Page 124 of Lucky Shot
I chuckle. “Good. I’m sure he deserves it.”
“Always.”
“Ready to get out of here?” I ask, kissing his lips quickly. Because I can. Because I’m addicted to kissing him.
Pretty nods. “Yeah. We going home?”
I shrug. “Long enough for you to change.”
He grins. “Good. I know I look good in a suit, but I get tired of wearing them.”
“You look damn good in a suit,” I confirm, pinching his ass before taking his hand. “So, so good.”
“So do you. I miss seeing you in a suit.”
“I’ll treat you to me in a suit any time you like,” I tell him as we leave the back room hand-in-hand. We say goodbye to whoever we meet on the way out until we’re in the sunny streets of LA. Honestly, I love everything about us moving here. LA is a great city. Beautiful. Clean. It’s a much healthier climate than Florida and I’m not talking about the weather.
I’m entirely in love with our house. We live just north of the arena overlooking Griffith Park. It can be a bit of a commute because of traffic, but it was important to us that we weren’t surrounded by buildings. We wanted a little bit of nature too.
Pretty happily relives the game as I drive us home. I love to hear his voice. Sometimes, I wonder how I never realized I was talking to Noah when Pretty and I spent all those hours on the phone. In hindsight, his voice might have sounded familiar. Maybe, if given enough time with Noah in person, I could have put the two together.
But I suppose that’s the crux of it. Noah and I have been around each other plenty, but we rarely spoke to each other until that summer. Mostly our conversations had been in passing. “Hi, how’s the weather? How’s hockey? You good? Okay, see ya.” And let’s be honest; everyone has a ‘polite’ voice. That tone you use when you talk to customer service or need to be carefully neutral.
There are many reasons that I can think of to explain why I didn’t recognize his voice. Even as I kick myself over and over for missing what was right in front of me. We could have been together for years, but we kept looking the other way.
Then again, I don’t know that we would have worked out the way we do now had we gotten together years ago when we met. Some things take time. Sometimes we just need to be in the right place in our lives and then you can finally look at someone and gooh, there you are. I’ve been looking for you my entire life.
That was exactly how it felt when Noah’s face turned up on my first video call with Pretty. It was confusing, as I tried to figure out how I could have gotten the number wrong. Then putting it together with all the little moments that had hinted at Noah for weeks. Things fit. They fell into place. And it suddenly felt like everything in my life, everything I’ve been searching for and coming up empty, just lit up in front of me.
There he is. The love of my life.
“You’re quiet,” Pretty says. I glance at him and smile. He squeezes my hand and I return the gesture. We’re rarely not touching. Still.
“Just thinking,” I say.
“Nothing bad?”
I bring his hand to my mouth and kiss the back of it, then scrunch up my nose. He still has more than a hint of hockey on him. Maybe I’ll run him through the shower again when we get home. “Not at all. There’s zero bad in our lives, my Pretty Boy.”
He grins and lets out a contented sigh.
“I’m just reminiscing on how I didn’t recognize your voice during all those hours we’d spent on the phone,” I tell him.
Pretty huffs. “Because we never really spoke before. A couple conversations over three years doesn’t really mean our voices would be memorable.”
I nod. “That’s basically the conclusion I was coming to. But I think that maybe it’s also because I would never have guessed it was you in a hundred years. Why would I guess that? So if there was any moment of me thinking you sounded like you, I’d have written it off as a coincidence.”
“Yes. Exactly. It’s so ridiculously improbable that it would be more logical to decide it was a coincidence than fact.”
I pull into the driveway, and we head into the house. “Go wash again. You still smell like hockey. And wear something comfortable."
Pretty grins. “I was in a hurry to see the sexy man waiting for me,” he says as an excuse as he heads down the hall while shrugging out of his jacket.
I’m super excited about what I have planned. It’s definitely not a means to try to force him out of his comfort zone, though I suspect it’s going to feel that way. But something that I’ve noticed about Pretty since living with him is that he’s very self-conscious about how he looks. Heknowshe’s pretty. The world never lets him forget. But that doesn’t mean he feels pretty.
He’s always looking for affirmation, which I have absolutely no problem providing, and I do often. But it really breaks my heart when I see the insecurity on his face. Especially once I’ve dressed him in all the pretty things he loves so much.
Pretty doesn’t see himself clearly. Even when I pose him in front of the mirror and tell him everything I see. Every detail that I find beautiful. He believes me. But he doesn’t think those things about himself.
