Page 28 of Friendzone Hockey
“Well, I’m just gonna—” I stand.
“You’re not going anywhere, Dash. Sit.”
Fuck me. That voice.
I fucking sit, sinking into my chair, accepting imminent doom.
“Dash?”
I jump. “Yeah?”
“There a reason I’m being punished?”
“Punished? That’s not what I’m?—”
His barbarous expression stops my mouth from talking. From lying.
I huff. “Sorry.”
His lips break into a huge grin, which is not appreciated. It’s pretty obvious, no matter how much I want to deny it, that I’m jealous of the attention he’s giving them, and I retaliated in a brat-like manner.
Not my finest moment.
“Nah, I deserved it,” he says. “We talk every day, I didn’t call you once, and then I show up with two adorable subs on my arms. I didn’t do it to hurt you, I did it to move on, but I won’t continue if it hurts you.”
“Wait, move on? Move on from what?” Because that sounds a lot different than the kind of “move on” I’d been thinking of.
“From you, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart.Okay, it sounds special when he says it to me.And you’re distracting yourself from what he just fucking said, Dash.What did he say? I need to run that by my brain again.
I needed to move on from you.
“From me? There was no us to move on from, Stace.” I hear the words as soon as they’re out of my mouth. I don’t mean them how they sound but, judging by his wince, he takes them how they sound. I’m trying to make his words make sense in real-time, out loud, when what I should be doing is finding out just what the fuck he means before I let my mouth get me into trouble. Instead, it sounds like I’m trying to draw a hard boundary. I’m not. Not at all. “I mean … fuck.”
He leans closer. I’m in the seat across from him, much too far away. The world does that funny thing it does whenever he stares at me for too long, as if it’s tilted its axis a degree too far, spinning too fast.
“I know this comes too late, but, fuck it,” he mutters. “I wish it were me marrying you instead of Syd.”
He wishes what…?I can’t have heard him right.
“But … but you said nothing was ever happening between us. You said … you said?—”
“I said stupid shit. It was shit that I believed, really fucking believed at the time, Dash. I was trying to do right by you, and I don’t regret what I did. You were too vulnerable when we met.”
He didn’t just say it, he lived it. Our friendship’s been one long walk on a tight rope, balancing on a thin wire, always worried we were gonna go over. I wanted it, wanted that free fall into him. But for Stacey, falling over the edge meant the fall of his moral code. Each time we wavered, got close, confronted our feelings, he pulled away, drew a hard line in the sand.
“But the whole time, I ached for you. I tried to erase the ache. This fucking bone-eating ache.” He takes a breath as if that ache is eating away at him right now. “I was going to tell you the season before last—my last one with the Wildcats. But then you met Syd and you fell for him so fast. On paper, keeping my mouth shut seemed like the best course of action. Nothing was going to come of my feelings, what would be the point?”
Yeah, what is the point? What good does he think coming clean about this is gonna do now? I’m getting married for fucksake. I work to keep my breathing under control. My emotions are another story. A contradictory stewpot of anger, frustration, and pure elation bubbles beneath my skin, wanting to froth over.
What am I supposed to do with this?
“But the rift is already there, Dash. The only way I can think to close it, heal it, sew it up, is with pure honesty. Dealing with it won’t be comfortable—this conversation’s not fucking comfortable—but it’s the only way through.”
I want to say so many things, but the words are trapped, clogging my throat. Mostly, what the fuck? What the actual fuck? I know he doesn’t expect me to dive into his arms so that we can run off into the sunset, but even if he did, the answer would be no.
Not after … after … I’m so confused. He told me it would be wrong for us to date until I believed him. How would we undo that? The amount of time I’ve lived with that reason—seven years if anyone’s counting—and the fucking heart-smashingrejection when I tried to convince him otherwise. It took ages to recover from that, but in the end, having Stacey in my life was always the most important thing.
