“I think it’s because of everything we’ve talked about recently,” she said, taking the glass of red wine Natalie offered her. “There have been moments today where I’ve vacillated between old behaviors and new ones, but I think I’ve realized that falling apart and apologizing and panicking won’t change the outcome. Do I still feel the sting that this is all connected to last year? Yes. But is it my fault? I know it isn’t.”
She took a sip of wine, bizarrely feeling relaxed given the news they’d received today. “Thank you for paying for our lawyer, Anders,” she said quietly.
Anders laughed. “You didn’t make it easy for me, älskling.”
She hadn’t. When he’d offered, she’d insisted that she couldn’t accept. But when she’d overheard Emerson and Jake discuss postponing the start of construction on the events hall to ensure they had the money available for legal fees, she’d changed her mind. “I know. I just feel a bit weird taking money from you, and I don’t expect you to have to spend money on me.”
“Liv. We give and take. I come home after a game and somehow my pre-bed snack is ready in the fridge so I don’t have to make it. And I’ll put money on it that when I get home, there will be clean sheets on the bed for me to fall into. I don’t expect you to do those things for me, either, Liv. But it feels good that you do.”
Speaking of someone she didn’t expect to do things for her, she thought of Jackson Tate. The huge bouquet of flowers he’d sent her, with the note reassuring her the Rush would look out for her and Anders, had been so reassuring. So had the phone call with Lenny Sanders and Elizabeth Nichols, the lawyer he’d found to represent her and the distillery. “How do you feel about the Rush?” she asked.
“I think that’s been the biggest shock of it all. They’ve gone beyond my expectations.”
Olivia sipped her wine as she listened to Anders share even more details about the call he’d had with Jackson. “I guess I have a greater respect for Fleury now. And then the breakfast I ended up having with Wyatt and Theo and Karl.”
Anders sounded . . . happy. And she was happy for him. “So, what does this mean for your free agency decision?”
There was a long pause. “Toronto unofficially got us word of their offer this afternoon, and it’s a really fucking good one, Liv.”
Canada. A four-hour long flight and two-hour time difference. “That’s amazing,” she said, finally finding her voice.
“Is it?” Anders said, quietly, his voice so uncertain.
She needed to be the positive voice of reason. “Of course it is. To have a team want you that badly must be a huge confidence boost. For it to be a team you admire and want to play for must feel even better. It’s nothing more than that right now. You’ve already said you won’t be able to officially talk to teams until the unrestricted free trade window opens, right? So it’s nothing more than a piece of paper holding some really impressive news.”
Anders was silent again.
“It doesn’t change anything, Anders.”
“Kelvin said now word is out that Toronto has unofficially made an offer, he expects to see off-the-record confirmation from New York and Boston by the end of the week. Vancouver has just made contact too. I mean, they’ll all wait for the trade window to officially make offers, so they aren’t final.”
“I’m proud of you, Anders. Yes, we have decisions to make, but I’m still really, really proud of you.”
“You don’t know how much that means, Liv. You asked me how I feel about Denver, right? The truth is, I’m really confused. When I first entered the room for that call this morning, I was convinced I was about to be traded, and I really didn’t want it to be true. I’d almost convinced myself the Rush was a great organization to be with. But then I get the details from Kelvin and see what Toronto is offering and I’m certain that’s where I’m meant to be.”
Olivia’s stomach tightened. While she’d support him wherever he decided to go, she harbored a secret hope that he’d at least listen to what Denver had to say. Long-distance would work for a while, but not forever.
Anders sighed. “It’s not as easy a choice as I thought it was going to be. If you’d asked me six weeks ago, it would have been a no-brainer.”
The scent of garlic and tomatoes began to fill the apartment, and Olivia became acutely aware it was really close to game time. “Sweetheart. I know it’s all a lot. But park it for tonight. You need to go out there and play like the all-star I know you are. You need to prove to Harding and his bunch of vulture lawyers that their lawsuit hasn’t rattled you. But most importantly, enjoy it, Anders.”
