“Share,” I said. “Grad students are poor.”
He pretended to think about it. “Nah. You know Waylon is my best riding buddy.” Waylon was his old dog. Some kind of Great Dane mix with spots like a dairy cow. “Besides, how could I leave all this?” He waved his arms around the room, encompassing the old championships posters and trophies, stacks of papers, dented metal file cabinets, and my ginormous oak desk. I would have replaced it but there was no way it would fit through the door. I suspected that the office had been built around it. It was also rumored to be a replica of the Resolute desk from the White House. Maybe it was. Who knew?
“You’re a rock, Vinny. What would I do without you?”
“Get ripped off by contractors, probably,” he said with a grin.
“Probably,” I conceded with a sigh.
Vinny hiked one butt cheek onto the edge of the desk. “What’s up, Tiny? What’s with the mood?”
Vinny was one of the only people who still called me that. Hell, he’d probably called my father that. For the hundredth time, I wondered how old he was. He’d looked the same age since I was in peewee. It seemed rude to ask.
“Nothing. Just feeling my age.”
He scoffed. “My hat’s older than you, son. Try again.”
“Your hat hasn’t been beaten up as much as I have,” I said. “How old is that hat anyway? And what is that ship? Were you in the Navy?”
He took the hat off, looked at it like he’d never seen it before, and then ran his hand through his hair. “Corpsman. Medic,” he clarified off my confused look. “Vietnam.”
“I take it back. You and that hat have seen some shit.”
He laughed. “Hat’s not that old. But we’ve been some places.” He put the hat back on. “So, what’s really bothering you?”
I shook my head. “Second-guessing my life choices. You know how it is.”
“That’s not like you. You were always…” He made a gesture with his hand, a level slice of the air. “You had a vision. You were focused, one-track mind.”
“Yeah, well, the problem with that is when that track turns out to be a dead end. Then what?”
He stared at me, head tilted like he was trying to read my mind. Hell, my soul. He stood up, dusting off his ass. “I reckon you gotta go off-road then. Hop that fence and see what’s out there.”
Making things up as I went along had never been my strong point. That had been Jake’s job. My childhood best friend and my first love, Jake Karlsson was the one who’d had a head full of wild dreams and wilder possibilities.
I wonder what advice he’d have for me now. He probably would tell me to get the fuck out of La Crosse, go to Mexico or someplace like that, and open up a bar. Which, come to think of it, sounded like a fabulous idea.
Not that I’d thought about that asshole in years. A decade at least. Well, not for longer than a minute at a time. Maybe five. He didn’t deserve my mental energy. But since I’d been back, he’d been on my mind constantly. Every place I went, I saw through his eyes, heard his snarky hilarious commentary. I guess when you went home to the place you had your first broken heart, it was normal to think about it.
“Driving without a map was never my strong point,” I replied to Vinny, just as the door to my office opened and Ryan came in.
“No,” he agreed, though he couldn’t have any idea what we were talking about. “Eric likes to have a plan. Likes to know exactly what is going to happen, when it’s going to happen, and who is going to be there when it does. It’s so boring.” He rolled his eyes as he gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and squeezed my ass.
That last bit was for Vinny. Ryan thought it was funny to make him uncomfortable. Too bad for him, Vinny could give a shit. He’d confided in me that he’d fooled around with some of his buddies in his youth. “There’s nothing new under the sun,” he’d said.
You know how people said that going into business with your friends was a bad idea? Going into business with your on-again, off-again boyfriend was a worse one. I wasn’t sure if we were on or off right now. According to Ryan, we were “taking a break” while we got used to living full-time in the same town, a novelty for us.
We’d been long-distance during college and then a similar arrangement after I was playing for a living. I wasn’t exactly out publicly but we’d lived together whenever he liked the town I’d been assigned to and met up on the road when we could. After fifteen years, I was getting tired of it.
Part of it was my own damn fault, I was well aware of that. I hated fighting, and over the years I’d gotten kind of worn down. Fighting for my spot on the team, fighting Father Time, and fighting for our relationship when he left. So each time he’d returned, I hadn’t had the strength to fight him, and I let him come back.
There was enough good to keep us together. When it worked, it was easy. Ryan was handsome and we looked good together. Both over six feet tall, his dark hair and brown eyes complimented my white-blond hair and blue eyes. He had a square jaw and full lips, and the confidence that comes from never doubting your attractiveness and never being the dumpee, but always the dumper. Was that enough? From what I’d seen of other people’s relationships, plenty of people thought so. I couldn’t help wanting more, and that was one of the main things that kept breaking us up. Ryan said I was an idealist and foolish for thinking there should be more. He’d accused me of wanting some fairytale soulmate.
Joke was on him, I hadn’t believed in soulmates since I was seventeen. Deep inside though, I wanted to.
There’d been a four-year stretch where we’d barely spoken. He’d met some up-and-coming film producer at a party in L.A. and had moved in with him within two weeks. The guy had some success at Sundance, but his two attempts at big-budget success had failed. According to the explanation Ryan had given me when he came strolling back, it was because someone somewhere was jealous and had it out for the guy, but failure in L.A. was contagious and the guy had never really managed to get traction in the big leagues.
Then again neither had I. Oh sure, I’d been called up to the show a few times near the end of the season when injuries had taken their toll on the big boys, but my time in the NHL had always been short-lived. And as the years had rolled on by, the call-ups had come further and further apart. My contracts got shorter and shorter, and I’d been passed from club to club like a joint at a high school party. One memorable season I’d been traded twice only to spend a few too many games watching the boys play from the press box as a healthy scratch.
I didn’t blame the coaches. That’s just how the game went. The AHL was a development league, meant to sort the wheat from the chaff, the boys from the men, and train the next generation of hockey superstars. After a certain number of years, you were as developed as you were going to get.
Once I’d gotten over the disappointment of not making the NHL—and I had gotten over it, really—I’d figured I’d ride it as long as I could. Mostly because I didn’t know what else to do and the pay didn’t suck. Beat digging ditches, as my grandfather used to say. But every veteran knew, at some point, there was nowhere to go except down. The injuries would start coming faster. I already ached so much in the mornings that it took a hot shower and twenty minutes of stretching for me to be able to tie my skates.