Chapter Eighteen
Spotted around town: Camille Easton landed in LAX last night.
Photos show her in a camel-colored jacket from Burberry’s spring collection.
Last we knew, she was headed for the runways in Paris and Milan after quietly divorcing Phil Easton of the San Francisco Sea Lions.
What brings her back to the States? Is it something (or someone) in the City of Angels?
Or is she aiming to reconnect with her ex-hubby just in time for Valentine’s Day?
Top comments:
phileastonfanclub: She’s so glamorous! NGL, I hope they get back together.
Drinking coffee with Phil’s ex-wife was not how Ben had pictured his wedding day.
They’d scheduled the court appointment for ten thirty.
By nine, none of them were dressed, and they had two unexpected guests.
Breezy sat at the table, looking gaunt and hungover, wrapped in the hideous crochet throw blanket.
Ben hoped he’d take it with him when he left and conveniently forget to return it.
Charlie kept looking back and forth between everyone and making increasingly panicked faces.
Ben couldn’t help but agree.
“So,” Phil said, serving up a dish of scrambled egg whites. Ben wasn’t sure if he made them in an attempt to fool Breezy or Camille. When they were alone, Phil used the whole egg. “What brings you here, Camille?”
“I returned to the States yesterday,” she said, tossing her long, sleek blonde hair over her shoulder. “When I turned my American phone on, I had a large number of concerned texts from Tom Crowler.”
“Ah, fuck,” Phil said. “Let me guess. He sent those sometime in November?”
“I looked up your game highlights.” Camille pursed her perfectly lined lips. “I never liked when you fought.”
“No one likes when hockey players fight,” Ben muttered. “It’s ridiculous.”
“You’re gonna have to make me a list for the fridge,” Phil said to him. “Top ten silliest things about hockey. You’ve only gotten to five so far.”
“Did I talk about the goal horns? Those are easily places one through three.”
“I see you’re doing fine,” Camille interrupted. “The knee again?”
“Yeah.” Phil refilled his coffee cup. “Been rehabbing it pretty intensely, and the trainers think I’ll heal up well. I might even make it back for playoffs.”
Ben grimaced. Playoffs was pushing it, but he knew Phil wanted to actively decide which game would be his last instead of letting a freak accident in St. Louis take him out. He glanced across the table and was alarmed to find Camille with an identical grimace on her own face.
“You came all the way here because you were worried?” Phil asked.
“It’s a short flight from LA,” Camille said. “And of course I worried. We were married for five years.”
“And now we’re divorced.”
“Yes, well, that doesn’t mean I don’t care anymore.”
Breezy squinted up from his egg whites. “So you do care?”
Ben patted his head. “He had a tough night. It’s a little early for double negatives.”
Chuckling richly, Camille looked at him. “And you are?”
“This is Ben,” Phil said. “He’s…um…” He looked at Breezy. Then he looked at Charlie. Then he looked at his watch.
It was nine fifteen.
All of them had to shower, dress, and find the paperwork. It would take at least half an hour to get to the courthouse and find parking, and Ben had never met a bureaucratic process it didn’t pay to be early for.
“I don’t wanna, um, tell on you guys before you’re ready,” Charlie said carefully. “But it’s getting late.”
“We do need to go soon,” Phil agreed.
Breezy blinked out from his blanket cocoon and made no move to get to his feet. Camille leaned back in her chair. She probably still thought of it as her chair. Her table. Her house. The notion made Ben irrationally angry.
He lived here now. He planned to live here for the foreseeable future. But so far, he’d actively avoided leaving any of his stuff lying around; everything that truly belonged to him was in the guest bedroom.
He should move it over to Phil’s room.
No, their room. The room they would share.
If he hated the throw blanket Phil’s ex-wife had picked for the couch or the decorative vase shaped like an ostrich egg, he could get rid of them. He was allowed—invited, even—to take up space here.
“We do need witnesses,” he said.
Phil’s head snapped up. “Seriously?”
“I don’t see any other options.”
“We can get court-appointed witnesses.”
“This will be a much better story.”
Phil laughed. He took a bite of his eggs, made a face, and turned to Breezy. “Hey, Breezy, how good are you at keeping secrets?”
“So good,” Breezy said instantly. “You all don’t even know about—the thing I am definitely not telling you because I promised I would keep it a secret.”
“Nice save, dude.” Charlie did a poor job of hiding his laugh as he said it.
