MITCH
I had three
days, three tasks to complete, and zero time to waste.
There were only three days
because I was a member of the National Hockey League’s Portland Storm, and we
were on our league-mandated days off for Christmas. I’d left Portland for my hometown
of Brandon, Manitoba, as soon as the team had finished our final game before
the break. I barely made it through security and to my gate in time for the
flight, but I would have lost half a day had I waited until tomorrow. As it
was, I was due to catch the last possible plane out on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth
so as not to miss morning skate on the twenty-seventh. So really, I supposed it
wasn’t even three full days when you got right down to it. That was why I
couldn’t mess around.
Particularly when you considered
the three tasks I’d set for myself.
First, I planned to clear out the
last of my things from the small house in our hometown that I’d shared with Mia
for the past seven years until our divorce over the summer. We’d moved around a
lot during hockey season over the years, but we’d always kept this little house
near our families for when the off-season rolled around. I’d need a little help
to get my training equipment out, but Jason Redwine and Zach Farmer—two guys
who’d been my friends for as long as I could remember—had promised the use of
their trucks, along with whatever physical strength was necessary. We would take
care of it all together, much as we’d done almost everything over the years, at
least until I made it to the NHL. These days I wasn’t always around to help
them out when they needed it, but if I could help, I did.
Second, I wanted to spend every
spare moment with my little girl, Marley Lynn. I didn’t know what Mia’s plans
for the holidays might be, but she’d have to adjust them. Mia might have
custody, but Marley was my daughter, too. A daughter I hadn’t seen in months,
not since she was just beginning to crawl. Marley was over a year old and she
was walking. I had missed so much already, and I’d be damned if I’d let my ex
keep my daughter from me while I was in town and could spend time with her. I’d
lost so much time already that I’d never be able to get back. I didn’t even
know if she’d remember me—I mean, I Skyped with her sometimes, but that wasn’t
the same as being live and in the flesh, and during the season we didn’t get
enough time off to travel home very often—but I couldn’t worry about that or
I’d just tear myself up worse.
And third, I had a meeting
scheduled with my lawyer so we could file a formal petition with the courts for
joint custody. Mia had been granted full custody at first, because she was
breast feeding and my life was far from stable—I had played for eight different
NHL teams in the last five years—but things were changing now.
Marley was eating solid foods,
and it looked like I might have finally found a home with the Storm. I had
contacted a reputable nanny service and knew that I could take care of Marley
if she came to stay with me for short visits. I wanted to be able to have
longer visits with my little girl—at least something more than the nonexistent ones
I was currently receiving.
I was supposed to get a couple of
hours a few days a week, but since I wasn’t even in the same country as Mia and
my daughter, those visits weren’t happening other than during the offseason, so
really only three or four months out of the year. At the very least, I wanted
the courts to order Mia to bring my daughter to me on occasion. I’d pay for it,
but going for months on end without even seeing my baby, without hearing her infectious
giggle was killing me. It was bad enough that I hadn’t heard Mia laugh, hadn’t
seen her smile, in so long I almost couldn’t remember how her eyes lit up. If
we kept going like this, the same would be true for Marley. I’d be damned if I
was going to let that happen.
All of this was running through
my head for the thousandth time as I headed for the regional airport’s baggage
claim. I didn’t have a checked bag to collect since I would only be here a few
days, but it was where my buddies would be waiting for me.
I saw Zach first when I rounded
the corner. Actually, it was only Zach.
No Jason. It was well after midnight by the time my flight got in, and the late
hour was visible in the lines around Zach’s eyes. He had followed in his
father’s footsteps and gone into construction after his dreams of pursuing a
hockey career had been dashed, although he’d taken it much farther than his dad
ever had. Zach built custom homes. In fact, he’d built the very home that Mia
was currently living in. He’d probably worked a full day, ten hours or maybe
even more, before coming to pick me up. That didn’t stop him from reaching for
my hand and slapping the other on my back as he pulled me close in a hug.
