Chapter 15
GARRETT
I expected to be a bit lonely whenever Chris was on the road. I was still new to Pittsburgh and hadn’t yet made friends. My coworkers were friendly, but we weren’t quite to the point of getting together outside of work. So when Chris was gone, I was alone in this new city.
But it wasn’t just his absence that left me climbing the walls.
Liam
We just checked into our hotel and have a team meeting in 20. I’ll be back in my room in about an hour, I think?
Is the team meeting to tell everyone to behave while they’re in town?
LOL Nah. It’s one of those meetings that sometimes makes me wish I wasn’t captain.
oooh, so you have to be the adult in the room.
One of them, yeah. There’s some issues with the bottom six forwards and one of the D pairs, and Coach wants me to unfuck them.
Sounds like fun.
(skull emoji)
He went quiet after that, so he was probably getting ready for the meeting in question.
Chris pinged me on FaceTime a few minutes later, so he apparently didn’t need to attend the meeting. Made sense, since he was a top six forward. Either way, I didn’t ask, because I didn’t need him to know that I even knew about the meeting.
Why do I feel so guilty? Liam and I are just texting.
I couldn’t even come up with a rational reason why I needed to hide that from Chris. Maybe because I couldn’t explain why we were communicating at all? Because I was afraid he’d dig enough and find out that Liam and I had brushed up against doing more than communicating?
Well, whatever. I kept it under my hat, and Chris didn’t give me any reason to believe he suspected I was hiding something. We talked about the upcoming game, and he told me about a bar down the street from the hotel where the guys would be hanging out later.
“I guess it’s just your average sports bar,” he said, “but they’re really good about not letting fans mob players or whatever. Even the baseball and basketball teams sometimes hang out there and don’t get bothered.”
“Nice. I guess getting mobbed is one of those things that sounds great on paper—like hey, you’ve got fans—but then when it happens in reality…” I made a face.
“Yeah, Saints and Barns have told me some stories.” He shook his head slowly. “I’ll pass, thanks.”
“I bet.”
“Barns used to play with Gunnar Seversen, back before he retired. I guess he had to have security everywhere he went, especially in Canada and Sweden, because the fans just went nuts over him.” Chris shook his head again, more emphatically this time.
“I love having fans, and signing stuff is cool as hell, but that? No, thank you.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound fun.”
We chatted a bit longer, and then he let me go so he could meet up with some of the guys for dinner.
I was just starting to make my own dinner when my text tone went off. It wasn’t Chris this time, though.
Liam
Okay, done with THAT noise for the day.
How did it go?
Well, they’ll get their shit together if they know what’s good for them.
I’m here for a while. Want to FT?
My heart sped up. Yes, I absolutely wanted to FaceTime with him. Like, always. I just couldn’t believe that was mutual.
It apparently was, and a moment later, I was situated on my couch with Liam on my screen. “So the meeting went well?”
He nodded. “They usually do. It’s just never fun hearing someone rattle off everything you need to do better. No one enjoys criticism, you know?”
“Yeah, that’s fair. I didn’t even think they were playing badly.”
“They’re…” He quirked his lips and his eyes lost focus.
“It’s not so much playing badly. It was mostly that as soon as the other teams did something that caught them off guard, they’d fall apart.
Like they’d be fine in our offensive zone, but then the other team would get a breakaway, and suddenly everyone is scrambling and flailing.
So I was mostly reminding them that we have to react but not lose our heads. ”
“And they have you do that instead of the coaches?”
“The coaches talk about it, too, but sometimes it feels less…” He seemed to think about it. “Sometimes the guys are more receptive when it’s peer-to-peer. When it’s more ‘we need to fix this’ than ‘you need to fix it.’”
“Oh, I can see that. Like the team unfucking the situation rather than the coaches telling them it’s their fault.”
“Kind of. At this level, you take criticism from wherever it comes and don’t complain, but psychology is what it is.”
I was nodding as he spoke. “That makes sense. Is that a lot of pressure for you? Being the captain?”
Liam pushed out a breath. “Not gonna lie—it’s a lot of pressure. Like I’m happy to do it, and the guys obviously trust me with it. But it does mean a lot of pressure.” He paused. “Probably one of the few things I won’t miss after I retire.”
“What else is on that list?”
“The constant traveling, for one. My own bed is a novelty for more than half the year.”
“Oh God,” I said. “That must be…” I didn’t know how to describe it.
