by Selena Kitt
Later that night at the glitzy, exclusive club I'd started to spend most of my time at and already four vodka shots in, I spotted a girl who reminded me of Ellie. She was sitting alone at the bar, sipping a drink and discretely checking out the men. It was her eyes, they were huge and dark like Ellie's. Or maybe it was her body language, the slope of her shoulders as she leaned over slightly to talk to the bartender. I can't even remember. But it was something. She'd seen me, too. I'd already caught her looking a few times. As usual, I stayed exactly where I was. Girls came to me, not the other way around.
That's exactly how pathetic I was then. Forced to scrabble for the tiny self-esteem boosts offered by the fact that women approached me. Sure enough, once I made deliberate eye contact with her a couple of times, she came over to me and threw me a coy smile.
"You're Cade Parker, aren't you?"
"Yep," I replied, openly looking her body up and down. She looked less like Ellie close up. Her tits were fake and her perfume smelled sugary and cheap. I was desperate.
"Oh my God. I love hockey."
"Do you?" I asked as she slid one of her manicured hands up my thigh.
"Yeah. I love - I love hockey players."
Jesus. She wasn't going to make it easy. I endured her inane conversation for as long as I could, maybe five minutes, before inviting her back to my place.
"Do you have any friends?" I asked as we left the club, suddenly worried that one girl - especially one barely coherent girl - wasn't going to be enough company to stave off the howling loneliness. Hailey - that was her name - looked up at me.
"Friends? You mean, like, for right now?"
She knew what I meant. She wanted me all to herself, of course, but what she wanted wasn't my concern.
"Yeah, for right now. Call them up, I'll give you my address."
And that's how I ended up with Hailey and two of her closest (ha!) girlfriends, standing naked in front of my bed and furiously masturbating to try and stay hard while they made out with each other on my stupid, ostentatious chinchilla bedspread. I could barely contain the rising levels of desperation inside me. I told myself that this was what every man on earth wanted. Money. Fame. Power. Young women willing to do anything you asked of them just to spend time with you. So why the fuck wasn't it working? I disappeared into my en suite bathroom and popped a Viagra. When I came back out, limp-dicked because it hadn't kicked in yet, I caught one of Hailey's friends giving her a look. One of those 'really?' looks that women give each other when a man is failing to live up to whatever it is they think he should be living up to.
"Hey, you don't have to be here." I told her. "Get your ass back to the bar and find yourself another chump if this isn't doing it for you."
Hailey cut in. "Cade, do you have any, uh, treats?"
Treats. Yes, I had treats. Five minutes later she was snorting a line of coke off one of the other girl's tits and they all perked right up. I ended up having to jerk off over all three of them as they knelt on the floor in front of me doing their best to feign arousal and begging me to come all over them. When it was over, after I'd closed my eyes and locked my brain onto the picture of Ellie's half-open mouth when she had an orgasm, I passed out in a chair and the girls did the rest of my coke before leaving.
That was my life. That fucker Jay turned out to be right, too. Early that year, as the play-offs loomed, my career-long goal scoring streak came to an abrupt end as my lifestyle did finally catch up to me and I lumbered around the ice like a drunk, oversized toddler night after night. Stories started appearing in the sports media about the state of my game. Coach became less and less willing to make exceptions when I showed up late (or not at all) to practice.
Ellie Hesketh was gone. She'd slipped through my fingers like sand. And no amount of alcohol or drugs or pussy or partying or fancy cars was able to paper over her absence. By the same time a year later trade rumors were swirling and I was being benched on a pretty regular basis. My own self-loathing just added to the velocity of my downward spiral and the only question became not whether or not I was going to fuck up my life, but how irreparably I was going to do it.
Ellie
Christopher Caden Hesketh was born at two in the morning on a blustery spring night. I labored alone, unwilling to let my mother, who wasn't interested anyway, anywhere near the hospital room and only allowing the boys to see me before things got serious. He was perfect. Flushed with a fierce, instinctive and utterly overwhelming love as soon as I laid eyes on him, I held Christopher in my arms for over an hour while we stared at each other, fascinated.
He looked exactly like his father. The intense, blue-eyed gaze was the mirror image of Cade's, so familiar to me it was almost eerie. When my brothers came into the room to meet their nephew, they were quiet and wide-eyed. When Jacob held him for the first time, I wept. Baby Ben eyed me.
"Why are you crying, Ellie? Are you sad you had a baby?"
"No," I sniffled, ruffling his hair. "No I'm not sad I had a baby. I'm happy. Sometimes people cry when they're happy, too."
They passed Christopher around to each other with heart-melting reverence, pulling the swaddling cloth down so they could run their fingers over his smooth cheeks.
"His skin is so soft." David commented in an awed voice. "I can barely feel it."
