Page 43 of Canadian Boyfriend

“Surprise me.”

She always said that.Surprise me.She liked white wine, but she never seemed to care beyond that. “Do you really not have a preference?”

“I really do not have a preference. I don’t drink much, so I never developed one.”

“Sounds like me and beer.” I went to the fridge and extracted a Labatt Blue. “Don’t get me wrong. If you give me a fancy craft beer made from hops that grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen, I will drink it, but I won’t like it any more than this.” I set my can on the island. “Sarah was the wine person.” I pulled a bottle out of the wine fridge at random. “And she had eclectic taste, so this could be an eight-dollar bottle or a fifty-dollar bottle.” It was funny that Sarah had been dead almost a year but this wine fridge was still half-full. It was also funny that I could notice that without it feeling like someone had shoved a spear through my chest. I really had come a long way—well, if you counted guilt replacing grief as my coming a long way.

“White wine roulette. Hit me.”

I filled a glass and moved to set it on the counter in front of her, but she thought I was handing it to her. So we did this little dance with our hands.

“Sorry,” I said, but we kept doing it. She laughed, and I used my free hand to take her hand. Held it, I guess, but only so I could, once and for all, set the wine down.

Damn, she had soft skin. I already knew that, but touching it now made me feel kinda… sweaty. And not in the way chopping wood did. I dropped her hand and cleared my throat. “At least you like wine.”

“Yeah, you’re a hoser, right? I still don’t think I get it. Is your beer taste related to your hoser status?”

I leaned against the fridge and contemplated the question. “The whole hoser thing is kind of a shorthand. I come from a modest background, and I will freely admit I have a bit of achip on my shoulder about it. Not that I feel like I don’t belong or anything, more like…”

“You don’t want to belong among people who wouldn’t like you in your hoser guise,” she finished.

That was exactly it. “I have the fancy house with the wine fridge.” I nodded at her glass of wine. “But I don’tneedthe fancy house and the wine fridge, you know?”

“You don’t let yourself need it.”

I wasn’t sure what the difference was, but OK. “Sarah had no idea who I was when we met. I loved that. We were flirting, but she didn’t know I was a hockey player. Mind you, back then I was only playing in the AHL, but hockey had been so much a part of how people saw me for so long, at every level. It was refreshing that she didn’t give a crap. As far as Sarah was concerned, I was just a guy who kept showing up in her section at the diner she worked at. That was incredibly appealing.”

“I can see that. How did you go from sitting in her section to marrying her?”

“Eventually, I asked her out. Which took a lot of nerve, I might add, because I was kind of terrified of her.”

Aurora laughed. I loved her laugh. It sounded like music, almost. “Why?”

“For the same reason she shot me down. She was too busy to go out with me, she said. She had a one-year-old, a job that had her on her feet all day. There was no room in her life for a guy. She had her act together in a way that I both admired and found intimidating.”

“Something must have broken the logjam.”

“She did. I took no for an answer, but I still came to the diner to eat every now and then—they were famous for their pie.” I paused, wondering if it was weird to be telling Aurorathis. Nah. Why would it be weird? “Then one day, she sat down across from me and propositioned me.”

“What!”

“Yeah.” I chuckled, remembering. “She said she didn’t have room in her life for dating, but she had an hour before her neighbor who took care of Liv expected her home—she was getting off early that night because the place was dead.”

“And then what? You wowed her with your mad skills and suddenly she had time for you?”

I grinned. “I kind of wormed my way in. And Olivia liked me, which helped my cause.” I took a swig of my beer.

Aurora grew serious. “You must miss her so much.”

I tried to think of a way to articulate some of the stuff I’d been thinking at the woodpile. “I do, but it’s not as… close of a missing as it used to be. It feels less and less like an emergency the more time passes.” I cleared my throat. I didn’t mind talking about this, but I also sort of felt like I’d said as much as I wanted to for now, so I pushed off the fridge and opened it, trying to think what I could make us to eat.

Grilled cheese. That was one thing I knew how to make, and we had some good cheese. I might not be into fancy beer, but I did like a nice brie. So maybe I wasn’t as much of a hoser as I claimed. “How do you feel about grilled cheese?” Aurora had told me her food issues mostly had to do with sugary stuff, but I wanted to check.

“I feel good about grilled cheese.”

“My parents aregreat,” I said, returning to the topic of my hoserdom as I got out a pan. “They drilled modesty into us—‘us’ being my older brother and me. When we go home, we’re doing dishes and sleeping in our childhood bedrooms like we aren’t hot-shit NHL dudes. My brother’s a coach in Pittsburgh,”I added, because how would she know that? “Anyway, I try to retain some of that single-bed, doing-dishes energy in my life.” Apparently not enough, though, or I wouldn’t be so defeated by the prospect of making Christmas happen.

“So it’s grilled cheese and Labatt Blue.”

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