you're a sweetheart."
"He’s deceptively cuddly."
"He slept in my bed last night." She picks up the stuffed sloth and moves it over to the couch. Gordie follows her, jumps onto the couch, and then settles against the sloth like they are old friends.
"He is cuddly," she notes. "It's extra cute."
"You might want to put the sloth upstairs if you don't want it to smell like Gordie."
She looks at Gordie and the stuffed animal lying together. "How can I deprive him?"
"Don't get used to this," I tell the dog. "It's only temporary."
Gordie closes his eyes, uninterested in my angst. Typical.
My phone pings and I avoid Mollie's glare by checking it. Then I groan. "Beck says that Rosie has something called impetigo and it's super contagious.”
"Impetigo sounds like something out of a zombie movie." She wrinkles her nose.
"You should follow my rules, then. Be a nice house guest or face impetigo."
She sticks her tongue out at me, then starts hauling a couple of the trash bags upstairs. Brat.
I help her get it all upstairs, running out to my SUV for a second and third armload of bags. When everything is deposited in a pile in the room she's staying in, I slip away to the back deck to call my agent.
He doesn’t have any news for me, so I follow that by giving Gordie a nice long walk around the western side of the Cheshiahud Loop.
It's a nice walk, paved and studded with coffee shops, boutiques, and eateries.
The lake and its many docks are on the other side.
There are a ton of people jogging, and lots of families strolling together.
The idea of having a family appeals to me.
People who cheer you on. People whose successes and failures you celebrate and comfort.
Unfortunately, the second I start trying to picture myself with a family; as a happy dad wearing a giggling toddler with my wife pushing a stroller beside me, I get a pang of guilt.
This is probably what my dad thought before having me. He and my mom swear they had me on purpose. Which means that at some point, my dad thought that he would be a good family man. That’s laughable.
And look at what a mess that turned into. Hockey players should stay single until they retire. There would be a whole lot less heartbreak if we all just learned to keep our sex lives casual.
I've done my part so far.
When Gordie and I get back to the house, my eyes bug out.
Twelve pairs of Converse are in a pile next to my neatly displayed shoe rack.
On the coat rack, there are several strange rain jackets.
There are several "Learn How to Coach" books on the end table beside the couch.
And going upstairs, I nearly trip over one of her duffel bags.
"Hey!" Mollie pops her head out of the spare bedroom. "Will you take that bag into your home gym?"
She pops her gum, waiting for my answer. The tinny sound of music played through a phone leaks from her room.
"Your stuff is already everywhere. How did you manage it so fast?" I wrinkle my nose.
But Mollie's expression hardens. She steps out, grabs the bag, and pulls it away.
"Sorry that my stuff is crowding you. It must be terrible to have your space taken away from you all of a sudden." Her words are sharp enough to cut, her eyes glossy with unshed tears.
"Fuck. Mollie, I didn't mean—"
She shuts the door in my face. I gape at it.
This isn't going well at all. Having my teammate's little sister, someone I already find tempting, in such close proximity is already a challenge. But add in the way that I can't manage to open my mouth without insulting her?
It's a disaster.
I go into my room and sit on my bed. It's only then that I realize that every single sound from her room is amplified and played through the vent. And right now, I can hear her crying jagged tears.
Fuuuuck. I made her cry? I really am the worst.
Mollie would hate if she knew I could hear her. Not to mention that doing anything about it would be crossing a line I've been careful about for a year.
The last few months, I’ve struggled to keep Mollie separate from me. I can’t do anything to rock the boat.
I put my headphones in to give her a little privacy and tune her out.
Hours later, though, my stomach is growling and she’s still holed up in there.
I end up ordering Korean food, since bibimbap is basically all the foods I normally eat anyway.
And I tack on an order of tteok-bokki, bulgogi, an order of galbi, and some of those tasty dumplings.
I’m hoping that a little Korean food will ease some of the tension that I created.
I knock on her door and leave the bag of food without waiting for a response. It feels a little cowardly, but I’d rather keep some space between us. When I pass by her door later, though, I notice that the food is gone.
Shaking my head, I hope I just made things better instead of worse.