“Mitchell Fucking Quincey. You
look like ass,” he said, laughing.
“I look better than you.” I
sniffed. “I smell better than you, too. You couldn’t take a shower before
coming to get me?” He didn’t smell bad, actually, but that was just the way
things had always been between us. If we weren’t insulting each other, then
there were bound to be real problems.
“Thought I’d bring a little of
the job with me, make you feel at home.” He took the handle of my carry-on bag
and headed toward the parking lot.
“What’s up with Jason?”
“Fatherhood changes a man,” he
said with a beleaguered sigh. “Now I have double confirmation of that fact.”
“Changing diapers, then.”
Jason and his wife had just had
their first child, a boy named Simon, about two months ago. I still hadn’t seen
the little guy other than in pictures and videos.
I took my gloves and toque from
my coat pockets as I walked alongside him, settling them in place before we hit
the bracing cold outside. As usual in Manitoba, we were definitely going to
have a white Christmas. The snow had blown into drifts almost as high as my
waist. I double checked to be sure my coat was buttoned all the way to the top.
Being home in the winter made me appreciate the mild Portland weather even more
than I usually did.
“Something like that. Shana
promised you could have him tomorrow, though.” Zach put my bag in the back of
his truck and we both climbed in. “You haven’t changed your mind about
anything, have you?” he asked as he pulled out onto the road.
Changed my mind? I wasn’t the one who’d wanted to end things. Even if I
had, the divorce had been final for months now. What was there for me to change
my mind about? I gave my friend a fuck-off look when he glanced over at me.
“All right, Q,” he said, forcing
a laugh back into his tone. “I just thought maybe if you left a few things over
there…”
“It’d give me an excuse to drop
by? Having my gym equipment cluttering up her house isn’t going to change anything.
All it’ll do is have her badgering me about getting it out of her way. She
doesn’t want me.”
And that stung like a
motherfucker, because there wasn’t a goddamn thing I wanted more than Mia and Marley.
I wanted my family back.
She’d claimed that it was all the
moves, that they had created too much stress for her, having to go from team to
team and city to city. Just as soon as she felt settled and comfortable, as
soon as she had a few friends she could talk to, I’d get traded. Or I wouldn’t
be re-signed to my team and I’d hit the free agency market, and we’d be on the
move again. There was definitely some truth to that. It had been hard on both
of us, maybe harder on her because she didn’t have the built-in new friendships
that my teammates provided, and because she was the one having to deal with the
logistics of moving our house and changing our address.
I was fairly certain that there was
more involved than what she’d told me, though. She’d always made friends
easily, and she adapted to change better than anyone I’d ever known. I should
know. We’d been together since we were in high school. Everyone had always said
we were meant to be together, that they couldn’t imagine one of us without the
other. In the beginning of our marriage, I knew exactly what they meant. But
then things had started to change. Mia stopped being the smiling, laughing,
easy-going, sexy, flirty girl I’d fallen in love with. That girl was still in
there somewhere. She had to be. I just didn’t know how deeply she was buried or
how to bring her back to the surface.
“You know who does still want you?” Zach said,
bringing me back from my ruminations. I shrugged, lifting a brow in question,
which only made him chuckle. “Vanessa Hough. Next time I see Q, I’m going to sweep him off his feet. He won’t know
what hit him,” he mimicked in a high-pitched squeal.
“Naughty ‘Nessa?” Whether I was
still in love with Mia or not, there wasn’t a frozen chance in hell I would
fall for Vanessa Hough and her numerous charms.
She was one of those women who would screw anything with two legs and a dick if
she thought that dick might be her ticket out of Brandon.
“The one and only.”
“Fuck me.”
“That she would, my friend. That
she would.” Zach pulled up in front of his constantly-a-work-in-progress house
and killed the engine. He spent so much time making everyone else’s dream
houses that he never had enough time to dedicate to his own place. “She’s
pretty good, actually. Might not be the worst thing you could do. Screw
Vanessa’s brains out. Move on from Mia.”
