The question, asked in the quiet summer night held a million implications she didn’t know what to do with. But not knowing what to do had never stopped her before, and there had been an honesty in this evening. One she would remember anytime she got that stupid, hopeful feeling in her chest.
“I saw the smile on your face when you were on the ice. It would be stupid to stay, Dan. It would be robbing yourself of joy.”
He opened the door to the backseat of the truck, carefully placed the skates inside, and then he leaned against the door. He tilted his head back, his eyes on the stars.
She might have looked up too, except she knew exactly what she’d see up there. What was new, what was fascinating, were the hard lines of this man’s face, the pensive wrinkle in his forehead, the way his lips pressed together.
He was famous and rich. People had just fawned all over him. He was in magazines and on sports shows, and everything about his life made no sense to her, except that he seemed to be stuck in a very similar space she found herself in.
What do I do next? How do I keep going?
“A guy can’t play hockey forever, Mel,” he finally said, his gaze dropping to his feet. “No matter how much joy it gives him.”
A familiar pain wound its way around her heart, a familiar helplessness. This was not anything she could fix. Luckily, it wasn’t her business to fix it.
Unluckily, she found the words spilling out anyway.
“My dad used to ride his horse every day. No matter what. Whether he needed to or not. Boiling heat, freezing cold. At least for a little part of every day he was on that horse. It was a thing he did. He did it because he loved it, and it made him less sad when he was…upset about things. It was everything he had, and when he couldn’t have that anymore… Well, you saw. Without it, he has nothing. So, if skating makes you that happy, you can’t just…hang it up. Even if you can’t be a professional hockey player forever, the thing that brings you so much joy is the thing you should be focusing on.” Because he was one of the lucky few who had the money and the means to focus on their joy no matter what.
She was one of the unlucky few who had neither of those things, and an unwillingness to go after them at the expense of the people she loved.
“It’s not the same,” Dan said, shaking his head. For the first time since they walked out of the rink, he looked at her. “Firstly and most importantly because your father doesn’t have nothing. He has you. He has Caleb.”
For a moment, she couldn’t breathe. Not in, not out. It was as if her lungs were paralyzed—everything seized up inside her with a blinding pain she quite simply could not push away or bury or ignore.
She would very much love for her father to see it that way, but he’d lost his ability to walk, and in that he’d lost whatever pieces in him he’d manage to salvage after her mother left. The pieces she’d clung to so hard, coaxed out of him, begged for. All swept away by one accident…and she’d learned to stop begging.
“Mel?”
His voice sounded thin and cottony. Her vision was wavering with the pain…the memories of all the times she’d begged and succeeded. Begged and failed. Wanting a hug. Never getting it. Until Dan.
“Let’s go home, huh?” she said, echoing his words from earlier in a scratchy voice. It wasn’t her home, but she didn’t care. There were too many other cares clogging up in her chest. She just wanted to be somewhere she didn’t have to beg or work or try.
And so far, that was only with Dan.
*
Dan pulled the truck onto the gravel drive in front of his place. His place. And yet, he felt more comfortable back on that ice than he did in the pitch black of night surrounding the cabin, a slight drizzle starting to fall on the windshield.
He glanced at Mel, curled away from him, head resting on the glass of the window, though he didn’t think she was asleep.
He almost wished she was. Or that she’d want to go home, because he couldn’t get over or erase the image of her face twisted in a kind of horrified pain when he’d said her father had her.
Those kinds of hurts he couldn’t fix, couldn’t smooth away. The kind he could see, but she wouldn’t really trust him to ease—not that she should. They were things that would always be painful for her, and he didn’t know how to make them easier. Distract, that he could do, but actually fix?
He’d never learned how to fix. She needed someone stronger, someone who had any clue what it was to stitch together all the emotional hurts into some kind of healing. How to ask what was wrong and get an answer. He already knew he couldn’t do that.
It had been stupid to think otherwise.
“Do you ever get tired of feeling like life keeps beating you over the head?” she asked into the silence of the car.
“Lately, yes.”
“Do you want to go have sex and pretend it’s not hard?”
God, he wanted to do that. So he went with a joke. “Well, something will be hard.”
She snorted. “You’re a classy guy, Sharpe.”
He grabbed her braid, and while he usually just gave it a tug, this time he didn’t let it go. He pulled until she had to look at him, and he was not surprised in the least to be met with a scowl.