Page 104 of Canadian Boyfriend

But if itwasn’tabout me, did that mean I needed to apologize? I was stillpissedshe hadn’t told me at the outset. Or when we started getting close. Or for God’s sake, at least when we started sleeping together.

But what would I have done if she had?

I would have fired her. I couldn’t even pretend otherwise. The whole thing would have hit way too close to my insecurities about people only seeing me as the hockey player, and it would have reopened the wound of Sarah’s big lie.

I thought of Aurora saying,You might be missing out on some really great people who happen to be fans of yoursbefore we went to my dad’s Tim Hortons.

In continuing my thought experiment, I wondered if I could apply the same logic to the current situation.You might be missing out on some really great people who happen to have invented a version of you to be their pretend boyfriend when they were kids.

Well, shit.

As with Sarah and the birth control pills, I needed to look beneath the surface of events, get over my butt-hurtness, and see what was really going on. With Sarah, it had taken me the better part of a year.

I didn’t have that much time here.

Something had happened to Aurora under the northern lights, she’d said. Something had happened to me, too. I’d just decided it didn’t matter, or that I couldn’t allow it to matter.

But it mattered. It mattered more than anything.

A fire lit under my ass, I called Gretchen.

“Well, Mike Martin, as I live and breathe.” Her voice was dripping with disdain.

“Where is Aurora staying right now?”

There was a pause, a long enough one that I feared she wasn’t going to answer, that the force of nature that was Miss Miller had turned against me. But she finally said, “With me.”

“Any chance you would give me your address?”

“Why would I do that?”

“So I can send her a letter.”

25—SHARP EDGES

AURORA

Dear Aurora,

I’m not good at writing, but I wanted to say a few things, so I’m just going to say them.

1.I really miss you.

2.I’m proud of you for drawing your line in the sand.

3.I’m sorry I was so cold to you last time we spoke.

4.I’m still hurt, though. I’d like not to be, but, even though I understand, with my brain, that you weren’t trying to hurt me—that those letters weren’t even about me, really—I can’t seem to help it.

I don’t know how to square all these things. How do I square them?

—Mike

Dear Mike,

I really miss you, too. And Olivia.

I don’t know if youcansquare all those things. But maybe you don’t have to, at least not right now. Lately I’ve been thinking about how sometimes two things that should cancel each other out can be true at the same time. For example: I hate ballet, but I also love it. I love you, but I hurt you. You care about me in some fashion, right? But you hurt me, too. Lately, I feel like once you open your eyes to the possibility, life is full of conflicting truths.

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