I’d been trying to move on from
Mia for months, though, and I doubted taking Vanessa Hough to bed would do
anything to make it any easier.
I couldn’t help but note that
Zach spoke like he had experience of a particular kind with Vanessa. “You’ve
slept with her?”
He shrugged, climbing out of his
truck. “Once. Almost a decade ago, when I was home for the summer.”
It would have been while he was
playing major junior hockey, then—after he’d been drafted. Eventually, he’d
suffered a concussion that had ended any hope he might have had to play in the
NHL. Maybe it was after he’d known that chance was gone.
“She help you move on from
anything?” I asked dryly. I followed him up the steps to his house, carrying my
bag. It was too late to drop by my parents’ house. Too late to go to Mia’s and
demand time with my daughter. I was going to crash here for the night and get
started on my list of tasks in the morning.
“Nah,” he said. “But at least for
a little while, I didn’t care.”
I’d
like to not care. Somehow, though, I doubted that ending up in Naughty ‘Nessa’s
bed would be cathartic.
MIA
“Marley, no!” I said in my best mommy
voice. I seemed to say that more than just about anything these days. Once my
daughter had started walking, she was suddenly able to get into absolutely
everything. Sometimes it felt like she got into it all at the same time. I
didn’t know how it was possible.
I’d turned my back for about 2.09
seconds so I could clean up after breakfast. That was all it took for her to
grab the cat’s tail, causing Inigo to let out an ear-splitting yowl and race up
the Christmas tree. The tree had come crashing down, of course, because that
was just how today was going to go.
I raced back into the living room
to find that—thankfully—the tree hadn’t landed on my daughter, and Inigo seemed
to have escaped her clutches and found somewhere to hide. We had named him
Inigo Montoya, after the character from The
Princess Bride, because he had markings on both cheeks that looked like
scars. Also, the tree didn’t appear to have started a fire or set off a flood,
so we should be all right in the long and short term.
Marley looked up at me and
giggled, pushing up from the floor into a standing position. She tottered over
to me and lifted her arms, and I hauled her free from the disaster zone,
brushing my hair out of my eyes.
“How am I supposed to get
showered and dressed and make both of us pretty for Gram and Papa if I can’t
leave you alone for three seconds?” I asked.
She answered me with a sticky
kiss. It tasted like applesauce. I thought I’d cleaned her up before I let her
loose, but now that I took a closer look I could see the remnants of her
breakfast still clinging to her chin and cheeks.
“I should probably just take you
into the shower with me, huh?”
Before she could answer that in
any way, the doorbell rang. Who on earth would be here at this hour of the day?
And on Christmas Eve, no less. I looked down at myself, scowling at the grungy
pj’s covered in applesauce and Lord only knew what else Marley had gotten into.
It wasn’t worth trying to sort myself out, though. Everyone in this town knew
everyone else, so they all knew I was a divorced mom with a baby. If they wanted
me to look presentable, then they needed to send a babysitter and a
construction crew.
I planted Marley on my hip and
crossed to the front door, not bothering to look through the peephole before
throwing it open.
I should have looked.
I really, really should have looked.
Because if I had, I would have
known that it was Mitch, and I would have double-checked that the deadbolt was
secured and pretended I wasn’t at home. But I hadn’t done that. And now here he
was.
On my doorstep.
Looking good enough to eat.
Staring at me the way he always
had, like I was good enough to eat,
even though I was in grungy, applesauce-covered pj’s with my hair an absolute
wreck and a destroyed Christmas tree all over the floor and had no idea how I
was supposed to react to him.
“What the hell are you doing
here?” I demanded. I should have at least said something polite first. Hi. How’s it going? I miss you—God, how I
miss you—so I need you to leave.
The corners of his lips twitched,
a tic he’d had since we were teenagers, and he shoved his gloved hands into his
coat pockets. “Christmas break. I came to move all that gym equipment you’ve
been bugging me about.”
“At 8:30 in the morning? You
should have called,” I said, helplessly looking at the disorder surrounding me.
