Page 33

Chapter 31

Kitty

“If we want to think about my love life in terms of the Netflix and Channel 1 sensation, the Great British Bakeoff, Paul Hollywood would take one look at my little gingerbread house, stare it down with those piercing blue eyes, and say, ‘It looks a bit of a mess.’”

Laughs swelled. I was on stage at Caroline’s, one of my favorite clubs for stand-up.

“And it’s one of those cases where I’m someone who never should have been cast on this show. The show is fading from favor and they’re begging for contestants. Pandemic baking is over. Too many people stopped eating bread and enormous New York Times chocolate chip cookies and went back to diets and salads.”

More laughter. I held my body in the explanation posture.

“But Paul and Prue walk up to my bench, and they see a gingerbread house, not even made of proper gingerbread, mind you. It’s like half-raw brownie batter with no standing walls. Just frosting and ganache and cookie crumbles everywhere. But like, it tastes *great*.”

I waited for the laughter to die as I pulled my stool to the edge of the stage to do some crowdwork.

“Lots of couples in here tonight. Anybody on their first date?”

A couple in the second row raised their hands.

“Oooh, a fresh kill!”

I licked my chops and rubbed my hands together with crazy eyes.

“Let me just get the tough part out of the way for you two. Miss, do you fuck on the first date?”

She gave an iffy “maybe,” eyeing her date sidelong. “Depends on the person.”

“I hear you, mama. I hear you. And what about you, sir?”

His face went beet red. “Depends on the person.”

“Oh, that was slick, sir. She answered first and you just got to mirror her answer. Oooh, this ain’t his first rodeo.”

I reached in my back pocket and pulled out a condom, tossing it to them.

“Have fun tonight, kids, but lady, watch out with him. He’s a little too good.”

I scanned the faces looking back at me when I stopped on a very familiar face.

“Alright, hang on. I think we’ve got a rare opportunity here.”

I put my hand over the mic and leaned so my face was past the lights on the stage.

“Guy? Is that you?”

His smile gleamed in the dark and he nodded.

“Will you come up here? Yeah?”

He nodded and stood. I looked to our stagehand, Maurice.

“Maurice, can we get another mic up here? Ladies and gentlefolk, I have a special treat for you here tonight. Please welcome to the stage, star forward for the Seattle Sealpups and my ex-boyfriend, Guy Stelle!”

I pronounced his name the way everyone else does, not wanting to give away something so personal to us. Guy walked to the side of the stage and stepped up to whoops and applause. He wore a short-sleeved button-down and well-fitted jeans that showed off his athletic body. His long-ish hair was smoothed back and parted to the side. A few wavy strands fell out around his face. He looked, in short, as stunning as ever.

I welcomed him with a hug, and God, he smelled so good. Like him. He kissed my cheek to a quick “aww” from the crowd. I pulled the stool back and invited him to sit, and Maurice handed him the extra microphone. I rested my arm on his shoulder, propping my chin in my hand and looking at him.

“So, Guy, you look great. Did your cheekbones get more cut? Jesus. And your hockey butt, big and tight as ever.”

Guy laughed, his eyes sparkling at me as he said, “You look beautiful, Kitty.”

I flipped my hair coquettishly, but my stomach swooped. I’d always loved the way he said “beautiful.” His accent was music to me. I hadn’t heard him say my name since the depths of the pandemic: “Kit-tee.”

“It’s been a minute, huh?” I said, acting like I was interrogating him.

“It has.”

I squinted at him. “Did you know I was going to be here tonight?”

“I, uh . . . maybe?” he said with a wince.

“You don’t follow my comedy account,” I said, accusatory. “Your face is never in my stories and you’re not in my followers.”

“Actually, I do,” Guy said. “I have a burner account.”

My jaw dropped. “Just to stalk my comedy career?!” The crowd looked about as shocked as I felt. One girl had her hands covering her mouth. Another flapped her hands as if to say this is the most romantic shit I’ve ever seen .

Guy blushed and put a hand over his face.

“Are you @funnyfan96?!” I gasped. Guy blushed deeper and bent forward. “You guys, @funnyfan96 puts the sweetest comments on the sets I post. Like that I’m funny and pretty and smart and sexy. And if anyone trolls me, @funnyfan96 is all over them.” My heart pounded and my eyes watered. I couldn’t hide the quiver in my voice. “It’s you?”

Guy sat up and with a look of ultimate embarrassment, nodded. “Jesus, Guy, this is a revelation.”

I stood back, taking it all in to the hysterical laughter of the crowd. I took off my jacket and fanned myself.

“You could just, ya know, tell me you miss me.”

“I don’t want to bother you.”

I set my jaw and turned to the audience. They were gobbling this up. Who could blame them? “So to catch y’all up, Guy and I lived on the same street for a year in West Virginia, and his family and my family were besties. Then we started dating in college until he got drafted into the NHL. Okay, so why don’t you tell the lovely people here why we didn’t work out?”

Guy laughed and so did the crowd. “It just wasn’t our time,” he said. “You wanted to do this and I wanted to play hockey. Our schedules didn’t line up.”

“Guy,” I said, looking at him pointedly. “I put my life on display for laughs. You can tell them the truth. Surely there’s something about me you couldn’t live with.”

“That is the truth. I never should have let you go,” he said. Then just looking at me, he said, “You’re the one that got away.”