“So Ben and I are getting married this morning. Courthouse appointment’s in about an hour. You want to be a witness?” Phil asked Breezy, but his eyes remained trained on Camille.
She had great eyebrows, thick and dark but plucked to perfection. They shot up her forehead for a second before she schooled her expression. “This I can’t miss” was all she said.
“Are you sure we can leave her alone with Charlie and Breezy?” Ben asked in an undertone as they went upstairs to get ready.
“Oh, yeah, she’s a sweetheart,” Phil told him. “She only looks mean. It’s the eyebrows.”
“She’s gorgeous.” Ben hadn’t intended to say it, but it slipped out unbidden. He couldn’t help but note all the differences. Apart from gender, Camille was immaculately groomed and slender to the point of being petite.
Ben was decidedly neither.
Phil squeezed his ass on the way to the shower. “Not a complicated guy,” he reminded Ben. “Just have a wide-ranging palate, apparently.”
“I would make a joke about eating me, but we don’t have time.”
They hurried through showering and shaved standing next to each other at the vanity.
Phil reached for the burgundy suit he’d left on a hanger on the bathroom door to steam out any wrinkles—the same suit Ben had complimented him on long before Ben had seen any of this coming.
With a sigh, Ben wandered into the guest room and perused his own stack of suits. There was a blue one he didn’t hate.
“No way.” Phil appeared behind his shoulder, buttoning a white shirt over a distracting expanse of bare chest. “Wear something you actually like.”
“But it’s our wedding.”
“Yeah, and I don’t want you pulling on your tie for the whole thing.” Phil pulled open a dresser drawer and selected a dark green sweater and a pair of tan chinos. “Here.”
Ben debated arguing, but they were already running late.
The ceremony itself went off without a hitch.
Ben didn’t see how it couldn’t, given they’d arrived on time and had all the necessary documents.
There was the dicey part where they both had to say “I do,” sure, but contrary to his own expectations, Ben didn’t worry about that.
Phil had been clear about who he was and what he wanted, and Ben wanted the same things.
The whole thing took fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, and then they signed some paperwork.
The officiant made a nice little speech beforehand, something about the rainbow at the end of the thunderstorm.
From a journalist’s perspective, she could have picked a less twee metaphor.
As the guy getting hitched, Ben got the impression it wasn’t rehearsed but rather that she wrote something new for each couple she married.
It must be a nice part of her job. Charlie presented them with the ring box when the officiant indicated to do so and, after they’d exchanged rings, surprised them both with a big hug.
“I know you’re not doing this only for me,” he said, “but thank you anyway.”
Ben hugged him back, eyes watery. He suspected he wasn’t the only one because as soon as Phil finished kissing him, he wrapped Ben up in an equally tight embrace.
Having Phil’s ex-wife sign as a witness felt a touch surreal, but she took it in good grace, and the rest of them followed suit.
Afterward, they drove home. Breezy, Camille, and Charlie sat cramped in the back seat of the station wagon like a very strange clown car with one clown twice the size of the other two put together.
Once they arrived, Breezy begged off to go home and watch the All-Star coverage.
His eyes were too bright for that to be the unvarnished truth.
“You’re sure you’re okay to be by yourself?” Phil asked.
“Oh, yeah. Weddings, man, I love them.” Breezy wiped his eyes.
“I mean about…”
“I’ll be fine. Watching my Italian D-bro tear it up at the ASG will make me feel better.”
Italian D-bro, Ben mouthed to himself. Number six on the list of silliest things about hockey was the players pretending the D didn’t have a firmly established cultural meaning, and the letter did not stand for “defense.”
“Thanks for being our witness,” Ben said to him.
“It was an honor.”
How did a human being survive being so earnest?
“I promise it won’t affect the team,” Ben added, remembering that as far as Breezy knew, Phil had just married their coach.
Breezy clapped him on the shoulder. It nearly made Ben’s knees buckle. “I’m not worried about it. Congratulations, Coach!”
He got into his pickup and headed out, leaving the rest of them standing in the drive.
Camille watched him go. “What a character. You know, he asked me about my guy for the WAG jackets. Apparently, the current WAGs are having trouble getting it organized.”
With three of the team’s leaders in relationships with other men, it must be difficult.
And most of the other guys old enough to have long-term partners were Europeans with European wives and girlfriends.
They all spoke better English than Ben spoke Russian or Finnish, but he doubted those WAGs were interested in arranging tacky matching jackets for a group of women they barely knew.
“The WAGs do love him,” Phil said, bemused.