Page 86 of The Best Parts of Him

Dabbs kissed him again. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

“Too late for that. Come on, let’s take a walk. I want to hear how the retreat went.”

Outside, the summer sun shone. The campus itself was barely half awake: with classes starting next week, students were only beginning to move into campus housing, making the place seem halfway to a ghost town. It reminded Dabbs of how his teammates tended to trickle back into Burlington from wherever they’d spent their summers.

They circled around the athletics facility, aiming for the paths that zigzagged through the quad.

“So?” Ryland hopped ahead of him and turned to face him, walking backward. “How was the retreat?”

Dabbs flicked his sunglasses from the top of his head onto his nose. “It was good. Really good. I learned a lot, but more than that, being in a room filled with other middle-grade writers was awesome.”

The retreat had catered specifically to children’s book writers and illustrators. Dabbs had waffled for months about going, but he’d finally registered himself as an attending author after Ryland had admitted to being nervous about his new job.

“I’ve been a hockey player my entire life,” Ryland had said in July, the week before starting as manager of player aesthetics. Of course, none of the college players had been on campus at the time, but he’d had meetings with coaches and strategy sessions with management. “This is totally different. What if I suck at it?”

If he could start something new that scared him, Dabbs could fight past the impostor syndrome to attend a retreat.

The Hockey Diaries had sold better than he ever could’ve expected. He supposed that was what happened when one was a hockey player with lots of hockey player friends who were willing to hock one’s shit to their massive followings. He’d had such success with them that he’d expanded the series to nine books with three more on the way in the next year. His team’s media relations people had gotten him onto podcasts and morning shows to promote his first book, and it was on one of those podcasts that he’d told the world about growing up with a verbally abusive parent.

He’d even told them about the seventeen-out-of-twenty math quiz.

And the world had continued to spin.

The best part about being published? The royalties he was able to donate to charity, the awareness he was bringing to mental health resources for youth, and the messages from parents who were thrilled to have stumbled on his books because they just knew they were going to help their kid through a sticky situation.

And that had been his entire reason for writing those books in the first place.

He and Ryland chatted as they strolled hand in hand through the quad, passing empty picnic tables and ducking under leafy low-hanging branches.

“Hey, I added to our Scrabble game while you were away,” Ryland said, stopping under the shade of a maple tree.

“Oh yeah? With what word? Not get again.”

Ryland’s gaze turned flinty. “Ha ha. No. Zombie.”

“No shit? I think that’s the first time you’ve managed to successfully use a z.”

“Just for that, you’re making dinner tonight.”

Laughing, Dabbs swept him into his arms and kissed him while the tree leaves rustled gently in the breeze.

Four years ago, Dabbs had tried to resist this man, thinking they were too different.

And they were different, but not where it counted.

Now, he couldn’t imagine life without him.

And as their smiling lips met again and again under the branches of the massive maple—a moment in time stolen just for them—the future spread out before them, full of pitfalls and challenges and celebrations and new opportunities.

Dabbs couldn’t wait to navigate them all with Ryland and discover more of those best parts of him.

THE END