Page 83 of The Hockey Grump Saves Christmas

She puts her hand over her mouth as she cough-laughs.

After regaining her composure, finishing her mouthful and clearing her throat, she looks at me dead seriously. “Maybe.”

Now it’s my turn to snort. “Uh-huh. When was the last time you banged anyone anywhere?”

“Hah. That’s rich coming from Mr. Two-Year-Old Condom.”

Can’t argue with that. “Yeah. Probably should have checked the expiration date.” I draw a circle around her knee with my finger. “You don’t have a boyfriend though, right?”

The words are out of my dumb mouth before I’ve processed what I’m asking—are you available?

Do I want her to be available? Do I want her for more than just this short time that we’re both in the sameplace?

Dumb mouth.

“It’s very gracious of you to assume I wouldn’t cheat on someone.” She points her spoon at me. “Your opinion of me is obviously higher than I thought.”

My opinion is indeed incredibly high. She’s smart, hilarious, cares more about doing a good job for the kids than anything in the world, and is smokin’ enough to melt an Olympic rink. And my opinions have only climbed higher by the second after what was undoubtedly the orgasm of my life.

Has her opinion of me changed? Has me helping with the kids and jetting in a top-notch European dessert made up for her undoubtedly poor first impression of me?

“Anyway, the answer to your question is no,” she says, digging around for the perfect ratio of strawberry to ice cream. “I broke up with my long-term boyfriend last Christmas. He got a job in Alaska.”

“And he wasn’t worth putting up with the freezing temperatures and twenty hours a day of darkness for?” I ask.

She pauses and sucks her lips in for a moment, as if trying to stop herself from talking.

Then she takes a deep breath. “I didn’t want to be with him enough to move. But I only realized that recently. Like, in the last couple of months. At the time…” She sighs and settles on a spoonful. “At the time, I thought I was just too scared to move away. Or live somewhere new. Or try something different.”

“But obviously you’renotafraid to move somewhere new. There are few places more different from Warm Springs than New Orleans.”

She looks up to meet my eyes, and those baby blues pierce something deep inside me.

“I’m moving therebecauseof that,” she says. “Because Ithought I was too scared to leave the coziness and familiarity of Warm Springs.”

“Easy for me to say, because I could be sent almost anywhere at almost any time, but that sounds like a weird reason to move.”

“I need to prove to myself that I can do it.” The eyes looking at me are earnest. “That I’m not a small-town girl with a small-town mind and a small-town attitude.”

I recoil like her words are a punch on my nose. “Is that what the loser in Alaska called you? A small-town girl with a small-town mind and a small-town attitude?”

And is that what’s behind the obvious signs, obvious to me anyway, that her heart isn’t in this move?

“Yup.” She drags her lips over the spoonful of sweetness.

“Dick.”

“A dick who’s right though,” she says, sucking on the creamy treat.

“He’s not right.” He’s a total fucking loser is what he is.

“Well, I’ll give you that he’s not factually correct, because I’m actually from Queens. But it wasn’t like I was partying it up in Manhattan or Brooklyn when I was a teenager. I hung out with the local drama school nerds. Todd knows I barely left the neighborhood till I went to college, that I always preferred to be in familiar surroundings.”

“Okay, so you went away to college. That’s moving somewhere new and different.”

“Hardly far. I went to Brown,” she says. “And that makes Rhode Island the farthest I’ve ever been.”

As someone who’s traveled all over the place playing hockey since I was a teenager, that’s prettyshocking to hear from a twenty-eight-year-old. But it sure as hell doesn’t make her any less of a person. It doesn’t make her life wrong. It just makes it different from mine.

---