Chapter 15 #2
“Uh-huh. And what kind of errand involves me?”
He spread his hands. “I’m on a mission from God. By which I mean my wife.”
Adam raised a brow. “She got sick of you already?”
“Oh my sweet summer child. It’s not my attitude she’s sick of.” Adam flushed at the implication. “See, she has this dumb friend who went and got his heart broken for no good reason, and she’s a big softie so it’s really bumming her out.”
Adam huffed. “Sorry.”
“For what? No one said this story was about you.” Jorts reached out to tickle Jane, who shrieked happily before returning to her toys.
“Anyway, this guy’s having a bad time. Breakup, makeup, breakup again, disowned by his parents and thrown out on the street—I guess you weren’t exaggerating when you complained about the Du Ponts. ”
The words hit him in the solar plexus. Mo got disowned? How? After everything he’d done to stay in his parents’ good graces… why lose it now?
“What happened?”
Jorts shrugged. “According to Mads, he said something about yelling at them over shady business deals. Look, Murph, I don’t know the guy like you do, but I do know you deserve to know the truth of what happened between you. Mo wants to tell you.”
Adam looked down at his hands. “What good would that do? What would it change?”
“You won’t know unless you look.” He held out the envelope.
“What is it?”
“Do I look like someone who reads other people’s mail?”
“Yes.” Especially if he thought the contents of said mail might be emotionally upsetting for Adam.
“Well, I didn’t, so—”
Adam opened the flap.
For something that felt so important, the envelope had almost no weight to it. Adam closed his fingers around a few thin slips of material and pulled them out.
The first item was a piece of paper that looked like it had been ripped from an old-fashioned receipt book. One corner was smeared with grease.
Please let me explain. – M.
Adam might not have been inclined to honor that request by itself, if not for Jorts’s earlier story, but the rest of the envelope’s contents would’ve tipped the scales.
“Mads helped him find the materials,” Jorts said conversationally. “Turns out there was a sudden run on whatever that iron-on stuff is that they use and couldn’t get it in stock in time. The two of them and Janey did an arts-and-crafts day, didn’t you, baby?”
Janey babbled something Adam couldn’t decipher, though he caught what might have been crayons. He didn’t have the processing power to get through it. He was too focused on the four little slips of fabric bearing Mo’s handwriting in Canyons burgundy.
Every postseason, the Canyons’ spouses and partners wrote messages for the players to put inside the cuffs of their gloves, for luck. Some were romantic, some sexual, others just plain silly. No one knew who’d started it. The players all claimed to think it was dumb.
But God forbid anyone suggest the tradition be retired. Such a comment would be met with a roomful of grown men clutching their rank hockey gloves to their chests.
It was dumb. The iron-on patches never lasted more than a game. Jorts’s wife once wrote:
I can smell this thing from the nosebleeds.
Jorts scored an OT winner that game and kept the scrap of fabric pinned to his stall for the rest of the run.
The point was… Adam had never had anyone to write messages for him. He didn’t expect Mo to remember that, let alone act on it all these months later.
The first scrap of fabric read:
You deserve more than fake.
He inhaled sharply and put the rest back in the envelope. He’d read them when he didn’t have an audience.
When he looked up again, Jorts was watching him.
Feeling judged, Adam carefully folded the envelope and put it in his pocket. “What?”
Jorts raised his hands. “Nothing! Nothing.” He put them down again. “So are you going to see him?”
Adam blinked. “Sorry?”
“Adam, you’re killing me. Are you giving him a second chance or not?”
“…Since when are you Team Mo?”
“I don’t know, Murph. You’re miserable. He’s miserable and has to work for a living for the first time in his life.
This is our last postseason as the Canyons.
Maybe I just think it’d be nice if someone had something to celebrate.
Beyond a winning season, obviously.” He shrugged, but the tension in his shoulders didn’t ease.
“Plus, I don’t know. Guy knows his way around cars.
Has my Firebird purring like a kitten. And Mads likes him.
She’s a better judge of character than me.
She sat with him for like two hours while he came up with those.
Maybe I misjudged him. Or maybe I judged him right and he changed. ”
Maybe.
Adam rubbed his palm over his jeans. Under his hand, the paper crinkled.
“Adam!” Jorts prompted.
Adam had never had someone special to cheer him on before—not for real.
But he’d gotten a taste of how that might feel, and now he knew he wanted it.
Not when he retired, not in a few years, not when hockey made it convenient.
He wanted it now, however it complicated his life.
He wanted the deep conversations and the silly ones, the lazy sex and the against-the-wall sex and the trembling vulnerability of real intimacy.
He wanted Mo’s defensive, campy aggression and the real man who lived beneath it, waiting for someone to see him.
He wanted someone to challenge him to ask for more for himself—someone to remind him he didn’t have to settle.
“Hey,” he said after a moment. “Don’t the two of you have somewhere to be?”