Page 44 of Mile High Coach

As he moves, I stare at his forearms, the way his baby blue shirt bunches around his elbows, folded neatly out of his way.

I would have expected a hockey guy like him to be messy, leave the kitchen covered in spatters and sticky puddles, but he moves methodically, cleaning up each mess as he goes, throwing away scraps and wrappers the moment they accumulate.

Without meaning to, I imagine Harrison on Christmas morning. He would be the kind of dad that might gather up each little scrap of wrapping paper the moment it hits the floor. For some reason, the thought of that—the image of it in my head—makes my throat get a little thick.

And then, like it always does, the grief hits me out of nowhere.

The fact that my dad will never be a dad like that on Christmas morning again. That this will be our first Christmas without my mom. How Chrys and my dad are all alone today, trying to navigate what this holiday means with just the two of them.

“Lovie, are you okay?”

When I look up and see Harrison watching me with a concerned expression, it’s over. A sob fights its way up my throat and I start to cry—not the dainty, pretty crying you can dab away with a tissue—but the wretched, jerking kind of crying that’s so embarrassing and you can’t stop it from happening no matter what you do.

“Hey, hey,” Harrison says, coming around, wrapping his arms around my shoulders, pulling me close to him. On my next inhale of breath, I get nothing but his scent, and it actually manages to soothe me, to make something in my chest feel a little quieter.

His hand goes to my back, and he whispers, “Hey, what’s going on, honey?”

Honey. I should stop this right now—tell him not to comfort me. Not to use a pet name with me. But I feel horrible, and his touch is making it better.

“Sorry,” I gasp, pulling back, wiping at my face and trying to get control of my breathing. “I just—I was thinking about my mom, and I?—”

The sobs cut me off again, and Harrison wordlessly pulls me into his chest, hand running soothingly up and down my back until I go still, feeling impossibly sleepy. Without a word, Harrison seems to understand, and takes my elbow, leading me to his bed. He brings me my drink, a box of tissues, drops a blanket around my shoulders, then sits in the bed with me and continues to rub my back in comforting circles.

“It’s okay,” he murmurs, and when my eyes meet his, I almost laugh at the fact that I was worried about frizzy bangs earlier. Here he is, looking like a model, and I’m a snot monster. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I open my mouth to say no, but instead I say, “I’ll never have another Christmas with her again.”

Harrison pauses, his eyes going vague for a moment before he presses his lips together, nods, and says, “The grief comes out of nowhere, sometimes.”

Then I remember that he lost his mom, too, and that thing in my chest grows even quieter. It’s nice to sit here with someone who knows what it’s like, who understands the particular black hole that opens up inside me any time I think about her, about my dad, about what happened.

When I start talking, Harrison listens. When the oven goes off, he disappears for a moment, then returns, settling back into the bed without a word.

An hour later, I get hungry, and he reheats the food, bringing in plates for us to eat on his bed.

“I just feel bad,” I mumble around a bite of food. “These must be nice sheets. And you worked so hard on this meal just for it to go in the microwave.”

“It doesn’t matter, Lovie,” he says, and it really sounds like he means it. When we’re finished eating, and he takes the plates away, I try to find the will inside my body to stand, get out of his bed, force myself back to his apartment.

“What are you doing?” he asks, when he comes back in and I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, preparing to stand up.

“Since we’re not going to…” I trail off, not wanting to say fulfill our contractual agreement. “I should probably head back to my place.”

“No way.” He shakes his head, and pulls from behind his back the chilled bottle of nonalcoholic wine. I’d give anything for it to be the real thing right now, to numb some of the pain from the grief rolling through me like crushing tidal waves. “We have to drink this first.”

That makes me laugh, and I accept a glass from him, sitting carefully and making sure not to spill, even as I wipe the crumbs away from supper. Tears continue to trail down my cheeks, though the sobbing has stopped.

Just barely, I stop myself from adding something about how I’m not usually like this. I don’t usually cry this much. It must be the hormones. The grief. The experience of being here with him and loving it, and feeling guilty for leaving my family back home.

The lingering, looming knowledge that when I get the thing I’ve always wanted, I’m going to lose Harrison. That is just a fact. It’s in the contract.

“Lovie,” he says. His voice is deadly calm, filled with a level of seriousness I’ve never heard from him before. And when he raises his eyes to mine, holding them in the intimacy of his bedroom, he says, “This is the best Thanksgiving I have ever had.”

And I realize I might be falling in love with him.

Chapter 20

Harrison

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