Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
IMPACT
TULLY
It’s the first week of July, and I’m coming back from a trip that was supposed to clear my head. I’m not sure it worked. I’m rolling my carry-on through Terminal C, still in that vacation daze, when I see her.
Blonde hair, a little wild, falling past her shoulders. My chest does that familiar lurch. I move toward her on instinct. Then she turns, and she’s a stranger. Thirty, maybe. Tired eyes. It’s only then that I notice the toddler asleep in a stroller beside her.
I stop walking, breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth.
In the time since Lola left, I have become someone I don’t recognize. I see her around every corner. I still have to remind myself, in airports and grocery stores and coffee shops, that she’s gone, and she’s not coming back.
She haunts me.
I’m playing with the Minnesota Fierce. It’s where I wanted to be, but never more so than after Lola left. I needed to be home, and playing for the team that I grew up watching with my face pressed against the glass as a kid just felt right.
But the thing that’s hard about staying in Minnesota is that I remember her at every intersection.
We walked these streets, split food from our favorite restaurants, and drove the parkway along the river.
I can’t cross the Washington Avenue Bridge without thinking of us leaning over the railing and laughing in the cold.
I see her in her favorite vintage shop, at the Whole Foods on Hennepin, at the ice rink at Centennial Lakes, where I skated as a kid—I search for her everywhere.
I don’t think she’s here, or I would’ve found her by now. But my heart hasn’t caught up with that yet.
Dax and I have stayed in touch, and he says I need to go out more.
Meet someone new, he says, like I can just choose to stop loving Lola.
I’ve become good friends with one of my new teammates—Roman—and he’s convinced me to go out a few times.
But then I end up sitting at the bar and talking about Lola.
When I’m sober, I avoid talking about her at all costs. My family knows I’m hurting and they want to be there for me, but no one knows how to help me.
I don’t know how to help me.
The Ink Parlor is cool—dark walls and jazz playing on the speakers. I booked online after seeing a lot of good reviews. I pause to look at the flash sheets pinned up near the front.
The artist is already set up when the receptionist walks me back. Her name’s Cora and she has sleeves from her wrist to her collar.
“You’ve got good ink,” she says, glancing at my forearms. “Who did these?”
My throat tightens. “Lola Donavan.”
I check for any sign of recognition, but there’s none.
“Nice work,” she says.
She pulls on her gloves and snaps them into place.
I’ve designed the piece myself, which is new for me.
I’m not an artist, but I knew what I wanted—a clock face, but shattered.
The hands are still visible behind the cracked glass, but they’re bent, mid-motion.
Whatever the clock was counting toward, it isn’t anymore.
I want it on my ribs. I don’t examine why too closely.
Cora traces the stencil onto my skin. The paper is cold.
“This is not your first time,” she says.
“No.”
She doesn’t say anything else, just clicks on her machine and leans in. The needle hits, and I breathe through it. I’ve always been okay with pain. Lola used to say it made it harder to gauge when she was going too deep.
Lola.
She’s always on my mind, but I should’ve known I couldn’t do this without her right at the forefront. Her love for tattoos was so much a part of her that they go hand in hand. When I think of one, I think of the other.
She gave me my first tattoo at Rebel Mark, the shop where she was apprenticing. Her mentor trusted her and started letting her close the shop. If she was still there when I got done with practice, I’d go hang out with her there.
When I walked in on this particular night, she had the overhead lights low and the lamp on her station angled over the chair.
The shop was a different place after hours.
It felt like it was hers. She’d rearranged everything the way she liked it, stencil supplies on the left, inks arranged by color family, everything just right.
She was wearing a purple tank top with a small bleach stain near the hem, and her hair was piled on top of her head.
She looked up at me with that expression she had when she was concentrating so hard on her art that everything else vanished.
“Want to get your tattoo tonight?” she asked.
“Really?” I’d been wanting one for quite a while.
“Really.” She smiled and motioned for me to sit down, and then held up a stencil.
The number 19. The number I’d had my whole hockey life.
“I love it,” I said as I sat in her chair.
She pressed the stencil down and smoothed it with two careful fingers and peeled it back, and the fact that she’d chosen this, that she just knew I’d want it, made me happier than I could explain.