The “aww” that came from the crowd that time was deafening. I doubled over and staggered backward like I’d been shot, laughing because I was embarrassed and crying because it was sweet. He’d never said anything like that during our pandemic rekindling.

“Are you kidding me?!” I shouted away from the mic as I took a minute to recover. Guy’s smile was my very favorite one, the one he reserved just for me. The one that was natural and easy but so gleeful.

I stepped back to the mic stand and brushed off my clothes to compose myself. “So like, are you single?” I asked, wiping tears from my red face.

The crowd whooped in approval.

“Pretty much,” he drawled.

“Pretty much!” I turned to the crowd. “That’s NHL fuckboy speak for ‘I still fuck the fans but not one regularly.’”

Guy shrugged and the crowd laughed. He winked at me.

I tucked a strand of hair that had come loose from my ponytail behind my ear. I leaned on the mic stand, putting on exaggeratedly flirty body language. “So what are you doing later?”

He lifted his mic to his lips. “I mean, hopefully,” he started, wiggling his eyebrows and pointing to me. He was so fucking charming and funny. The crowd was in the palm of his hand.

“Okay, get outta here. Stop stealing my show. Guy Stelle, everyone!” I held his hand up and we bowed together. He gave me a big hug and another kiss on the cheek before going back to his seat.

When I finished my set, Guy waited at the bar with a beer for me and an open stool.

“You were amazing,” he said into another hug, this one longer and more intimate.

“So were you, funny fan! Thanks for coming. It’s really great to see you,” I said. “And what a surprise!”

“I figured you’d tell me not to come if I told you I was coming,” he said. “I really wanted to see you. I miss you.”

I took a long drink of my beer. Why did he think I’d tell him not to come? I didn’t feel like getting into it with a potential audience around us. “How long are you in town?”

“I booked a room for the weekend,” he said. “I knew you had a few sets here, and based on your schedule, it doesn’t seem like you live here anymore.”

“Oh,” I said, somewhat taken aback. It’s true, I loosely followed his schedule during hockey season, but he had done research about me. “Yeah, I don’t. I’m about to start a job in L.A.”

His jaw fell open. “Congrats! What’s the job?”

“I got a writing job for a show on NBC.”

Guy’s eyes lit up. “Seriously? Kitty, that’s so amazing! I’m so proud of you!”

“And I bought a house. I close next week,” I told him with a grin.

“Oh my God, Kitty Bird! I can’t believe it!” He did that thing where he swept me into his broad and tall body and jostled me around like I was a toy. It always made me feel so cherished, a child-like display of affection that was so pure and joyful. “Can I take you to dinner to celebrate?”

I laughed. “Why do I get the feeling you were going to take me to dinner even if I bombed tonight and had no good news to share?”

Guy gave a deep, full laugh. “You know me too well.”

He popped on a baseball cap, paid our tab, and we headed out. His fitted shirt gave a delicious peek at his biceps, and his jeans were a goddamn work of art. He touched me as much as he possibly could on the walk over, and I let him. It was so nice to be back in his company, with his familiar scent and his hands moving their old routes over my body.

He was in the mood for sushi, so we slid into a late-night spot not far from the theater district. As I picked my sushi, I kept feeling him watching me. I looked up.

“What?”

“I’m just so glad you’re here,” he said, eyes soft.

“Yeah?”

We ordered, and he took my hand across the table, playing with my fingers and knuckles until he settled on holding it.

“So I don’t mean to crash your weekend in New York, but I want to talk to you about something,” Guy started. His expression was vulnerable and sincere in the table’s candlelight. “I don’t think last time was our only time to try. It was a good start, but it wasn’t the end of our story.”

I gave a wry smile. “I live in L.A. now, though, and your season is about to start.”

“I know. But I have summers off, and really Kitty, I date around but no one makes me happy like you do. You understand me, and I understand you.” He looked down at my hand in his, rubbing his thumb over my fingers, then brought his eyes back to mine. “I never stopped loving you. I’ll play L.A. and Anaheim a couple times a season, and I can fly you out to see me when you have breaks. I know it’s not ideal, but I’d rather have you sometimes than not at all.”

“But what’s the end goal? You still have another five or ten years to play. Will we be long distance for that long?”

“I don’t know right now. But I’ll do my best to work around you. I’ll never ask you to give up your career for me again,” he said. I swallowed hard. One of the greatest deliberations of my adult life was whether I was wrong turning him down when he offered to make me an NHL wife.

“We haven’t even really talked in over a year, Guy. You kind of fell off. We don’t even know if we’re still right for each other. People change,” I said, pulling my hand back from his and sitting back. With the upcoming changes in my career, I didn’t know if I could handle the emotional rollercoaster of trying with him again. Never really being able to have him. Forever out of reach.

Guy sighed. “I don’t know what you had planned for this weekend, and I don’t want to take it over if you had big plans. But what if we just pretend for this weekend that it’s all going to work? What if we try, just for these three days? Then you can think about it.”

I took a beat to think. I thought about what he’d said on stage, and I knew they weren’t just lines. With me, Guy isn’t an act. He’s real. So much had passed between us over the years. So much time, so many memories, so much pain, and so, so much love.

I reached for his hand again. “This weekend. All in. We don’t talk about the complicated stuff. I can’t have my heart broken like that again. We’ll just enjoy each other. I have a couple of dates with friends but the rest of the time, I’m yours.”

Guy’s eyes went watery. “Thank you. I love you, Kitty Bird.”

“I love you, too.”