“I wish you were here and could come and watch.”
There was wistfulness to his tone, and it matched the way she felt. “Me too. It feels like one of those days that we should be together but aren’t.”
“That’s what next year could be like.”
She hated that he felt so uncertain. “It could be like that if you were with any team, regardless of whether I moved with you or not. I could be living in Toronto and something could happen while you were playing Dallas. Or you could be living in Jersey and playing here when something happened, and I’d get to see you. That’s borrowing trouble from the future, Anders. I’m choosing to focus on the fact that we are on the phone, that we care enough about each other to listen, that we are walking through two really big challenges side by side. Isn’t that what matters?”
Anders laughed. “Steady, kämpe. Coach should have you come in and do the pre-game pep talk.”
“Funny,” she said sternly.
“I’m serious. You’re right. It is really impressive how this hasn’t tripped us up. I’ll try and focus on that.”
“Okay. You need to go and get ready. By my reckoning, you are six and a half minutes late in getting your pre-game ritual underway.”
“I wish you were my pre-game ritual and were underneath me.”
The thought of being underneath him sent heat flooding between her legs. She thought about the way they’d made love on Monday, so intense and powerful versus the way he’d thrown her up against the shower wall on Tuesday morning, before she’d gone to work and he’d left for Minnesota. The two sides of Anders.
“I’d answer that, but Natalie is twenty feet away and I don’t think she’d like it.”
Anders laughed. “I love you, älskling.”
“I love you too. I’ll be watching.”
“You’d better. Bye, love.”
Olivia placed her phone on the kitchen counter and wandered over to the sofa where Natalie was reading. Sitting, she curled her feet up beneath her. “Would you rather I watch the game in my room if you want some peace and quiet?”
Natalie shook her head and put her book down. “No. I’m just killing time until dinner is ready. I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation. I like you and Anders together.”
Olivia smiled, her glass halfway to her mouth. “I like me and Anders too.”
“He’s been good for you. When I think back to who you were last year—heck, when I think back to who you were in January. You’re different.”
“I’ve lost eight pounds. These jeans are so loose.”
“That’s great, but not what I meant. This lawsuit is totally bogus. Yet you seem to be handling it. And Anders might be leaving, but I heard you reassuring him. Color is coming back into your life, Liv. I see it in that fab cashmere sweater you’re wearing, and the painting you’ve started doing again, and the brand designs you’ve been working on. It was as if someone had put a muted gray filter over you and everything you touched. But it’s lifted now.”
“Anders has that effect.”
Natalie shook her head. “Maybe he’s helped you make sense of what happened, but it’s not Anders’s presence that has this effect. If he left, I don’t think you’d fade back to that person you were. And that’s because you did the work. I like you and Anders because you challenge each other. And I like you and Anders because you like each other enough to make the change
s you need.”
Olivia reached for Natalie’s hand and squeezed it. “I think you might be right. I feel like I need to help Anders realize he’s changed too.” She pursed her lips for a moment and then had an idea. She hurried to the kitchen and grabbed her phone. She couldn’t pull this together on her own, so she called Sarah. If she was going to pull it off, she needed Karl’s help.
Three days after learning of the lawsuit, three days during which they’d beaten Minnesota and drawn with Dallas, Anders followed Karl as they stepped into what was clearly a junior hockey rink. The tin roof gave it the appearance of an old farm building, and it suddenly made sense as to why so many of his American peers referred to their arenas as barns.
“What are we doing here, Karl?” he asked, tossing his skates to the ground and slouching on one of the cheap plastic seats that surrounded the rink.
Karl sat on the row in front and began to take off his sneakers. “Just put your skates on.”
