Page 26 of Like A Daydream
“Actual date, at least seven years. Puck bunny date… A year?” Andrew admits. “Maybe longer.”
“No wonder you’re a walking disaster.”
“That’s just my anxiety,” Andrew snorts. “And I might be a disaster, but I have a great sense of humor. Seriously, tell me about Danielle. I’ll owe you.”
“The only thing I’ll tell you,” JT says, “is that right now, she’s going through a lot. If you’re even thinking about trying to start something, you’d better be patient, and clear on what exactly it is you want.”
Andrew pauses.
Is he ready to put time and effort into pursuing someone, only for it to crash and burn at the end of the summer if nothing comes of it? He’s never even been sure if he’s a relationship kind of guy, and now one girl at a bookstore has him rethinking his whole life?
He starts hammering a nail into the board.
Something tells him that this girl is worth it. He’s not sure what it is, but he has a feeling. A good one, even though he needs to start off by being normal around her first, and he’s not sure he’ll be able to make that one happen.
“I’ve got nothing but time,” Andrew says, finally, “two whole months’ worth. Then I’ll either be back on the ice, or hiding. I guess we’ll find out either way.”
“Two months isn’t a lot of time,” JT says, “don’t do anything if you’re going to put an end date on it. She’s been through too much.”
“You knew you hadfour dayswith Ainsley,” Andrew protests. “I literally have fifteen times that.”
“Ainsley and I had over twenty years of history,” Jamie says, hammering the board into place. “Completely different.”
Andrew takes his truck into town, Roscoe in the front seat, as soon as he and JT get back from the cabins. There’s a bunch of dog-friendly places in town, and as far as he knows, Spine Crackers is, too.
Even if it wasn’t, he could just slap on Roscoe’s ESA harness to get him into places.
He tries really hard not to do that, because there are people who need ESAs more than he does, but technically, Roscoe comes with a written order from Andrew’s therapist as one. She’d finally come around to the idea when Andrew had first gotten him from a German Shepherd rescuer and said that having him around helped him stay calm.
Andrew isn’t even sure what he’s doing back at the bookstore, and he hates that. Four months ago, he was the best player in the NHL and he had the swagger and ego to back it up, and there was literally nothing stopping him from getting any girl that he wanted.
Whether it was for a night or longer. Not that he had really ever capitalized on the “or longer” option. His last serious, years-long relationship had been in college, and that had ended in a disaster because she hadn’t been able to handle his travel schedule when he had tried his hardest to make it work.
When he’d gotten to the NHL, he’d kept it to one night only, and those one nights hardly ever happened during the season when all of his focus was on his game.
Even in the rare times he hadn’t stuck to the rules of his own making, there had almost never been a girl that he considered for more than a couple of months. Certainly, never one he’d bring into the NHL fold.
Now? He doesn’t even know how to talk to a woman without putting a foot in his mouth.
Or knocking over a ladder, apparently.
He’s in Lake Placid for anonymity, but he’s starting to wonder if that was his best move, if only so he could have spared himself that first interaction. If she’d had any indication of who he is, it might have been helpful.
Or maybe it would have made it worse because people have their preconceived notions about him.
Maybe she would have told him she wanted him dead for losing the Stanley Cup. And he would have run out of the store and never left JT’s basement again because nowhere in this world is safe. She knows where JT lives, though, so that probably wouldn’t have kept him hidden.
His breathing picks up. Roscoe nudges his hand with his nose. He’s literally thinking about a girl he’s spoken to exactly one time finding him and murdering him in his sleep.
In the mountains.
Over a hockey game.
Because his life has turned into a horror movie and he doesn’t know how to move on.
Five things you can see. Four you can touch. Three you can hear. Two you can smell. One you can taste.
He digs his thumbnail into his index finger, waiting for his pulse to steady as he grounds himself. He’s been using the mental strategy more often than usual, and he’s thankful he has it to fall back on. Especially when he’s unsure of what he’s doing, which seems to be more and more frequent these days.