“It’s tough. It’s the price of admission for the best job in the world, though, so…” He offered an adorably lopsided smile and a half-shrug.
I chuckled. “Yeah, I guess there has to be a downside or two to everything.”
“Right? Eh, it’s not so bad. Just means I have to play Dad sometimes.”
I snorted. “Kinda sounds like it.”
“I know, right?” He paused. “I actually had a lot of one-on-ones with Chris when he first got called up. Not bad ones—just kind of helping him find his footing.” He smiled, unaware of what that always did to my heartrate.
“I don’t know how much help he actually needed, though.
He was a little overwhelmed—everyone is at first—but he impressed the hell out of everyone whenever he was on the ice. ”
Pride swelled in my chest. “I’m sure he did. He worked hard to get where he is. I’m glad to see it paying off.” I paused. “And I’m glad to, you know, see it. In person instead of entirely on TV.”
Liam’s smile faded. “That must’ve been hard.”
“It was. It was hard with all the kids, but they weren’t constantly on TV or mentioned in articles, you know?” I exhaled. “It was kind of… salt in the wound, I guess. But I’m glad we’re past that now. It’s been amazing to actually see him regularly.”
“I bet.” There was something in his expression that I couldn’t quite read. Something that gave me an unpleasant spike of anxiety.
I cleared my throat. “What’s on your mind?”
“Well…” He gazed offscreen for a moment. “I guess, if you don’t mind me asking…” He studied me for a few beats. “What happened with you and Chris? When things got… um…”
I winced and pulled my gaze away from my own screen. “Why were we estranged?”
“Yeah. You don’t have to tell me. I’m just curious.”
“You’re fine. It’s just… It’s tough to talk about. It wasn’t my finest hour, let me tell you.”
He didn’t answer, and when I looked at him again, his eyebrows had climbed with a mix of alarm and curiosity.
Well, damn. Now I’d tipped my hand far enough to let him speculate, which meant I needed to show these cards before he imagined the worst.
Guilt wound my insides into knots, but I kept going. “Taylor and I, we were that couple who stayed together for the kids. We were absolutely miserable together, and by the time our oldest was in fourth grade, we both knew we weren’t going to make it.”
“But you stayed together?”
“We thought it would be better for them. We’d always heard so many people talking about broken homes and how divorces are terrible on kids, and…” I shook my head. “It never occurred to us that us staying married would be worse for them.”
“Oh, shit,” he whispered.
“We thought the best thing was to stay together until our youngest was out of high school.” My shoulders sagged as I pushed out a breath. “We were so, so wrong about that.”
“Yeah?”
I nodded. “In hindsight, it’s so damn stupid.
I mean, we fought…” I huffed out a breath.
“God, we fought so much. Like, all the time, over every goddamned thing. If we weren’t fighting, we weren’t talking at all.
But people always talked about how a broken home hurts kids, and we’d been through our own parents’ divorces…
We just never realized that we’d hurt our kids so much more by staying together than by splitting up. ”
“I’ve always wondered about that,” Liam said. “If a divorce is really worse for kids than… well, that.”
“I found out the hard way. When we finally did split up, the kids—especially the oldest two—were absolutely livid. Turned out they’d been hoping and praying for years that we’d separate. We thought we’d kept it out of sight, but…” I shook my head.
“Kids are perceptive,” Liam said softly.
“Yeah. They are. And I knew that, but we still stupidly thought we were doing the right thing. And then…” My shoulders sagged, and it was a struggle to look at Liam. “Well, the reason we divorced when we did is because I was an idiot who made things so much worse than they needed to be.”
His eyebrow rose, but he didn’t ask.
Shame twisted like cold barbed wire around my spine, and I wanted to be sick as I said the words out loud: “I cheated on my ex-wife.”
Liam jumped as if he hadn’t been expecting that. Maybe he hadn’t.
Wiping a hand over my face, I sighed. “I’m not proud of it.
At all. Of everything I regret, that one is definitely number one.
I…” I shook my head. “I won’t make any excuses.
I didn’t even feel good about it at the time.
I was just angry and bitter, and I did something extraordinarily stupid and hurtful.
If I could go back and change one thing, it would be that. Hands down.”
“I believe that,” he said softly. “I take it she found out?”
I nodded, wincing at the memory. “And she’ll be the first to admit she shouldn’t have told the kids. We both knew we were a mess, and—I mean, she was cheating, too.”
Liam’s eyebrows flew up. “She was? But she told the kids about you doing it?”