Page 21 of Played
“I almost didn’t. Doesn’t matter that you allowed me to read it. Still felt intrusive and none of my business. Add in the fact you only gave me access because you’d read my journal. It almost felt like you were coerced into it. Like I was on some get-back shit.”
“But you still read it.”
“Yeah, I did.” Sighing, I pick up my bottle, but instead of lifting it to my mouth, I twist it back and forth between my fingers. “I’m sorry about the loss of your fiancé.” I loose a rusty chuckle. “Shit, I feel likean asshole even saying those words, since I hated when people offered them to me. But Iamsorry, Adina. No one should know that kind of pain. Especially when they’re so young, when they have so much life to live. When they have a life to live with you.”
She clears her throat, and I stare at the elegant column, inordinately fascinated by the motion behind that pretty brown skin. The V of her sweater exposes her collarbone, and her pulse ticks away. For a moment, I’m damn near hypnotized by the fast pulse. I want to feel it under my tongue.
Guilt and shame creep through my body, infiltrate my veins, and take a ride straight to my chest. My heart.
Thisis why it took me a couple of weeks to get off my ass and come find Adina. Not because I’m scared of her or her reaction to my offer of an apology.
I’m scared of me, of this unwanted and hated fascination with this woman who I have no business being within five feet of.
“You remember when I said I didn’t have the courage to acknowledge or admit what you did?” she asks. I jerk my chin up in response. “I didn’t mean being able to write down how you were feeling about losing your wife. Well, not all of it. You emptied yourself into that book. Gave voice to things that ... scared me. Things I never confessed out loud, much less to my parents or brothers. Things that made me feel ungrateful and ashamed just for thinking about them.”
“Suicide.”
The ugly word echoes between us. Even with the loud chatter and laughter as well as a replay of a football game on the mounted television, it seems as if the word echoes, getting louder and louder.
Adina’s gaze drops to the bar, and the bartender arrives with our fresh beers, removes the tops, and sets the cold, damp bottles on the bar top.
“Thank you,” Adina murmurs to her. Switching out her empty, she tips the new one up to her mouth. And I pretend the act of her pursing those lips over the bottle opening isn’t downright fucking lewd. After amoment, she says, “Yes.” Another heartbeat of silence passes, and then she shakes her head. “All firefighters go to a call praying to make it back safe, without injury. Keshaun included. It’s a slap in their face—it’s like spitting on Keshaun’s memory—to even consider ending my life. Not when our job is saving the lives of others and our own. I think a part of me felt like if I didn’t write that down, I could deny the thought ever crossed my mind. But reading your journal made a liar out of me. It also, as terrible as it sounds, gave me relief. Because I wasn’t alone.”
I wasn’t alone.
Yeah, I’m intimately familiar with the hollow emptiness that some underwhelming soul coined asalone.
“One thing I didn’t read in your entries ... after your fiancé passed, did you ever consider going into a different field? Losing someone in a fire and then having to turn around and face that same thing every day? I don’t know if I could do it.”
She finally looks at me and cocks her head.
“The thought of doing anything—hell, breathing—was painful at first. But I can honestly say not once did the thought of quitting my job come to my mind. Hockey isn’t just something you get paid to do. I’m going to assume that it’s your passion, sometimes your saving grace and your peace in the middle of a storm. It’s the place you go to empty your mind when it’s so busy, filled with too much noise and chaos that thinking is a lost cause.”
I don’t reply, even though she’s absolutely correct.
In the days after Kendra’s death, when I couldn’t drag myself out of the bed to do anything, not even to care for Khalil—thank fuck for my in-laws—I would leave the house at one, two in the morning and go to the rink. It was the one place where everything made sense. It still is. Skating. The swish of blades over ice. The clack of the puck against my stick. The speed of flying down to one end of the rink and back to the other. They’re all the equivalent of a slowly rocking cradle, lulling me into a peace, a calm that has become a rare commodity.
“That’s how firefighting is for me,” she continues. “How hockey is a passion for you, fighting fire is a calling for me. There’s nothing else I’d rather do. Maybe it’s my way of living for both of us. For continuing to do what he wanted above all else but now can’t.” She pauses, drags her short nail down the label on the bottle. “I don’t know. And maybe I’m making it much deeper than it is.”
I don’t contradict her.
Who am I to say it’s wrong to use his memory to get through the day? To grant more meaning to her decisions? She’s talking to a man who used his son as the sole reason not to sayFuck itand walk away from it all.
“Also, it’s in my blood. My brothers, my father, my grandfather—all firefighters. Sure, I had a choice, and I’m sure there are days when they wished I’d gone a different path. But in a way, I was born to do this.”
My eyebrows shoot up, shock vibrating through me. Of all the things that had come up during dinner, the family occupation hadn’t been one of them.
“You work with all of them?”
She laughs softly and sips from her beer. “I can hear the horror in your voice at the thought of that. And some days, the struggle is real. My dad, Malcolm, and I are in the same house; Malik is stationed in another one. And let’s just say they can get a little ... overbearing at times.”
“Wouldn’t have believed that shit.”
Her grin is quick and dry. “Sarcasm duly noted. My dad’s been a firefighter for almost thirty years. And being Black in the department brings its own set of problems, as you can imagine. The racism, bigotry, favoritism is as deeply entrenched in our culture as it is with the police. As a matter of fact, not too long ago, a Black firefighter was racially profiled and harassed by the police while he sat in his car right in front of his fire station in full uniform. No, we’re not too far removed from that bullshit. Experiencing all of that, you can understand why he didn’twant his daughter to not have to face dangerous situations on the daily but also have to deal with that shit on top of it.”
I get it. As one of fewer than forty Black players in the entire NHL and the only one on my team, I for damn sure get it. Being called racial slurs or having animal noises aimed my way by players and fans ain’t anything new to me. With the players, I can take it out on their asses on the ice. But with the fans? Nothing I can do but take that shit because my love for the game and my job is more important than some inbred muthafuckas who probably can’t even spell the shit they yell at me. At least that’s what I tell myself to keep from climbing in those stands and showing them these hands are good for other things besides holding a stick.
“So yeah, he can be overprotective. And my dad. I keep telling him he needs to lay off calling mebaby girland hugging and kissing me while on shift. Besides a couple of the EMTs, I’m the only woman there,andI’m the shift captain’s daughter. It’s giving nepotism.” She shakes her head with a rueful smile. “But I’ve been saying it since I entered the fire academy three years ago. But Fire Captain Nolan Wright isn’t listening. And it’s only gotten worse in the last year.”