She had me look at it carefully, so I’d be sure before she made it permanent.
“I’m sure,” I tell her.
She worked slowly and carefully. I watched her face instead of the needle. The small line between her brows. The way she bit the inside of her lip when she rounded a curve. I knew every part of her face. God, I loved her face.
When she finished, she sat back and looked at the number on my skin, then grinned at me.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re perfect.” I reached up and put my hand on her jaw, and she leaned in, kissing me.
The second tattoo was a week later. I let her choose this one as well, and she looked a little nervous before she showed me the stencil.
“I actually have two choices, but if you don’t love either one, I’ll draw something else. It has to feel right, so promise you’ll say if it doesn’t,” she said.
“Promise.”
It wasn’t what I’d expected. The first drawing she showed me was of beautiful flowers.
“Rose and honeysuckle are the birth flowers for June. That was your mom’s birthday month, right?”
I was so touched that she remembered my mom’s birthday month and just by the sentiment of all of it, I reached over and put my hand on top of hers.
“Lola,” I whispered.
She bit the inside of her lip, looking up at me. She wasn’t usually shy about her work, but I could tell this was a vulnerable spot for her.
I swallowed the lump in my throat, and my voice was hoarse when I spoke. “I love it. Thank you. It’s beautiful, and it means so much to me that you thought of this. I’d be honored to have that on my body.”
She put her hand on my cheek, her thumb brushing over my lips. “I wish I could’ve met your mom. I’d thank her for raising such an incredible son.”
I had to blink away the tears. The grief was still close to the surface about my mom. I suspected it always would be, and I appreciated that Lola didn’t shy away from talking about her.
I leaned in and kissed her lightly.
“She would’ve loved you,” I told her.
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
She pressed her lips together and looked down, picking up the second stencil.
“Just in case you’re not sure, there’s this one too.”
It was a wolf’s head. The drawing was stunning.
“I love it.”
“You remind me of a wolf when you play.”
“You’re making this really hard to decide. How about tonight we do the flowers, and next time, the wolf?”
“How about you see how tonight goes?” She laughed. “This will take a lot more time than your numbers.”
The flowers were on my bicep, with some of the honeysuckle trailing higher up my shoulder.
It took two and a half hours to do. Every minute of that time felt like foreplay.
I studied every part of her that was in my view, and not being able to touch her was torture.
The chair reclined almost flat, and when she finished, she leaned over me, pressing the cling wrap against my shoulder.
When she started to straighten, I pulled her face to mine, and she gasped against my mouth.
The smell of ink immediately imprinted itself in my memory, along with the lamp throwing her shadow against the wall.
She tugged my hair as we kissed, and my hands slid under her shirt and down to the buttons on her jeans.
She pulled them off the rest of the way and got a condom out of my pocket, unzipped my jeans, and pulled me out before rolling the condom on.
She straddled me, and we kissed and kissed.
My fingers slid under her panties to find her soaked, and she cried out.
I pushed the fabric aside and rubbed her until she was close and then slid inside.
When I gripped the back of her underwear tight and pulled it back and forth, her head fell back and she pulsed around me.
“Fuck, I’m not gonna last long,” I whispered against her neck, and we came together.
What happened in that tattoo chair was one of our hottest and most intimate experiences, and I have thought about it approximately three hundred times since.
I thought she was it. I was so certain. And somewhere in there, she’d already decided to go. I don’t know if I wasn’t paying close enough attention or if she never felt what I felt, and I was only ever in it by myself.
Cora finishes the outline and sits back to check her work. She holds a mirror up, and I twist to see my ribs. The clock looks like the aftermath of impact, like it got hit so hard that it stopped working.
That’s how I feel right now. Like I’m only half-functioning. But I’m determined not to stay frozen here forever. I know I’ve got to keep putting one foot in front of the other, but I don’t see myself loving anyone else. Ever.
“Nice,” Cora says simply.
She goes back in for shading. The needle finds a vicious groove between two ribs, and I breathe through my nose and try to think about game tape.
It doesn’t work. My thoughts go right back to Lola, like they always do.