Page 56 of Goalie and the Girl Next Door
He waits.
“You’re responsible,” I say. “You’re grounded. You’ve got Angel, and the kids, and you care about people, and you’d never treat anyone like they’re a prize to be won.”
My throat feels tight. Like I swallowed the truth and it lodged halfway down.
Scotty reaches out a hand. “C’mon,” he says gently. “Let’s sit.”
He gestures to the front steps of my cabin and lowers himself onto the top one with a quiet groan.
I follow, because somehow, in the middle of this tangle of nerves and stubbornness and whatever it is Clément’s doing to my brain, Scotty’s still a lighthouse and I’m more lost than I thought I was.
We sit side by side on the step, staring out at the fields.
The autumn air nips at my ankles, cool enough to raise goosebumps even through my socks. I should go inside. I have spreadsheets waiting. A cost analysis for cupcake scalability. A budget update from the town hall from Drench for Defense. A perfectly ordered list of things that make sense.
Instead, I stay.
Scotty shifts a little, joints creaking like an old barn door. He rests his arms on his knees, letting the silence stretch just long enough that I start to squirm.
“You know,” he says, “when I first started dating Angel, Iwas pretty sure I was too old, too banged up, and too tired to be anyone’s beginning.”
I glance at him. He’s still watching the fields.
“She saw something in me I didn’t know was there anymore,” he says. “And I fought it. Thought I was protecting myself. Turns out, I was just stalling.”
He turns to me, his eyes kind.
“I know you’ve been hurt. I know when someone burns you like that, you get puck shy. That’s normal.”
My throat tightens. I fold my hands in my lap, knuckles white.
“But Marcy,” he says softly, “you’re smarter than this.”
Oof.
He's neither cruel nor disappointed in the way he says it. It’s just fact.
“You’ve got a brain that could scare a tax auditor and a heart big enough to hold a town full of folks trying to save it.” He pauses. “You know better than to judge a man by the jersey he wears.”
I look away. My jaw works, but there’s nothing to say.
We sit there in the quiet. The wind rustles through the dried sunflowers at the edge of the field. Edgar bleats dramatically at a chicken in front of the barn.
A big part of me wants to go back into my cabin. Everything in there represents my life before Clément showed up with his crooked grin and his impossible house and his way of making everything feel less safe and a lot morealive.
That life in my cabin was predictable. Manageable. Fulfilling, even.
And yet… Up until now, Clément hasn’t done a single thing to deserve the ice wall I’ve built.
Not one thing.
Maybe he will. Maybe he’ll turn out to be exactly what I fear.
But maybe he won’t.
And if that’s true—if there’s even a chance—it’s unfair to write him off.
It’s unkind.
