Chapter Seven #3
Hayes rolled his eyes, but he couldn’t disguise his fondness when he said, “Now you’ve got him going.”
“It’s so amazing.” Vanderbilt pulled out his phone.
“At the end of last season, she had just learned to roll over, and now look at her go!” He showed Chris a video of Lily crawling across the living room floor, intent on a ball rolling away from her, before getting distracted by the coffee table and starting to pull herself up.
“Wow,” Chris said. It took babies nine months to crawl? What did people do with them until then? Did Cheryl carry Lily around from room to room all the time? Chris would go insane. “How is Cheryl holding up?”
Vanderbilt nodded slowly, his smile fading.
“It’s been tough on her, you know? We have a nanny part-time and everything, but the nanny can’t breastfeed for her, and it’s hard to let go.
I’ve been trying to get her out of the house without the baby sometimes so she doesn’t go nuts, but with the season starting up again… ”
Why did humans keep having children? Why did women specifically keep doing it to themselves?
Chris remembered some of the worst of Matty’s toddler phase, how his mom would close the kitchen door while she made dinner.
He would hear her sobbing through the plywood while Matty screamed and screamed, and Dad turned the TV up louder in response.
Chris knew his parents wanted grandchildren, but the thought made him clench up in fear.
On Chris’s other side, Dmitriyev cleared his throat.
“Hm?” Vanderbilt looked to him.
Oh no. Chris could not imagine anything good coming from this conversation. It was sure to mean more division—
“In Russia, my sister have friends who go on walks and shopping with baby,” Dmitriyev said. “Cheryl have…friends?”
Vanderbilt sighed. “She was close with the WAGs in Boston, but here…”
Right, Vanderbilt had been traded the year before Chris made the team.
“Not so many WAGs here.” Dmitriyev nodded in understanding.
“Yeah.” Hayes picked at his beer label. “I’m sorry Allie hasn’t been around much, bro.”
Vanderbilt shook his head. “Nah, it’s cool. It was her wedding summer. Hanging out with a stressed mom and a tiny baby is not the vibe.”
“Yeah.” Hayes picked at the label on his beer bottle.
Chris wondered what the vibe of a wedding summer ought to be.
Having a big party to celebrate that you loved someone sounded nice, but Hayes and Allie’s wedding involved a lot more staged photoshoots and tiny, finicky food than Chris wanted at parties.
She also spent a full year planning it, which sounded even worse.
When he flew out to the lake near Allie’s hometown in Iowa for the wedding last summer, he’d worried the party would get wild.
Vanderbilt, the best man, inevitably brought ecstasy to every party, but he never got it out at the after-party.
Maybe because Allie left it off the itinerary.
“Why you dump Vanessa, eh?” Dmitriyev elbowed Chris. “She love babies.”
Chris rubbed his arm. “Ow. She was in the mob, remember?”
He wasn’t 100 percent sure about that, actually, but Vanessa had been very cagey when Chris asked her about the restaurant in Montreal her family ran—the one his granddad had said wasn’t safe.
She did also love babies and weddings, though she didn’t get pushy or intense about it.
They’d only been dating about three months, and on paper, everything about her seemed like a perfect match.
But Chris had this idea that when he met the girl he wanted to be with forever, he would know. He didn’t want to string Vanessa along.
Plus, one time, she came to see him wearing lingerie and nothing else under a trench coat. When she took off her coat and turned to him, he asked if she was cold and whether she wanted dinner. They never recovered from what Chris could recognize in retrospect was a pretty big faux pas on his part.
She’d been his longest relationship to date.
Dmitriyev waved him off. “Psh. You take mob girlfriend to contract negotiation, get millions.”
“Ha, ha.”
Dmitriyev looked all set to say he was being serious, which horrified Chris. Before he could, Chris turned back to Vanderbilt.
“You could bring Cheryl and Lily to the rink with you sometimes, I bet.”
“Yeah?” Skepticism laced Vanderbilt’s question.
“She’s big into Insta, right?” Chris searched his brain for whatever Vanessa had told him about Cheryl this time last year.
She used her social media to promote designer clothes.
Or was it a travel agency? Something she had a dedicated Instagram for at any rate.
“Kayleigh from PR told me one of her social media interns quit. I bet she could use Cheryl’s input. ”
He had no idea if Kayleigh wanted or needed a player’s wife and baby hanging around, but she always said the team could use more human-interest stories.
It might keep her distracted from figuring out about Tom and Jax and trying to turn their relationship into content.
Jax would probably quit the team in a huff, and they couldn’t have that.
A rare smile broke across Dmitriyev’s face. “Is brilliant idea!” he cried. “And baby can come to gym with us sometimes when Cheryl need break, yes? Baby deadlifts!”
Vanderbilt actually laughed. “She is getting heavy.”
Dmitriyev nodded in mock seriousness. “Plus, if she with us, she will be best skater.”
Chris looked between them. Maybe this was a terrible idea. But the thought of Cheryl all alone at home with only a part-time nanny for help during the hockey season didn’t sit right. Whatever happened would happen.
“Are you bringing them to the Halloween thing?” Chris asked.
“We have the best baby costume.”
Vanderbilt wouldn’t reveal in advance what he and Cheryl had decided to dress Lily up as, which led to other team members with children describing their best baby costumes and Howie bragging about the costume he’d been working on but wouldn’t tell anyone about.
Finally, everyone was talking to everyone all across the table, loud and boisterous, and Chris could return to his seat and eat his steak.
He was almost finished when he looked up and caught Phil watching him.
“What?”
“We ever gonna talk about the A not on your chest?” Phil asked mildly, as if he didn’t care either way. Chris’s pulse sped up all the same.
He looked down at his food and didn’t answer.