It was nearly ten o’clock at night. He’d rather be home. With Olivia. His time on the road had given him some clarity. If they were really going to make the most of the now, of the time they had in Denver together, he wanted her to move in. Everywhere he looked around the house, there were already reminders of her. The office reminded him of coming home from a road trip and encouraging her to come to bed, making love with her to distract her from checking architects’ drawings and building plans. The sofa reminded him of the way she’d curled up in his lap after she’d been assaulted by Harding. Even the kitchen sink reminded him of her. The way she’d nursed his knuckles, cleaning them in warm water, after the fight.
He was simply better with her.
But he did what Karl suggested, even as he pondered why Karl had requested he just wear jeans and a hoodie. Threading his laces was therapeutic, and for a moment, neither of them spoke. It reminded him of when they were kids, when their father was coaching and the two of them would be allowed on the ice after the team and his father had left. A whole hour for just the two of them passing a puck back and forth.
Karl stood first. “I’m going to say some things and you aren’t going to like them all. But we aren’t leaving this arena until it’s all squared away.”
Something tightened in Anders’s chest, and he couldn’t decide if it was an adrenaline surge or something deeper. “Karl, I’m really not in the mood for whatever pep talk you have planned.”
Karl flipped his car keys around his fingers. “Yeah, well, too bad. I’m not driving you home until we’re done.”
Anders rubbed a hand over his beard. “You ever heard of ride shares? Ubers? Cabs?”
Karl shrugged. “You don’t strike me as a coward, Anders. Never have. So, take your head out of your ass and stop acting like one. You need to hear what I’m going to tell you. I picked a rink miles away from where we play so no one would bother us. Just listen.”
Anders finished fastening his laces and rested his elbows on his knees. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”
“You’ve forgotten how to play.”
“Fuck you, Karl. I’m playing just fine.”
Karl nodded. “Yeah. You are. Just. Fine. But you aren’t a just fine player. You’re fucking amazing. You’ve forgotten how to be that guy on the ice. The one everyone looked up to back home. Where did he go, Anders?”
Had he forgotten? Or had he lost it? Echoes of Fleury’s comments about the game playing him instead of him playing the game filtered through his brain. There were stories littered through history of talented players drafted first or second who had never achieved their potential once they had made it.
But despite his thoughts, he couldn’t bear the idea that his brother was standing over him, lecturing him. “Fuck off, Karl. I’m sure you mean well, but this time would be better spent analyzing video, chatting with the offensive line coach, making plans for—”
“Listen to yourself, Anders. Analyzing, reviewing, planning. What the fuck do all those things actually have to do with playing? Somewhere along the way, you’ve forgotten what it feels like to play hockey.” Karl slammed his fist against his heart. “You’ve forgotten the fun of it. You’ve forgotten the emotion of it. You’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a kid on the ice with his friends, having the time of his life.”
Anders took a deep breath, struggling to admit that he felt the psychical blow of each one of Karl’s words.
“You can’t outthink hockey. You can be cerebral. You can strategize. And yeah, you’ve always been great at that. But you’ve forgotten how to let go of all that and just see the puck and the net. You’re overthinking it.”
Anders stood. “So, what’s this supposed to do? I skate up and down the ice with you a few times and suddenly everything comes back to me?”
“No.” Karl put his fingers to his lips and whistled loudly. “You play with them and remember.”
From the other side of the rink, people started to skate onto the ice. His cousin, Lucas, who gave him the faint scar along his hairline from a high stick when they were twelve, and his older sister, Astrid, who played for Sweden’s Olympic Women’s hockey team. When Anders and Karl had spent two years in Malmö, they’d played on a junior team with Elias and Hugo, and Anders recognized Elias’s copper-toned hair. They’d practiced every hour at the rink and on the frozen pond in Hugo’s backyard. There was Maja and Alma, twins from high school who’d only played because they liked hanging out with the boys, but had turned out to be good enough to make a mark in the junior leagues. Wyatt and Theo came out next, Theo in a patterned wool sweater. Behind them was Jean Paul Fleury, his coach, dressed to play.
