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Shea, though. That was a pretty name. A pretty name for a good-looking guy, if I was allowing myself to be honest.
I shifted back to Shea just in time to spy Shea’s eyes traveling slowly up from my chest to my lips. Caught, his cheeks turned as pink as a peony. Really? I grinned, but he wasn’t looking at me anymore. He’d turned his attention to the end of the table, talking with Connor about video games. I kept looking at Shea, trying to will him to turn my way. I wanted to tease him a bit, get that flush spreading, see if I could get his eyes to wander down to my chest again.
Kathy stared Coates down like he was a melting fart Popsicle
“So, what’s a guy like you doing in a place like this?” I asked. That got a tiny smile out of Shea, followed immediately by a wince. “Don’t make me smile.” A fresh drip of watery blood slid down his cheek. I wiped it away. “Ah, but you have a good one.” He flushed.
He wore a ball cap turned backward, and he hit me with a big smile, his eyes lighting up like he’d been waiting for me to walk through the door. He leaned into Brody and said, “I told you he’d be back.”
I wanted to say hell yes and have you ever been to Key West and grab your swim trunks, let’s hit the road, I’m going to buy a boat and name it Blue Eyes after you.
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.
Lawson, a ghost when I’d first met him, had gained fifteen pounds and rediscovered his inner teddy bear. I’m a traditionalist: I like my goalies chubby, and Lawson was a beaut. He was also, once the nightmares melted away, a tenderhearted softie with a belly laugh that filled up the corners of the dressing room.
They were peanut butter and jelly: Brody was nuts, Lawson was sweet, and together, they could hallelujah the county.
So call-ups from no-name minor teams and washed-up nobodies these guys might be, but too many people had thrown away what they thought were dull rocks without realizing they were diamonds that only needed some spit and polish.
If we’d been anything different, I would have already tried to charm Shea into my bed. He was exactly the type of guy to get me going. Gorgeous. Broad, lean shoulders, thick thighs, narrow waist. Legs that went forever. A brain to match all that beauty, and as kind as he was smart.
When I do something, I do it right. It might take me a long time to get to the beginning, and I might raise hell and put a chunk underneath it before I get myself pointed in the right direction, but once I’m in, every part of me is committed.
“Have you ever been somewhere like this?” His voice had dropped, softer and deeper than we normally spoke to each other. “Never,” I said. “There’s never been any place like this.” My eyes found his.
“I’ll make you proud, Morgan.” “I know you will, Darlin’.”
He was wrapped up in that tender glow, so gentle it seemed like a caress running up his bare arms and over all of his gorgeousness. He was a fucking dream. I had to look away to breathe again.
God, I wanted him. I wanted to see his eyes flutter as I buried my face in his pecs and left beard burn on his skin, and know how his lips tasted and what sounds he made when he was clinging to the edge.
He resettled himself, getting comfortable, and then laid his cheek on my shoulder. His eyes slipped shut as I frowned. Was he… Yeah, he was. He was really going to do it, was going to use me as a pillow. Within minutes, before we were taxiing to the runway, he was asleep.
He hit me with those level, steady blues, a smile buried in their deep-water depths. He was as solid as the bedrock that lined the bottom of the ocean. I could rely on him like I could rely on the sunrise.
“This is our tomorrow. That game yesterday is the past. Today, tomorrow, and every day after, we become who we are meant to be. You got me?” Oh yeah. They got me.
“Morgan… I like you. I like you a lot, and I thought something might be happening between us. I know I did this clumsily tonight—” His lips rubbed together. “I’d like to date you. Whatever this is, whatever we have, I’d like to see if it can go somewhere.”
I thought the ceiling was going to fall down on top of us when I awarded Brody his first NHL goal puck. There’s a heartbeat on every team, one guy who holds the room together. For us, it was Brody.
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.
Shea woke slowly. Always the same way, on planes, in hotels, or napping before practice. I’d watched him pull himself awake so many times in so many places. It shouldn’t be different to see it happen face-to-face, but it was. It was because he’d never opened his eyes and seen me before.
His smile grew gently as his ocean blues zeroed in. If he was shocked to wake up in my arms and on my couch, he wasn’t showing it. In fact, he looked happy. No, more than happy. I’m not sure I had a word for it, but it looked like he’d been waiting for this, maybe anticipating it like a dream. Like Christmas morning arriving with all its wonder.
