Page 75 of Stuck with my Guarded MVP
I know it’s a long shot with such short notice.
Oh, and the fact you always seem busy when I’m in town…
I could almost hear her saying it, the smile in her voice, the not-entirely-joking sting.
I pictured her in that booth at Café Bellini, the same one she and Nora always claimed on Sundays. Two mugs between them, heads tilted together over some private joke, both of them turning on me with identical smirks if I tried to interrupt.
Megan wasn’t just Nora’s best friend. She’d been her echo, her partner in crime. The thought of sitting across from her was… well. It wasn’t nothing.
I stared at the message, then closed my eyes briefly.
She wasn’t wrong. I did always make excuses.
Today… I didn’t want to. Before I could talk myself out of it, I typed,
Four works.
and hit send.
The wind was colder than I’d expected when I stepped out of the café two hours later. It hit me head-on, sharp enough to keep me from sinking too deep into what we’d just talked about.
My ears were burning and my cheeks were stinging. I welcomed the sting. I shoved my hands deep into my coat pockets, head down, letting the walk back stretch long enough to sort the mess in my chest.
Lunch, dinner—whatever we’d just had hadn’t been heavy, at first. Megan asked about hockey, about my apartment, about the bakery down the block with the line out the door, even in the cold.
But then it came. The subject I’d been avoiding for a decade, though if I was honest, something in me had been waiting for it.
She’d looked straight at me and said, “You know she’d want you to be happy, right? Not… half-alive.”
I’d felt it in my sternum. Not a blow, more like someone pressing a thumb to a bruise that had never really faded.
Half-alive. Maybe she was right.
I know she's right.
I paused at the crosswalk, the red hand blinking. A couple brushed past me, her arm looped through his. Megan had been careful, gentle, but she still managed to say what no one else had since the funeral. That it was okay to stop living like every step forward was a betrayal.
The light changed. I crossed slow, shoulders hunched against the wind, replaying the way she’d reached across the table and covered my hand with hers. Not romantic. “You just have to let it happen,” she said.
It’s been so easy with Claire.
Easier than I expected. I caught the thought and shoved it aside. By the time I reached my building, I could still feel the ghost of Megan’s hand.
Inside, I let my coat slide off my shoulders, hung on the hook by the door, and sank onto the couch. Elbows on my knees, head tipped forward. The apartment was quiet, the kind of quiet that usually slowed the noise in my head.
Not tonight. Tonight, it pressed in, the way empty seats do in an arena after everyone’s gone home.
She’d meant well, she always did. But her words shifted a piece I’d wedged into place a decade ago. And now all I could see was the space where Nora’s life should’ve kept going, and mine, dimmed to half-volume to honor her.
Maybe Megan was right. Maybe that wasn’t what she’d want for me.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
Half-volume’s all I know. Do I even know how to turn up the volume?
I dropped my head into my hands, palms pressing into my temples, fingers hooked over the top like they could hold everything in place.
I knew what to do. Same thing I’d done a thousand nights before a game.
