Page 4 of Pipe Dreams
It had been a lie, though. Obviously.
A quick tap on a car horn broke the weird spell that had come over her. She turned to see a RAV4 against the curb, a man’s face peering up at her that matched the profile picture of the Uber driver she’d summoned.
Thank you, baby Jesus.
Without another word Lauren got into the back seat and shut the door. She couldn’t resist a parting glance up at Beacon, though.
He stood there, hands jammed in his pockets, watching her car pull away.
TWO
AUGUST 2012
Lauren surveyed the messy Syosset office as she walked in for the first time in four weeks. She spotted a couple of forgotten Starbucks cups on the windowsill, and the copy machine’s jam light was on. Could be worse. An hour of work would put everything back to rights.
It wasn’t too high a price to pay for a long vacation on Fire Island with her high school friends. She’d needed that vacation badly. The play-offs season had ended in a third round loss to the Rangers, and everyone had been crushed as well as exhausted.
But now she was sporting bikini tan lines and a happy outlook. In four days she’d start a new semester of night classes at LIU, inching closer to her BS in business management.
Things were looking up.
She tucked her bag away in a desk drawer and set about tidying up the office. She adjusted the air conditioning from sixty-six degrees (probably her father’s doing) back up to a more reasonable sixty-nine. The old grouch was next doorat the practice facility right now, so she hummed to herself as she worked.
“Nice top.Sexy,” her coworker Jill said when she arrived a half hour later. “It’s new, right?”
“Mmm?” Lauren said, not rising to the bait. The topwassexy. It was sleeveless, exposing her tanned shoulders. It was hot pink with a playful gather at the bust without actually showing cleavage. She didn’t want to start off the new season with a tongue lashing from her father.
“Have you seen him yet?” Jill asked.
“Who?” she asked, playing dumb. She and Jill had sat side by side in this office for eight years. There was nothing in Lauren’s life that Jill didn’t know, including the fact that she was nursing an eight-year long crush on a married man. But Lauren could not be prodded into discussing it. What was the point?
“Who,” Jill scoffed under her breath, and if Lauren had turned her head she surely would have seen the older woman’s eyes rolling. “Mike Beacon, that’s who. I’m surprised he’s not sitting on the end of your desk already, chatting you up.”
Once again Lauren demurred. It was true that she and Beacon were close. As the team captain, he spent more time in the front office than any other player. That meant more time with Lauren and Jill. And, sure—he and Lauren gravitated toward one another. They were almost the same age, and they’d both been part of the organization for exactly eight years. Beacon had arrived as a trade from Quebec the same month that Lauren started working for the team. The joke at the time was that they were both rookies.
The difference was that Beacon arrived in Long Island with a wife and toddler in tow, and made half a million dollars a year. While Lauren worked for her father—the team manager—because he wouldn’t pay for her to attend college.
“It’ll be good for you to figure out how the real worldworks,” her dad had said. “Save up some money and then get that business degree if you want it so damn bad.”
Eight years later and she was still taking two courses every fall, but none in the spring, because play-offs season often made final exams impossible.
Her whole life had been ruled by hockey, with no end in sight.
Meanwhile, after eight years, Lauren and Mike Beacon were good friends. Their jobs required having each other on speed dial, and at the top of their texting apps. It didn’t matter that the happy sound of his laughter always bounced around inside her chest, or that she had the exact shape of his smile memorized.
She didn’t dwell on it, the same way she didn’t pine for the penthouse apartments listed in the Real Estate section of theNew York Times. Some things weren’t meant to be hers, and thinking about them too much only made her feel pathetic.
“Jill,” she said, changing the subject, “are we still planning that charity skate for the end of September? I can’t remember which date we decided on.”
Her coworker just stared at her, and Lauren began to feel self-conscious. Her new top wasn’tthatsexy. And there was no way Jill could know that while she’d stood in front of the dressing room mirror at Macy’s, she’d been thinking about a compliment Beacon had paid her last spring.You look good in pink. You should wear that color more often.
“He hasn’t been by yet?” Jill asked, pressing her luck. “Really?”
“No?” Lauren said, letting her confusion show. “It’s nine o’clock. Time for the morning skate. We never see players at this hour. Why would he be in here?”
Jill’s eyes widened slightly. “I just thought he’d be by to talk to you, is all.”
Lauren was tired of games, so she turned away and began the process of logging in to her desktop computer. The numberof e-mails in her work account was probably astronomical, because for once in her life she hadn’t opened it while on vacation. She lifted her takeout coffee cup and took a sip.
