Chapter 5 #2
“I outgrew it. I needed a bigger pond.” She takes a sip of her cocktail.
“Caldwell, Price & Associates hired me as a junior associate.
My boss, Mabel Scott, is the managing partner.
First meeting she ever had with me, she told me I had potential, and that potential was useless without direction.
Then she gave me a stack of contracts and told me to come back when I'd found every error.”
“How many did you find?”
“All of them. Plus, two she didn't know about.” She tilts her glass toward me. “That's when she started taking me seriously.”
“And now you're going for partner?”
“Senior associate. Partnership is next.” She sets her glass down. “It's a grind. The hours are long, the expectations are higher every year, and there's always someone right behind you who wants it just as badly. But I'm good at it, and I'm close.”
“You'll get it,” I say.
She smiles, warm and bright and I feel it right in the ribs. “Thank you for the vote of confidence,” she says.
She talks more, and I listen. I've always been better at listening than talking, and Jasmine has always been better at talking than almost anyone.
“Enough about me. What about you?” she says. “How was the journey to the NHL?”
I take a drink of beer. “Less interesting than law school.”
“I doubt that.”
The words pour out of me. “I got drafted at eighteen and moved to New York. The first season was brutal. I was young, slow by NHL standards, and the veterans didn't care that I'd been a star in juniors.”
“That must have been a shock.”
“It was a wake-up call. I spent the first year on the fourth defensive pairing, barely getting any ice time.
Second year wasn't much better. Third year, I finally earned a regular spot, and it wasn't because I was more talented than the guys ahead of me.
I just outworked them. Eventually, the coaches couldn't ignore it.”
“That sounds exactly like you,” Jasmine says in a soft voice.
“Meaning?” I ask.
“You never were the flashiest player on the ice, even in high school. You were the one who ground it out. You just never stopped.”
I also tell Jasmine about the Cup run.
“By the way, congratulations,” she says with a huge smile. “How was that like?”
“Incredible and terrifying. The final series went to seven games. I blocked eleven shots in the last game, and two of them hit me in the exact same spot on my shin. I couldn't walk properly for a month afterward.”
Her eyes go wide, brows nearly up to her hairline. “Eleven? Logan, that's insane.”
I shrug off the rush of pride I feel that I’ve impressed her, and say, “It’s the playoffs. You do what you have to do.”
“And the Cup itself? Did you drink out of it? I've always wanted to know if people actually do that.”
“Warm, flat champagne at three in the morning. Best thing I've ever tasted.”
She laughs. “That sounds disgusting.”
I laugh too. “It was. I didn't care.”
I don't tell her that the first person I wanted to call after we won was her, or how close I came to it.
I held my phone in the locker room, drunk and grinning and surrounded by teammates spraying champagne, and typed out a number I'd deleted but always kept memorized and stared at it for a long time before I put the phone away.
“How's your back?” she asks. “I noticed you were stretching between shifts at the Long Island game.”
“Work in progress. It's manageable during the season, but it tightens up if I don't stay on top of it.”
“And the alternate captaincy? How's that going?”
“ I'm still figuring out the non-hockey parts of it.”
“I could tell from the sponsor event.”
“Thanks a lot.”
She laughs harder than she has all night. “I'm sorry. You just looked so miserable shaking hands with those executives.”
“I wasn't miserable. I was focused.”
She gives me a sideways glance, not buying it. “You were counting the minutes until you could leave.”
“That too.”
The stiffness is gone. I don't know when it left, but it's gone, and the conversation has a rhythm to it. It feels like it's been running on a track we laid down at sixteen, and all we had to do was step back onto it.
“Do you remember the boardwalk?” she says.
“On Long Island?”
“Friday nights, after your games. We'd go with Dom and Nolan and get those disgusting cheese fries from the stand near the arcade.”
“Gino’s.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Is it still there?”
“I don't know. When I go to Long Island, I drive to my parents' house, and I drive back. I don't walk around the old spots.”
“Why not?”
Walking around Long Island means seeing the places where we used to be together, and I can't do that without remembering what I gave up. But I don't say that.
“Fame,” I say instead. “People recognize me. It's hard to walk around without someone wanting a photo or asking about the team.”
She nods. “I forget that your life is public. You seem so private.”
“I am private. The public part is the job. I keep them separate.”
“That must be exhausting.”
“You get used to it.”
“Do you?”
I take a drink. “No.”
She smiles at that, and for a second, she looks exactly like the girl who used to steal my fries at Gino's and dare me to win her a prize at the arcade.
“Do you remember the beach?” she asks. “Past the boardwalk, down by the rocks?”
I remember the sound of the waves and the feel of the wind and the way Jasmine tucked herself against my side because she was always cold. That beach was the first time I told her that I loved her.
We're quiet for a moment, and I wonder if she’s remembering that too.
Miles refills my beer without being asked. Jasmine is on her second cocktail, and the line of her jaw is softer than it was when she walked in.
“We should do this again,” I say an hour later, when we’re about to leave.
She gathers her coat from the back of the stool and stands. “I’d love that.”
I walk her out. The street is cold, and the air hits us after the warmth of the bar. She pulls her coat tighter, and I almost put my hand on her back to guide her toward the curb, but I stop myself.
She turns to me on the sidewalk. “Thank you for the drink, Logan. It was awesome catching up, and I’m glad we can be friends.”
“Me too.”
She flags a cab, and it pulls over. She opens the door and looks back at me one more time.
Her hair is blowing across her face from the wind, and she tucks it behind her ear before I even have long enough to register that I wanted to.
She gets in the cab, and the door closes.
The cab pulls away, and I stand on the sidewalk until it disappears down the block, wishing I had gotten the nerve to tell her that I’d missed her.
I pull out my phone and text Blake. You were right.
He responds in under a minute. No surprises there. Goodnight, idiot.
I flag down a cab. The city moves past me in streaks of light, and I think about a beach on Long Island and a girl who said she loved me without hesitation and the ten years I've spent pretending I don't still hear her say it.