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A beautiful smile can make any man’s knees weak, but there was something about Shea’s that did more to me.
“I’ll come say goodbye before I head out of town.” “I know you’ll take great care of the team.”
The big moments in life that test a man’s mettle always come flying in out of the blue.
Home Depot didn’t open until 5:00 a.m., and I was parked outside ten minutes before the doors unlocked. They shouldn’t have sold to me. I looked unhinged: beard going scruffy, deep hollows beneath my eyes, my long hair escaping the knot at the back of my neck, fury and purpose in all of my movements. No one buys a chainsaw before dawn with good intentions.
Most of these guys had been dropped into the sadistic kind of mind fuck that would have made a Zen Buddhist monk climb the walls and swing from a chandelier.
We found each other’s gaps and broken spaces and filled them in, and we came together like a kaleidoscope forming shimmering fractals out of piles of nothing. Every time you looked at us, we were different.
They were peanut butter and jelly: Brody was nuts, Lawson was sweet, and together, they could hallelujah the county.
I might as well have signed adoption papers for this team.
But he didn’t, and I didn’t, and we ended the night the same way we’d started: as teammates, nothing more.
“I’d love to.” There was a wavering flicker in Shea’s voice, so tiny I missed it the first time. It was only later, thinking back on this moment, that I heard it at all.
had a hundred reasons not to kiss Shea, but Shea was stroking my leg, and he was looking at me like that, in that kind of way. That hungry, first-kiss way, his lips parted and his breath coming in hot.
You come into the world loving your parents automatically, in that you’re-a-part-of-me way that’s practice for when you go and find your own person to partner up with for the rest of your life. What happens when that kind of love—the trusting kind, the makes-you-vulnerable kind—shears off of your soul?
But now— Shea. Hockey wasn’t an escape when he was right fucking there.
So life was beautifully, wonderfully amazing. Except for the Shea-sized hole in it.
He smiled, and it was like a million sparklers went off at once, a million little flashes of light in the depths of his eyes. The shine of him, the glow. He was incandescent. Wondrous. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. I was so, so fucked.
My eyes met Shea’s, and I swore, for a split second, the world stopped. It was a freeze frame caught on high-speed film, him and me, locked in that moment. Gloves bumping, smiles breaking our faces, the new goal song Kathy and I had picked blaring from the sound system.
“This is the first of many,” Shea said. His voice was as low as mine, hidden beneath the video game and Brody and Lawson’s shit talk. I smiled. “Maybe. But it’s the first one in a long time that’s mattered.”
He was as close to perfect as I’d ever seen, so close that it burned to be around him. He was like staring at the sun.
“Morgan,” he breathed, so softly I don’t think I was supposed to hear him. He nuzzled my jaw, pressed his lips to my neck. “I’m in love with you.”
How much was I willing to risk? To give? Everything. All of me, every part. My heart, my body, my molecules, my atoms. My past, my present, my future. My dreams, my hopes, all of it, every single thing; they all belonged to Shea. I didn’t fucking deserve him, and this was most likely going to end in disaster, but could anything be worse than last night?
“You mean everything to me.” My words hung between us. “You are everything to me. So let’s do this. Let’s really do this.”
I’m yours. I’m yours as long as you want me. You can smash me to pieces, shatter me into smithereens, and it will all be worth it, just for the chance to be part of your life.
“I don’t want the world.” Shea slipped his hand into mine, wove our fingers together. “I want you, Morgan. I just want you.”
I lived in the spaces between when Shea made my heart stop and start. When he smiled, when he laughed, when those backlit blues blazed and he radiated that too-flawless-to-be-real joy. Whenever any of that happened because of me, because I brought him that happiness that danced across his day, my heart would stop and start. Every time, I thought I’d die.
was determined to spoil Shea every way a man could possibly be spoiled, and this was right up there with his coffee creamer and keeping butter pecan ice cream in my freezer.
Living like this, in such simple perfection, undid the corners of my very tattered soul. The calluses around my heart fragmented like a jeweler was taking swings at them.
A tap here, a strike there, and the scar tissue cracked away. Shea’s smile, the sound of his laugh, the starlit joy in his eyes when he looked at me. Each day seemed lighter than the last.
It was the thought of it that fractured my mind. What on earth would it feel like to be gifted with all of Shea’s love, all of his devotion, a lifetime’s worth of his hope, and his decision: you are the one I want forever, you are the one I have waited for.
