Page 72 of Cherry Picking
Of course it’s not good enough. This is bullshit.
“Why didn’t you talk to me?”
“I tried. In Nashville. I tried, Griff. I thought coming out would clear the doubt, that I’d be able sort through all the nasty shit in my head—but it only made it worse. It’s not fair to me or to you to pretend that I’m fine when I’m not.”
“I don’t want you to pretend,” I croak out, closing my eyes to focus on breathing even. “I want you to trust me enough to help you.”
“It’s not you I don’t trust. It’s myself.”
My head is swirling a hundred miles a minute, and I can’t formulate a single, half decent reply. There’s only one thing that sticks out above the rest.
“Are we breaking up?”
Riley takes a sharp breath in and an audibly quivered breath out.
“I don’t know.”
4:02PM
“I love you,” Riley says again, and my throat is too tense and dry to return the sentiment. “I’m sorry.”
The line goes dead, and the silence around isn’t just deafening; it’s a shot straight to the heart of who we are.
A shot that cracks the surface and spiderwebs the span of our delicate relationship.
If I could relive this day, I’m sure there’s something I’d do differently. But the only thing that resonates, that plays on loop as I stand there leaning on the wall for support is:
I’m sorry, too.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 17
RILEY
Two weeksof no contact has my heart beating ragged and tattered in my chest.
This was my decision, my call—me running home with my tail between my legs away from the man I love most in the world.
Because loving him scares me more than anything.
I just don’t know why.
Usually when I come home for the holidays, I tough it out on the couch because my old room was turned into Mom’s storage space, but Parker and I spent a few days clearing it out—with Mom’s permission of course.
It feels so much smaller than before I moved out, but that was twelve years ago.
Twelve years of playing in the leagues.
With a busted up knee and a heart hanging by its withering strings to show for it.
“I’m getting kind of tired of seeing your face,” Parker says with his head buried in the closet. “This is more Riley than I’ve had my entire life.”
He isn’t wrong. Parker was a baby when I went off to play college hockey and got scouted for the NAPH.
My parents had tried for years to have another baby, and it never seemed to catch. They said my Mom had a ‘hostile uterus’, and it was a miracle I’d been conceived at all. One in a Million chances.
Yet in my senior year of high school, she got that pink line, and she lit up with the same kind of joy flying down the ice gives me.
