Page 3 of Looks Real Good Now
“Melanie wasn’t all that happy about me retiring when she thought I still had a good four or five years left in my career. She made it abundantly clear that she was only in our relationship because I was Gunner the NHL player, not just Liam Mulligan.”
Ouch.
“How long were you together?”
“She saved me from a hoard of overzealous fans on my twenty-fifth birthday and we kind of just fell together.”
“Her loss. I—”
I was cut off by a phone ringing. I knew that ringtone. His mother was calling.
“Sorry, it’s Mom.”
I nodded my head in understanding as he answered the phone. I stared at the lid of my coffee cup and pretended that I wasn’t listening to his conversation.
4
Liam
Michelle Salisbury seemed to have a sixth sense for calling me at less-than-ideal times. Like when I was having a conversation with the first woman I ever loved for the first time in over a decade. I had no idea if our brief conversation was all we were going to have before she disappeared into the ether again. Our parents still lived next door to each other, but I wouldn’t put it past her to change her destination at the last minute to avoid me.
“Hey Mom,” I answered, keeping my eyes on Lenny to prove to myself that she really was there.
“Liam, honey, are you at the airport?”
“Yeah, I’ve been here about half an hour. Excessively early as always.”
I noticed the corners of Lenny’s lips curl into a smile. Being early to everything was a trait I had acquired from her. She was born a month early and had been early to everything ever since, eventually dragging me along with her. There were worse traits to acquire.
“Good, you’ll let me know just before you take off, won’tyou?”
“Course I will. Anything else?”
“I had a lovely chat with Stassie earlier… You know, it turns out little Alana is coming home for Christmas this year after all.”
I couldn’t help but snort at Mom calling her ‘little Alana’. The woman, currently looking at the lid of her coffee cup like it was a piece of modern art, was only an inch shorter than me and I was 6”4’. Then I caught up with the rest of her sentence.
“What do you mean ‘after all’?”
“She was supposed to go to Aspen with that boyfriend of hers, but they broke up a couple of months ago, so she’s coming home. I think she might also be flying today. Oh, maybe you’ll be on the same flight! That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
I didn’t tell Mom that I was standing right next to her. Instead, I reassured her that I would text her before my flight took off and I would see her in a few hours before I hung up and turned to look at Lenny.
“Why did you and Kai break up?”
I saw surprise cross her face for a moment before she schooled it back to neutral.
“How do you know about Kai?”
Everything I knew about her from the last twelve years, I had learnt from a game of telephone that I never signed up to play. She left me and I respected that it meant she didn’t want me in her life anymore. I didn’t ask any questions about her, but people told me about her anyway.
“Mom mentioned speaking to Stassie today about you going back there for Christmas because you could no longer go to Aspen, what with the fact that you broke up with your boyfriend.As for how I know his name, I’ve picked it up over the last eight years, whenever Mom thought I justhadto know about the wonderful things you were doing with him. So, why did you break up?”
“He asked me to marry him, and I didn’t say yes,” she said with a shrug, not looking up from her coffee cup.
I didn’t want to look too much into the fact that the relief I felt that she wasn’t engaged to another man was on par with the excitement I felt when I won the Stanley Cup. I decided to ignore it instead.
“Why didn’t you say yes?” I asked. It wasn’t the kind of question you could say no to, and I’d never heard anything to suggest that they weren’t happy. In fact, I had been waiting for the day that Mom sheepishly informed me that they were getting married.