Everyone was in casual clothes with a stick. No helmets. Just battered old sticks. Like they would use for a Sunday morning pick-up game.
Words choked him. “How? Why?” he whispered to Karl.
Karl threw his arm over his shoulder. “You needed a reminder, pysen. You need to remember that we have your back. You need to remember why you love the game.”
“Thank you. For doing this.”
Karl shrugged. “I can’t take any credit. It was her idea.”
Anders watched as his father and Olivia joined the ice. She was the only one in a jersey.
His, of course.
There were some good-natured comments thrown his way in Swedish and English.
Everyone skated toward him. “You might need this,” his father said, handing him the hockey stick he’d used in an early junior league tournament. It was shorter than the one he used now but, Anders rationalized, that was probably the point. He balanced it in his hand. The tape job was shit.
“So, there are twelve of you. Six on each team. I’ll ref,” his father called out. “Wyatt, you’re captain, with Anders, Astrid, Maja, Elias and Liv. The rest of you are on Theo’s team.”
Anders looked at Olivia. She held a stick in one hand and was scissoring her feet back and forth on the blades of her skates. As the others skated off to claim their spots on the ice, she waited for him.
He stepped through the gap in the boards and skated to her.
“You’re not mad, are you?” she asked. “I didn’t know what else to do and couldn’t even begin to organize this on my own.”
He placed his hand on her cheek. God, he loved her. He loved her smile. He loved the way she fell asleep before the end of a movie, and how she always asked him to tell her what happened the next morning. He loved the way she walked around the house in his T-shirt. He loved the feel of her body pressed against his.
“Karl paid for everyone to come, by the way. I mean, I would have but I couldn’t—”
He cut her off by playfully hitting the stick out of her hand and pressing his lips to hers. They broke apart when she laughed.
Her eyes were wide and bright, her smile crinkling the corners. Nothing could compare to the way he felt about her. “Thank you.”
Olivia nodded twice.
“Why did you do it?”
“You were so tied up in the business of hock
ey, but I never heard you talk about how much you loved the game unless you were telling me stories from your childhood. So, I called Karl and asked how I’d go about setting up a game of pick-up hockey. The whole let’s-fly-people-in-from-all-over-the-place was his idea.”
“He’s always been a bit over the top. Did he tell you how he proposed to Sarah?”
Olivia laughed. “He did. Please don’t ever do that.”
“If I ever propose, I guarantee it’ll just be you and me, and definitely not in front of a packed arena at the final game of the season. But is it okay if I ask you to move in with me, as we stand on a rink in the middle of nowhere with nobody paying us any attention?”
Olivia’s eyes went wide. “You want me to live with you?”
It felt like the bare minimum, but he knew she needed time to adjust to stages. “I do, Liv. I don’t know whether I’m here for three months or three years, but I want you with me every minute we can be.”
Olivia bit her lip and then broke out into a wide smile that reached her eyes. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. I’ll move in with you. People will think we’re crazy moving in together so quickly.”
Anders shrugged. “But that’s only because they’ve never loved someone as much as we love each other.”
“That’s fair. I’ll move in next weekend.”
“Perfect. We can combine your birthday party with a moving-in party. We’ll invite everyone we know and I’ll get it catered.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t. But I want to. So, you play hockey, huh?”
“That would be a no. But Astrid gave me some pointers while we were waiting for you.”
“Well, force Karl down the right-hand side because he prefers to play on the left. I’ll do the rest.” He bent down, picked up her stick, and handed it to her. “Do you know what position you’re playing?”
“Something down one of the sides.”
He shook his head and gave her a nudge down the ice, laughing as she squealed. Anders skated around her, impressed as she found her feet. She had more pace than he realized. “How come we’ve never been skating before?” he asked.
Love In Moments: An opposites attract hockey romance (Love Distilled Book 2) Page 22
