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Alana

“ M uller.” The old nickname rolled off my tongue like it was second nature. Once upon a time, it was. I saw his eyes brighten and then I noticed him holding the coffee with ‘Alana’ written on the side. I hadn’t heard the barista call my name.

“I believe this is yours.” He handed me the coffee and I took a greedy sip.

“Thanks,” I sighed as the drink ran a heated path down my throat.

“You going home for the holidays?” he asked slowly. Awkwardly.

“Yeah, you?”

“Yeah, surprisingly I’ve missed Christmas in New York and now that I don’t have to think about work, I can really go and make the most of it.”

“Oh yeah, I saw that you retired. Sent quite the shockwave through the sporting world.” The universe works in funny ways and so, although I tried to cut myself off from Liam completely, the universe gave me a boyfriend who was deeply invested in the professional career of one Liam ‘Gunner’ Mulligan. Christmas came early when Liam transferred to Kai’s home team, the Detroit Panthers.

I knew way more about Liam than I had ever intended.

I pretended that I didn’t care about any of it, but I stored everything Kai told me about Liam away in a special corner of my brain. When Kai found out that Liam was retiring, he had reacted in such a way that I thought something terrible had happened. When he told me what he was freaking out about, I felt relief on two levels. One, that everything was okay, and two, that Liam was getting out before he could do himself some real damage.

“Everyone has to retire at some point,” he said. It sounded rehearsed. And tired.

“Yeah, but why then?” I’d heard a lot of opinions. The consensus was that he had still time left in him, and he was throwing it all away by retiring when he was in his prime.

“I got slammed into the boards and did something to my shoulder again. I was sitting in the PT’s office, and they started talking about all the ways I could rehab it so that I was ready for the pre-season, and I realised I didn’t want it anymore. I didn’t want to live for a sport and only a sport, I wanted to just live.”

Liam first tore his rotator cuff when we were seventeen and it led to months of me reminding him that he was more than just a hockey player and trying to stop him from thinking his life was over if he wasn’t on the ice. He made it to his junior year of college before he injured it again. Then again at twenty-five. It played up quite a bit the following season as well but it wasn’t bad enough for him to have to sit out .

Between Kai and my hockey coach (and his high school coach) Dad, I had heard a lot about this shoulder injury and its impact on Liam in college and professionally.

“I told you there was more to life than skating around on rink. Multiple times if I remember correctly,” I said it with a level of familiarity that we didn’t have anymore, but the longer we talked, the easier it was to fall into our old rhythm.

“You definitely did, but that doesn’t change the fact that, at some point when I was a kid, hockey chose me and kept choosing me the bigger and more assured on the ice I got.”

I didn’t mean to, at least not consciously, but my thoughts wandered to an underwear advert that had been plastered around the city not long ago. Liam had been all chiselled abs and thick, muscular thighs that I wanted to sit on, curled up against his chest, which looked like both marble and the softest pillow you would ever sleep on. I could almost feel his arms and those solid biceps wrapped around me in the tightest hug, surrounded by the smell of his almond body lotion. I knew he wouldn’t have switched that out even after all these years, just in case it screwed up his game.

“You alright there, Len?” I could hear the teasing tone in his voice.

I felt hot, which meant that my cheeks had probably gone a little pink. Blushing usually went unnoticed on my brown skin, but Liam would notice. He always noticed. I took a sip of my hot coffee in the hopes that I might be able to pass it off as the reason my cheeks were flushed. My fingers started toying with the ring on my thumb.

I cleared my throat. “I’m fine. Your parents must be excited to have you home for the holidays.”

I hoped bringing up his parents would distract me from thoughts of black and white shirtless pictures, blown up to thirty feet and dotted around the city I lived in. I may have avoided the man himself, but I knew the exact location of every one of those billboards.

“They both are and they aren’t.” He shrugged.

“Meaning?” I knew his parents almost as well as I knew my own. They loved having him around. I couldn’t imagine why they wouldn’t be ecstatic about getting him for two weeks at Christmas.

“They are happy I’m coming home but aren’t thrilled that I am retired and single at thirty. They liked my job. They liked my ex-girlfriend.”

It made no sense for me to feel a sharp stab of jealousy at the fact that Liam recently had a girlfriend. He wasn’t mine, and I’d been in a mostly happy relationship for most of my twenties, so it wasn’t like I had a leg to stand on. But jealousy pulsed through me nonetheless.

I swallowed it.

“Why aren’t you more upset about it?”

He shrugged. “She wasn’t who I thought she was.”

“You getting off on speaking cryptically today, Muller, or what?” I teased. He used to talk in near riddles when he saw me getting into my own head and wanted me to snap out of it. It always worked because I always found it annoying and had to call him out on it.

“Definitely not. Old habit.” He smiled.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” I said .

“Melanie wasn’t all that happy about me retiring when she thought I still had a good four or five years left in my career. She made it abundantly clear that she was only in our relationship because I was Gunner the NHL player, not just Liam Mulligan.”

Ouch.

“How long were you together?”

“She saved me from a hoard of overzealous fans on my twenty-fifth birthday and we kind of just fell together.”

“Her loss. I—”

I was cut off by a phone ringing. I knew that ringtone. His mother was calling.

“Sorry, it’s Mom.”

I nodded my head in understanding as he answered the phone. I stared at the lid of my coffee cup and pretended that I wasn’t listening to his conversation.