Page 4

4

Liam

M ichelle Salisbury seemed to have a sixth sense for calling me at less-than-ideal times. Like when I was having a conversation with the first woman I ever loved for the first time in over a decade. I had no idea if our brief conversation was all we were going to have before she disappeared into the ether again. Our parents still lived next door to each other, but I wouldn’t put it past her to change her destination at the last minute to avoid me.

“Hey Mom,” I answered, keeping my eyes on Lenny to prove to myself that she really was there.

“Liam, honey, are you at the airport?”

“Yeah, I’ve been here about half an hour. Excessively early as always.”

I noticed the corners of Lenny’s lips curl into a smile. Being early to everything was a trait I had acquired from her. She was born a month early and had been early to everything ever since, eventually dragging me along with her. There were worse traits to acquire.

“Good, you’ll let me know just before you take off, won’t you?”

“Course I will. Anything else?”

“I had a lovely chat with Stassie earlier… You know, it turns out little Alana is coming home for Christmas this year after all.”

I couldn’t help but snort at Mom calling her ‘little Alana’. The woman, currently looking at the lid of her coffee cup like it was a piece of modern art, was only an inch shorter than me and I was 6”4’. Then I caught up with the rest of her sentence.

“What do you mean ‘after all’?”

“She was supposed to go to Aspen with that boyfriend of hers, but they broke up a couple of months ago, so she’s coming home. I think she might also be flying today. Oh, maybe you’ll be on the same flight! That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

I didn’t tell Mom that I was standing right next to her. Instead, I reassured her that I would text her before my flight took off and I would see her in a few hours before I hung up and turned to look at Lenny.

“Why did you and Kai break up?”

I saw surprise cross her face for a moment before she schooled it back to neutral.

“How do you know about Kai?”

Everything I knew about her from the last twelve years, I had learnt from a game of telephone that I never signed up to play. She left me and I respected that it meant she didn’t want me in her life anymore. I didn’t ask any questions about her, but people told me about her anyway.

“Mom mentioned speaking to Stassie today about you going back there for Christmas because you could no longer go to Aspen, what with the fact that you broke up with your boyfriend. As for how I know his name, I’ve picked it up over the last eight years, whenever Mom thought I just had to know about the wonderful things you were doing with him. So, why did you break up?”

“He asked me to marry him, and I didn’t say yes,” she said with a shrug, not looking up from her coffee cup.

I didn’t want to look too much into the fact that the relief I felt that she wasn’t engaged to another man was on par with the excitement I felt when I won the Stanley Cup. I decided to ignore it instead.

“Why didn’t you say yes?” I asked. It wasn’t the kind of question you could say no to, and I’d never heard anything to suggest that they weren’t happy. In fact, I had been waiting for the day that Mom sheepishly informed me that they were getting married.

“You know, I’ve been asking myself that question every day for the past two months and I still don’t have a concrete answer. I knew that I would need one, because going back home for Christmas was my only option unless I wanted to spend it alone, and people would ask. You know how everyone knows everything about everyone else. They were definitely going to ask. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks and I’ve still got nothing. The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to marry him. I couldn’t get my mouth to form the word ‘yes’. He was a good guy. He was a safe guy. He was for sure the marrying kind, but the yes wouldn’t come. It’s hard to come back from a failed proposal.”

Lenny looked annoyed that she didn’t have a concrete answer for why she didn’t get engaged and despite my better judgement, an idea formed in my head. It was probably a terrible idea, but it was an idea, nonetheless. One that might save us both, but mostly her.

“Do you want to pretend to be my girlfriend?”

She snapped her eyes from the coffee cup to me. “Come again?”

“Hear me out, we both don’t want to have to deal with the fallout from other people, but mostly, our parents lamenting over the fact that we both recently broke up with our long-term partners, even if the reasons are valid. So, what if we gave them a distraction?”

I was figuring this out as I went along but given that she hadn’t immediately shut me down, it felt like maybe there was a chance of this hare-brained idea of mine working.

“You can’t be serious?”

Now would be the time to back out. To laugh it off, and we could go back to being civil to one another. We hadn’t spent the last four years living in the same city and yet quietly, mutually agreeing to avoid each other for no reason. Her bakery was five minutes away from where the Panthers trained and I had never stepped foot in it despite my teammates always telling me that the hazelnut brownies there were to die for.

They weren’t wrong. Lenny had always made a great brownie. So much so that I had insisted that I wanted a tower of brownies from Sweet Nothing as my birthday cake for my thirtieth. Best brownies of my life.

“I’m serious.”

She took a long sip of her coffee.

“How would this work?” she eventually asked. I hesitated for too long because she continued. “Well, we are both freshly out of relationships, so, to some, it would seem like quite a quick turnaround for us to be in a new one without some crossover somewhere.”

“We were friends once upon a time. That gives us a more solid foundation for a relationship than if we were just straight-up strangers. No cheating necessary.”

“Except we are kind of strangers now. So, what happened? How did we go from near strangers to supposed lovers?”

It stung a little that she was right. We were near strangers now, even if falling back into conversation with her now had been as easy as stepping out onto the ice.

“You have a bakery right next to where I trained, why would it be so ridiculous that we bumped into each other?” I pointed out.

“Because I have a bakery five minutes away from where you trained, and I didn’t see you once. We’ve lived in the same city for four years and this is the first time I’ve seen you in person. Did you just spend all that time actively avoiding me?”

Yes.

“What, like you actively avoided telling me that you were moving to Michigan instead of Massachusetts?” I said instead, with a surprising amount of anger considering that I’d forgiven her for it a long time ago.

Lenny’s mouth gaped before she closed it again.

I sighed. “Can you blame me? You left me and I was the one entering your space. I thought the least I could do was leave you alone when I got there.”

She scoffed. “And yet here you are, standing in front of me as we board a flight home, saying we should tell people that we are dating and have been for…?”

“I dunno, a month or so. Like I said, it’s not like we weren’t friends before.”

There was a time when no one knew me better than her. She still might be the only person I could say that about.

“They won’t believe it,” she said. It was funny how easily I could still read Lenny. She had the same look and tone about her as when I would dare her to do something slightly stupid. She’d say she’d take the forfeit but there was always a moment when she came around to the dare and it was just a case of coaxing her to commit.

I had her in that spot.

“That’s where you’re wrong. Our mothers married us off in their heads when we were kids. Just because they didn’t spend our entire childhoods telling us they thought it, didn’t mean that they weren’t secretly rooting for it.”

I could see her thinking it through. Making the pros and cons list in her head.

Against all odds, she was going to say yes. I knew it.