“Out, in.” I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, as long as I’m with you.”
How did they know? I could fuck up in a heartbeat and ruin more lives than I could count. I’d rather clap shit between my hands than let anyone down, but it seemed, all of a damn sudden, a whole heap of people had put their trust and faith in me, and I had no idea if I was worth all that certitude and conviction.
I had 198 days left on my contract. In my mind, I tore it to shreds, tossed the scraps and the days remaining like confetti. This, right here, was my future.
“Shea…” I kissed each of his fingers, stared into his blazing blues. “Shea, I love you.” Another kiss. Part of me felt like I was dying, and part of me felt like I was flying straight into the sun. “Will you marry me?”
“Marry me, Shea.” We were close enough my words were whispers of breath bouncing off his lips. “I’ve never wanted anything more than this: to love you, and cherish you, and honor you, and to spend the rest of my life as your man.”
I hollered like I’d scored a goal, scored ten goals, like I’d won the Cup, because Shea was worth all of that combined and more, a million times more. He was everything. And now, he was mine, and I was his.
The glow in his eyes was more beautiful than all the sunrises I had ever seen.
“Shea,” I started again. My voice cracked, wavered. “You are every dream I didn’t know I had, and every future I never knew I wanted, come true. I didn’t know it was possible to be this happy, or to love life this fully. Loving you has changed everything. Now, my future is yours, and my hopes and dreams are tied tight to your hopes and dreams.” My hand fumbled in my pocket for Shea’s ring. I’d kept it in the pocket of my shirt right over my heart, keeping it warm for him, and I held it at the tip of his ring finger. A sunbeam caught the diamond and fractured, scattering rainbows across the
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“Morgan,” he started. “I love you for exactly who you are today, and for who you have always been: the man of my dreams, and the man I’ve waited my whole life for. I marry you today, loving each and every one of your very many strengths and your very few faults.” He grinned as I chuffed out a single laugh. My cheeks were burning. “Forever is not long enough with you—” Shea’s voice wavered “—but from today forward, every moment is ours.” He reached into his pocket and fished out my ring, held it at the tip of my ring finger. It was a plain band of dark, swirling steel, patterns that looked like
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“I asked my mom to send me one of my skates from when we were the conference champs at Harvard. I took the blade and had a jeweler melt it down to make a ring.”
these two idiots are so hopelessly in love
Every time Shea and I kissed, it was like my heart found a new fold of hidden happiness, or I uncovered a new layer of bliss and ecstasy I never knew existed.
But this? Making love to my husband, who picked me, chose me, wanted me? Nothing in my life could compare.
“You are perfect. You are perfect for me.”
All this time, the whole time we were dating, Shea was the one who said he was waiting. No, wrong. I’d been waiting my entire life for him. For our love, for our marriage, and for this exact feeling, right here, right now, of pure and perfect wholeness. Every choice, every step, every thought, every feeling I’d ever had, all of it, had laid out the path of my life that brought me here, into Shea’s arms and his heart and his bed, and into this life and our love.
I smiled back, huffed out a laugh, absolutely electric with wonder, with the immense vastness of all this fucking jubilation I couldn’t contain inside of me, and even beyond that, with the endless, boundless love that filled me, spread from here and now and to the end of my life, from this moment into the future, every day for as long as I breathed and as long as I lived.
When we filed our marriage license together, the clerk leaned across the counter and said, “Go Outlaws. I’ll take care of this.”
Always together, always, because that’s how we were meant to be.
But I’d forgotten that it’s the brokenness of a kaleidoscope that brings out the beauty, and as easily as there can be order, everything can fall apart. Can shatter. Now shatter we had, because all those fractures and cracks we’d had at the beginning were still there, no longer covered up by wins or glory or video game parties. We were still twenty hurt men, and though we’d tried our best to crawl out of the darkness, the darkness had decided it wasn’t done with us yet.
Early on, during one of those looks that passed between us, Brody had decided he wanted to live, that he didn’t want to die anymore. When, how, where, I might never know. But something had happened that made him choose us, and living, and if he’d found that reason in any part of me, then he was welcome to excavate my soul for as long as he needed, in case he found another answer buried within me for him alone.
just rip my heart out why don’t you
That’s the finest thing a man can do in this life: be there for someone.”
It’s a big thing to recognize inside yourself that there are lines you will not cross, and that even if someone can push you hard up to the edge, you won’t go over.
Hooked on an Outlaws Feeling.