"I know. It's because he's brand new. Your skin was like that when you were born, too."
"Was it, Ellie? Do you remember when I was born?"
I nodded. "Yes, I remember when you were born, David. I remember when all of you were born. You were just like this."
I held my sleeping baby in my arms and my brothers curled up at various spots on the bed to hear the stories of their own births, which I had always remembered more clearly than our mother did. For a couple of hours that day, in a hospital room in North Falls, Michigan, time stood sweetly still. In my memories of that brief time, all the edges are blurred with love.
Christopher's infancy wasn't easy and the sleepless nights were endless, but I was happy. We were happy. Our unconventional little family bonded tightly around the new arrival. Jacob, already showing signs of the man he was so close to becoming, seemed to grow up overnight. Suddenly tall and deep-voiced, he took it upon himself to keep his two little brothers in line when he knew I didn't have the energy to do it myself. David and Baby Ben were tender and attentive with Christopher, often to the point where me or Jacob would have to break up squabbles that broke out over whose turn it was to feed him dinner or play with him.
Christopher's arrival also solidified my belief that the boys needed some kind of real security in their lives. I applied for custody, expecting a long, drawn-out and possibly expensive process but it was surprisingly easy to do, especially when my mother's utterly non-functional lifestyle was taken into account. When the papers came through we had a family meal and I explained to them that I was now their legal guardian and that none of us were beholden to our mother anymore. It was a weight off all of our shoulders.
One night, when Christopher was nine months old and asleep in his uncle David's arms while we all watched some TV talent show, Baby Ben asked me if Cade was going to come and visit Christopher. I was unprepared for his question, despite it having been on my mind almost every second since I had first discovered I was pregnant.
"I - uh, I'm not sure, David."
"Does he know about Christopher?"
Jacob jumped in. "David, that's Ellie's business."
"No, it's OK. You guys can ask me about this, I don't mind. The truth is I don't know if Cade will come to see Christopher. He doesn't know about him yet."
"Why?"
"Because I'm not sure he would happy about it. He lives in another city now, on the other side of the country and he has a job there. He might not want the distraction of being a father."
I wasn't lying. There was every chance that Cade wouldn't want the distraction of being a father, especially given who the baby's mother was. He'd changed. He was no longer the tough but fundame
ntally sweet boy I'd known when we were eighteen year old kids. Although there was no question that Cade Parker would always have dominion over a piece of my heart, it wasn't my nature to be foolish about who people were - and what their capacity to change was.
It all sounded rather lofty when I told myself those things. There were other factors, too. The fact that Cade was famous was one. There would be media attention - and probably not the positive kind - if anyone found out he had a secret baby with a high school girlfriend who lived in a trailer and had a drunk for a mother.
Then there was his parents. That meeting with his mother at the cafe, when she had bought me a cupcake and used my own pathetic need for a mother figure to try and keep me away from her son, was still burned into my memory. In the intervening years I'd come to recognize that little episode for the manipulation it was. Cade's mother had been horrified at the thought of trailer-trash Ellie Hesketh with her golden-boy son. She knew what my home life was like - everyone in North Falls did. If she got wind of a grandson, one often left in the care of his fourteen year old uncle while his mother worked two jobs, I had no reason to believe she wouldn't try everything she could to paint me as a bad mother, maybe even to try and take Christopher away from me. Just the thought of it made my blood run cold, and I knew I didn't have enough money to even talk to a lawyer, let alone hire one to fend off Cade's pushy, rich parents if they wanted to cause trouble.
I used to go over these reasons one by one in my mind, trying to justify not telling Cade about his son. They were good reasons, and I'm nothing if not practical, but they weren't the only ones. After Christopher was born I started going online again, reading about Cade, looking at the latest photos and gossip pieces and brief interviews. He was usually pictured in expensive, well-fitted suits walking into arenas or out of clubs with a cocky look on his face like he owned the world.
Part of me, a small part, always assumed that Cade and I would end up together. After his brief visit, I'd been forced to face the fact that that probably wasn't going to happen. He lived in a different world. A shinier, more expensive world than North Falls. What hope did I have against the bright lights of Los Angeles and the smooth-skinned charms of its female inhabitants? What if I did tell Cade about Christopher and he rejected me - and him? I knew the pain of growing up with a parent who basically had no interest in me and it filled me with rage and pain to think of my baby ever experiencing anything like that. Wasn't it better for him to grow up loved? In a trailer, yes. Never having quite enough money for the latest toys or gadgets, yes. But loved. Because Christopher was loved - fully and completely by me and his doting uncles. I watched him grow from a placid, content baby into a happy, outgoing toddler and then a little boy. I saw the way he interacted with other people, so different from the way I or my brothers had when we were small. I didn't want my son to grow up convinced he was lesser-than or expecting to be treated dismissively.
