Page 25 of Like A Daydream
“Raleigh,” Erick finishes. “I knew there was a hockey player in town but I didn’t know it washim. He played with Jet, right?”
“Yeah. Apparently, he’s here for the off season,” she says, shrugging. “He seemed nice enough, if not annoying.”
“I can think of fifteen words to describe Andrew Fisher and none of them areannoying, Danielle.”
“Does someone have a man-crush?” Danielle asks, wiggling her eyebrows. “You’re obsessed with him, aren’t you?”
“Do you think you can introduce me to him?” Erick asks eyes going wide. “Since he’s friends with Jet, and everything.”
“He didn’t even introducehimselfto me before he tried to get my number,” Danielle replies, rolling her eyes. “I don’t know if he’ll want to meet a fanboy. And, like I said, he’s annoying.”
“Take it easy, he doesn’t know you’re a grump by nature.”
“I amnota grump,” she says, “I’m grieving. If you want to insult me again, after I cooked your dinner and invited you into my home, you can leave.”
Erick rolls his eyes and shoves his chair back from the table. “Whatever you say, Danielle. If you need anything, call me okay? I’m working a twelve tomorrow but I don’t have to be there until four.”
“I promise, you’ll be the first one I call.”
Andrew
“The girl at the bookstore, Danielle,” he says, “what’s she like?”
“Depends on who you ask,” JT says, throwing him a bottle of water from the cooler in the back of his truck.
They’re at the cabins on actual Lake Placid today, and it boasts a mountain view that Andrew can’t compare to any other he’s seen. When he’d first got signed in Raleigh, he’d spent a lot of time hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains during the off season, but the Adirondacks are something special.
He thinks could spend his whole life exploring them and never see enough.
“Explain,” he takes a long drink of water before throwing the bottle on the ground. He lifts a board over his head and follows JT down the path. They’re repairing a hole in one of the floorboards on the porch of a cabin that JT had only found out about this morning.
Before JT had even asked, Roscoe, Sokka, and Andrew had jumped into his truck and they were on their way.
“Well,” JT says, moving to the end of the broken board, “if you ask Ainsley, you’ll leave thinking she’s the devil incarnate.”
“That bad?” Andrew asks, setting the new board down and grabbing for the hammer. “She seemed okay to me.”
“Why don’t you just try to get Danielle’s number and you can learn all of this yourself?” JT asks, prying the broken board up with a crowbar. Andy is glad he’s friends with him, because if he wasn’t, JT definitely could have murdered him six different ways and made it look like an accident.
“Are you kidding? Look what happened last time!”
“You mean when you didn’t realize that the clearly-on-wheels ladder would move when you leaned on it?” JT says, grinning over at him.
“Yeah, yeah. We were both there, we know what happened,” Andrew says, prying the nails out of the opposite end of the board. “I’m off my game.”
“In more ways than one.”
“Dude.”
“My bad,” JT says, lifting his hands in surrender. “Seriously, though, that was tragic. I didn’t even mess up that bad when I started dating Ainsley.”
“She rejected your marriage proposal.”
“Thefirsttime,” JT replies, “and we’re married now, so I still got her in the end. When’s the last time you went on a date?”
“Do you mean an actual date with someone I like, or a date with a puck bunny? Because those are two very different styles of date.”
“Both,” JT says, pulling the board up and tossing it to the ground.
