Page 87 of What If I Knew You

He’s going to kill me!

How could I have been so stupid?

There’s no way he’ll believe that I didn’t know who he was now.

The guys will tell him I know them all very well.

Fuck!

“Everything alright?” My dad eyes me from the across the picnic table as I pick at my food.

“Hmm? Oh yeah. It’s fine. Just…” I shrug, looking for any reason to give him for not being extremely talkative. “A lot going on in my head. Yesterday was a really shitty day and I guess my mind isn’t letting it go just yet.”

Total lie.

Well…maybe not a total lie.

But it’s believable, nonetheless.

“I can’t imagine doing the job you do every single day, sweetheart. Especially with kids. It’s always harder with kids.”

“It is.” I nod.

I really don’t want to think too hard about yesterday when I have way bigger problems right now. Ever since Dad and I walked into Harold’s for lunch and ran into the guys on the team—including Bodhi—my gut has been twisting and turning. I’ll never be able to unsee the expression on Bodhi’s face when he saw me with Dad. It was like I stabbed a dull knife into his chest and twisted it several times over. I wanted to apologize to him right then but there was no way I could do that with my dad standing next to me. And there was no way I was going to out Bodhi and the reason we’ve been together in the first place to his teammates. He’s new to the team this year. I get how that probably feels being the odd guy out. He’s trying to prove himself. The last thing I want to do is embarrass him in front of everyone. I considered sending him a quick text but this doesn’t feel like the kind of thing I should just push away with an insincere text message.

I lied to him for weeks.

Alright, maybe I didn’t lie but I omitted truths.

So did he, obviously, but I understand why.

I may not have known who I was talking to when we were just texting back and forth but the night we finally met, I knew exactly who he was. Any hockey fan would have recognized him and now that I think about it, he was damn lucky that nobody recognized him that night on the terrace.

I, on the other hand, I knew everything about him.

I know so far this season Bodhi has scored twelve goals with five assists. I know he’s only had a total of four penalty minutes. I know his time on the ice averages nineteen minutes total per game.

But he didn’t know I knew that.

He didn’t know I knew him at all.

My heart tumbles in my chest as a tear slips down my cheek and Dad is quick to notice before I can swipe it away.

“That bad, huh?”

“Yeah, Dad.” I push at my food. “I’m really sorry, I guess I just don’t feel much like eating today.”

“Corri,” he says softly before reaching his hand over to hold mine. “You don’t ever have to apologize for your job and how it makes you feel. You’re human. You spend your days helping and comforting tiny humans. Tiny humans with gigantic hearts. I would think it odd if none of what you do affected you. You are completely within your right to have feelings.”

Dad and I have always been close. Especially when Mom was diagnosed with cancer and going downhill in the end. Dad and I relied heavily on each other. He knew I sort of understood some of the medical jargon and how to care for Mom so I was his safety net when it came to explaining it all, but he was my safety net as I watched my mom deteriorate right in front of my eyes. She wasn’t just another patient to me. There was no way I could ever look at her that way and Dad knew it. I’ve always been able to talk to Dad. I could tell him just about anything. Hell, he was the one I called when I found out Leo had cheated on me. He was the one I cried to. He was the one who took the all-night flight to help me pack my things and then he was the one who flew home with me.

He would move Heaven and Earth to make me happy even if it means moving it all around for me. He was always good at putting out my personal fires before they spread into something wild but this time it’s different.

This time I started a fire inside my dad’s hockey team.

And I fear confessing to him about it would only fan the flames.

There was always one rule growing up around his hockey teams and it was to never get involved with one of them. When I was a young teenager I laughed at his stupid rule because duh, I was thirteen. At that time, he just didn’t want me to bealone with them when he wasn’t around. Was he overprotective? Maybe. But he also knew the language and conversation that grown men were known to have in locker rooms and he wanted to shield me from that as best he could. It was harder once Mom died.

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