Page 110 of For the Boys
“So tell me,” Mackenzie said, hopping up next to Berkley, “how did you two meet? I mean, I’ve heard all about the birthday party Brent threw you, but I want to hear things from your perspective, Berk. You don’t mind if I call you Berk, do you? Brent does, so I figured it was okay.”
Berkley laughed. Mackenzie Jean and Jessica Daniels had to meet, as soon as possible. They were eerily similar, and Berkley had a feeling they would become fast friends.
Berkley glanced at Brent, who said, “Yeah, me too. We’ve never actually talked about this.”
Berkley glared at him. She and Brent were together now, so it wasn’t a big deal that he knew how long she had been obsessing over him from afar. Still, the thought of telling him that, saying those words out loud to him, was enough to make her cheeks heat once again, this time from embarrassment.
“I’ve pretty much had a crush on your brother since I was a freshman in college and first laid eyes on him,” she told Mackenzie, her eyes never leaving Brent’s. “Naturally, he had a girlfriend and had exactly zero idea I even existed.”
“Was that when you were dating Ashley?” Mackenzie asked him, and Brent winced.
“Yes, Mackenzie. That was when I was dating Ashley.”
“Anyway,” Berkley said. “Him leaving school made hockey games significantly less enjoyable for me. I still went, but it wasn’t quite the same when I could no longer ogle Brent Jean from my front row seat.”
“You were one of those girls that always sat on the glass at home games?” Brent asked, eyebrows raised in surprise.
“Yes, I was,” Berkley said proudly.
“That’s amazing,” Mackenzie said.
Brent smiled at Berkley. “She made me work for it,” he told his sister, gaze still locked on Berkley’s. “But it was a thousand percent worth it in the end.”
“I still don’t understand how you went from not knowing who she was to this,” Mackenzie said, gesturing between the two of them.
“I kept seeing her at the bar,” Brent said. “And she intrigued me. The way she carries herself, even in a crowd of guys all clamoring for her attention…You should see it, Mackenzie. For someone so little, she sure takes up a lot of space.”
“It’s this shining personality of mine,” Berkley said, flipping her hair over her shoulder.
“Among other things,” Brent said with a wink. Mackenzie rolled her eyes.
“Okay, back up,” Berkley said. “I want to know more about your relationship with Ashley.”
Brent groaned, and Mackenzie clapped gleefully. “Yes, big bro. Let’s talk about your relationship with Ashley.”
“Do we have to?”
“Yes,” Berkley said. “I told you all about the Lee situation on our date last weekend. You owe me.”
Brent sighed. “Okay, fine. Ashley and I started dating during my sophomore year. When I met her, she was so cool. One of those girls who didn’t take shit from anyone and couldn’t care less if you wanted her or not because she didn’t want you. Only, somehow, she wantedme. I should’ve realized pretty early in our relationship that she paid more attention to my stats as a hockey player and how much press I was getting rather than who I was off the ice. I was already drafted at that point, and Warriors beat writers were frequently publishing little updates about my college career, discussing my potential. I was asked at the end of both my sophomore and junior seasons if I wanted to leave school early and go pro. But I waited. I loved playing at State, and I couldn’t picture myself leaving my teammates. Ashley didn’t like that, but she figured the longer I stayed in college, the higher my stock would be when I finally did go pro.”
He paused, taking another long drink of his beer. “In the three years we dated, Ashley went from this super amazing girl who read poetry and was studying to be an environmental engineer, who wore leather and was always dying the tips of her hair crazy colors just for fun, to this college version of a Stepford Wife. She changed her major to business, started dressing more conservatively, became very interested in all of the partnership requests I was receiving in my Instagram messages, and came to games only to introduce herself to the media outlets. She was always talking about how I was going to be this big star and she was going to be an Instagram influencer, and we would be filthy rich.
“When I finally got the call to join the Warriors after we lost in the Frozen Four my senior year, the first thing she said to me was, ‘It’s finally happening! We’re finally going pro.’We. As if I hadn’t been the one to work my ass off since childhood to make my dream of becoming a professional hockey player come true. She started packing her stuff, talking about how I could buy her a ring when we got settled in Detroit and start planning the wedding and how our lives were just beginning, and I lost it. I finally realized she was only with me for the prospect of all the money I could make, and I broke up with her. Told her to get out of my apartment and never contact me again.”
Mackenzie looked at her brother as if asking for permission to proceed. Brent nodded. “So, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, Ashley put on a really good show,” she said. “She had our entire family fooled, including Nate, who usually can see right through people like her. We adored her, Mom especially. I heard them on the phone on more than one occasion, talking about when Mom thought Brent was going to propose. When we found out they broke up, we thought she broke up with him. We thought he was genuinely heartbroken and that’s why he wasn’t giving us any details. So I decided to do some digging into her social media.”
“And what did you find?” Berkley asked.
“Oh, for starters, I found out that she was already in a new relationship. Mind you, this was three months after she and Brent had broken up. In that time, she had graduated college and moved to New York, where she’d sunk her claws into some young investment banker. So that was the first red flag for me. But I scrolled back a bit and found that instead of deleting the posts of her and Brent over the years like a normal human being, she had changed all the captions to shitty things about my brother. For example, one from the summer before he started his last year of college, when we were up at our cabin in New York, said how she spent that entire weekend miserable because Brent was terrible in bed and his family was boring. Others talked about how he would yell at her when he got drunk. Just a bunch of bullshit.”
“That’s fucking horrible,” Berkley said.
“It was pretty bad,” Brent said. “As much as I didn’t want to, I had to reach out to her and ask her to stop lying about me. It was over, and it didn’t make sense to keep dragging it out. There were thirty guys that would go to bat for me if I ever needed character references, not because they were my teammates, but because they knew what kind of guy I am.”
“That didn’t work, of course,” Mackenzie said. “So I put her on blast on my own Instagram by posting screenshots of her texts to Brent begging him to take her back and how she would do whatever he asked whenever he asked it. It was embarrassing as hell for her, and it was enough to get her to delete the photos and back off.”
“I genuinely had no idea,” Berkley said. “Why didn’t I know about this?”