The bravery inside Shea would break your heart. He was so brave, every damn day. Brave standing up to Coates, brave taking on this mantle of leadership with me for our struggling team. Brave to stop me that night, to stake out his boundaries, to tell me what he needed. Brave to come back after I’d said no with all of his feelings braided back up, never once letting me see his pain or the scoured spaces where I had flayed his heart. So brave, all the damn time, so much more than me. But in my bed, in that hotel room, under those Dallas lights, he split right down the middle.
He clung to my shirt, holding on like he was afraid that if he let go, he’d fall off the planet.
We were two blown-apart men. Two shattered hearts in one bed. Two tangled lives that should have been parallel.
Everything I yearned for was wrapped up in Shea. I wanted his dreams to come true, and I wanted his days to be made of wonder and raw lightning, cascading into a lifelong perfection that hummed as sweet as summer.
I’d never felt this way. I’d never lost myself in someone else. Certainly had never given away my heart so completely, so utterly, that my life no longer belonged to me.
“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’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.
You never got a second chance at a first love, and we were both figuring that out in each other. Shea was mine, and, fuck, I wanted to be his. I wanted this foreverness to last, for the too-much, too-gold, too-perfect high to never fade.
Him in my home, us walking through minutes and hours together, us creating something new between us— It was fucking magical.
A pink flush rose on Shea’s cheeks. “He wanted to know if this was legit, and if we were serious. I told him I was as serious about you as I was about playing hockey: that I wanted both for the rest of my life.” I sank against him, pushing my forehead against his as I squeezed my eyes closed. “Jesus, Shea.” He couldn’t say things like that to me. They unzipped me from head to toe, opened me all the way up and dumped my insides right out. I do, too, I thought. God, I do, too.
“This could be it,” he whispered. “I think— I mean—”
We were here because of Shea’s grace, and because I wanted, to the knurls of my marrow, to become the man that Shea saw whenever he looked at me. That man seemed like somebody special, and I wanted to stretch myself out to fill in the shape of him. To be him for Shea.
The shock was receding from Shea’s shimmering gaze. Other emotions were cascading in, gaining speed, gaining strength, rising so quick and immensely that Shea was shaking from the force of them. I’d seen hints and edges of these feelings when Shea couldn’t fully smother them or hide them or wrap them up tight. Whatever doors he’d been holding carefully closed, the hinges had just blown completely off. I saw it all. Awe and wonder, devotion and adoration. And love. A whole huge mess of love filling Shea up, from his toes to the tears building on his eyelashes to the huge smile and bark of
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This was the image I’d come back to for years when I remembered our wedding: driving up on this place and hearing Shea’s exhale, and feeling all the tiny pieces inside me slot into their forever places. Here. Here, us. Forever.
Loving you has changed everything.
“Give me your hand,” Shea whispered, “and I will give you my forever.”
The air smelled like pine and crisp, rest-of-your-life mornings, and the radiance of it went all the way into the bottom of my lungs.
I was fucking terrified. “Are you nervous?” I asked. “Not at all.” He didn’t look it. He looked radiant, like he’d never been as happy or as certain. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
I could never, ever leave. Him, me, us. My husband, my fucking husband. I kissed him everywhere I could, lips on his cheeks and his chin and his neck and under his jaw, murmuring his name and “I love you.”
Shea took my three fingers as easy and perfect as he’d taken everything else, like he was made for me to make love to him, and he’d been waiting for me to come along and get to business, show him what two husbands in love could do together.
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.
When we turned down the tunnel, I heard Logan shout, “They’re coming! They’re coming!” and then the sound of skates jogging down rubber. That’s what Sherlock Holmes called “a clue,” and, finally, I was wising up.
Brody curled tighter. “Morgan…” He said my name softer than he breathed, so fragile I could have cupped his voice in my two hands.
Months ago, I’d thought we were a kaleidoscope, shifting pieces of broken beads and glass twisting into new and beautiful shapes. Every time you looked at us we were different, I’d thought. Stronger. More exquisite. 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.
Lawson looked like he wanted to die, right then and there, at Brody’s feet, drown himself in the puddle of Brody’s tears.