Mitch’s eyes followed mine and
landed on the overturned tree and the decorations that had been flung halfway across
the room. Then he looked at me again, letting his eyes rove over my grungy
attire and frizzy hair and the mess of a baby in my arms, and I felt like the
biggest failure as a mother. I wanted to explain it all away. I wanted to be
sure he knew Marley and I didn’t live like this, that it had all happened right
before he’d rung the bell. But really, only the disaster of the tree had been a
last-minute thing. Everything else just was.
“It’s not—”
He cut me off by reaching for our
daughter, who giggled and kissed his cheek, and then giggled some more because
he hadn’t shaved in a few days and had a decent accumulation of scratchy
stubble. His eyes lit up at the sound, and he pushed inside so that I had to
back out of the way or he’d barrel over me. “Come on,” he said over his
shoulder, and only then did I realize that Jason and Zach, his two best
friends, were behind him. “There’s a lot more to do in here than I knew.”
Mitch made his way into the
living room as if he owned the place, which technically, he did. He sat Marley
down on the couch and put her favorite—and disgustingly filthy—teddy bear in
her arms while the other guys came in, winking at me as they moved into the
living room. Without any of them saying a word, they took off their winter gear
and set to work sorting out the Christmas tree and decorations and the mess I’d
been trying to clean up from breakfast, leaving me standing there and staring.
“Why don’t you go get a shower?”
Mitch said to me after a minute.
I let out a frustrated huff. “I
can do this,” I said feebly, but it made me sound ungrateful for their help,
which stung because I actually appreciated their help.
“I know you can.” He grabbed
Marley around the waist and lifted her high up over his head until she squealed
out loud. She had climbed down from the sofa and had been tottering at a run
toward the tree they’d just righted, and he’d stopped her before she had a
chance to cause more damage as though it had been the easiest thing in the
world for him to do. That only made me feel like a bigger failure as a mother.
He caught my eye as he passed Marley off to Jason. “Go on. We’ve got this under
control. Take a few minutes for yourself. We should have this all sorted out by
then. We can talk when you’re done.”
A few minutes of my own were
exactly what the doctor ordered, but it irked that he knew it. Did I look that much
of a disaster?
I nodded, skirting around the
mess and heading toward the master bedroom. “If you need—”
“We won’t need anything,” Mitch
said. “We’ll be just fine.” I gave him a dubious look, and he added, “I may not
get to spend much time with Marley, but I promise I can watch her for fifteen
minutes with two other adults to help without allowing her to die.”
“That’s not fair, Mitch. I don’t
think that,” I argued.
He met my gaze, his unwavering
and thoroughly inscrutable. “I know you don’t. I’m sorry.” Then he shrugged,
and his features softened, and it was impossible to be mad at him when he
looked at me that way. “Will you please let me take care of something for you,
just this once?”
It was never just this once, though. Mitch had always taken care of things for
me, for almost as long as I could remember. He walked into the room, and
everything that had seemed overwhelming and earth-shattering and unmanageable suddenly
slowed down and settled into order. He made it possible for me to breathe.
In fact, until he’d walked
through the door a few minutes ago, I hadn’t realized that I’d stopped
breathing. How long had I gone without filling my lungs? I couldn’t even
remember, which probably said a lot.
I must have stood there staring
for too long because he closed the distance between us. Before I could prepare
myself, he lifted one hand to my cheek. It was all I could do not to press into
him, to beg for more of his touch, but I somehow refrained.
With the tip of his thumb, he
brushed against my skin. “Sticky,” he said quietly.
“Applesauce,” I replied, mentally
berating myself for the flutters of awareness and need racing through my veins.
He kept his eyes locked on mine
as he put the tip of his thumb into his mouth and licked it clean. “So it is.
Go get a shower, Mia.”
I
raced down the hall, not because I was in a hurry to clean up, but because I
didn’t trust myself not to push up onto my tiptoes and kiss him, and that would
be the worst thing I could possibly do.
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