When Christopher was five years old and settling happily into kindergarten, it started to dawn on me that it was probably going to be soon that he started to ask questions about fathers. Specifically, why most of his classmates had them and why he didn't. It was so easy to put off hard questions when he was a baby or a toddler who spent all of his time with me and his uncles. What was I going to say when he started asking where his daddy was, or if he even had one?
The anger I'd felt towards Cade, at how he'd just treated me the last time we saw each other, was gone. Mostly. I'd even come to understand why he'd behaved the way he had, even though it didn't excuse it. I think Cade probably loved me at some point in the past. Rich and famous he might have been, but he was still young and male and he'd reacted very badly to the fact that I had been with another man. But what was underneath that reaction? Would he have been so angry if I he didn't care about me?
I scolded myself for thinking that way. Allowing myself to feel vulnerable when it came to Cade Parker had never turned out well for me. I crept into Christopher's room to check on him. He was fast asleep on his back, one hand curled up beside his head on the pillow. He looked so much like Cade. He was even starting to develop some of Cade's mannerisms and quirks of body language. Every now and again I would find myself doing a double-take when he reached for a toy a certain way or cocked his head at me when I talked to him in exactly the same way Cade used to do. I looked down at his sleeping face and blinked back the tears that welled up in my eyes. No matter what, I was going to do what was best for my son. No matter what.
Cade
Everyone always said I was talented. My parents have grainy VHS footage of me playing hockey at nine years old. It's been used in various highlight reels for awards shows and sport broadcasts before, mostly because of what the announcer says as the younger me skates effortlessly around three opposing players and slams the puck into the back of the net.
"This is raw talent, folks. This young man has the potential to be the golden player of his generation."
That footage used to be a boost. Proof that I was destined for greatness from a young age. As I threw myself into the vortex of Los Angeles' dark side, it became nothing more than a haunting reminder of what probably wasn't to be. I had the one Art Ross trophy, yeah. But I didn't have a Stanley Cup and the sportswriters and commentators had started to talk about me in frustrated tones, wondering openly why I hadn't blossomed into the league-dominating player it had always seemed I was meant to be.
At twenty-eight and on the eve of the car accident that would change the course of my life, I was interviewed by a well-known hockey blogger. The team's PR person had set it up, billing it as my first step back from a descent into what they diplomatically deemed my 'unhealthy lifestyle.' When I arrived at the studio, Jessica called me as I was walking through the front doors.
"Are you ready for this?"
"Not really," I replied.
"Come on Cade, this is going to be good for you. You'll be back to your old self in no time."
I hoped Jessica's encouraging words were true, but in spite of my bullish attitude with Kings' staff, my manager, my friends and my parents, I was deeply worried. Was I going to be able to stick to the clean-living regimen that the specially-hired health team had set out for me? No partying, no more late nights, a clean diet and hours in the gym and the practice rink? It was so long since I'd lived like that. I didn't even know who I was anymore without the destructive crutches I'd come to rely on, or if I'd ever be able to recapture the part of myself that I seemed to have lost.
In the studio after the introductions, the host got right to it.
"Cade Parker, we're so glad to have you here. Tell me a little bit about the past few years of your career. You were supposed to be a superstar. You were almost there. What happened?"
I did my best to maintain eye contact and, at first, to keep my answers as broad as possible. The King's media coach had gone over it with me beforehand, warning me not to get into any gruesome details.
"Well, I think everyone knows what happened. I got sucked into an unhealthy way of living, I lost focus."
"Why do you think that was? What happened?"
I was stumped. Was I supposed to tell the truth? As I sat there searching for something to say, it occurred to me that it didn't matter anymore. Everyone knew about my troubles. What harm could it do to give the real explanation? I was either going to make a comeback on the ice or I wasn't and nothing I could say to a sports blogger was going to change that.
"Well," I started, slowly, still unsure as to what exactly was going to come out of my own mouth, "I ruined a close relationship. I hurt someone I cared about very deeply."
"Are you talking about Jessica Ray? You two broke up last year, it seems that your career troubles have been going on a lot longer than that.
"No, actually, I'm not talking about Jessica."
I knew I had to be very careful with my words so as not to cause any embarrassment to Jess. The fact that our relationship had been fake had never come out in public.
"I'
m talking about someone I used to know back in North Falls, when I played for the Ice Kings. Her name was Ellie."
Just saying her name out loud like that, knowing it was being recorded, gave me a slightly sick, slightly exhilarated feeling. I had no idea how anything was going to turn out, or whether talking about her was a good idea or not.
"Ellie? Is this an old girlfriend you're talking about?"
"Yeah, from high school."
"So what you're saying is that you've been pining over this girl for, what, ten years? That she's the reason your career has been in a nosedive?"
