I don't sleep most of the night because my brain keeps bouncing between feeling humiliated and feeling guilty. Humiliated because I dropped my towel and screamed like a petrified child in front of Mac Larue, and guilty because I invaded her space and used up her fancy bubble bath. And she wasn't kidding about it being pricy. That shit is like sixty bucks for the smallest bottle I could find online. Plus fourteen bucks for international shipping. I ordered her some in the middle of the night as the air mattress deflated for the second time. The bubble bath won't get here until the day after Christmas, though, so her day of self-care is officially ruined thanks to me.
When the sun starts poking through the curtains, I get up and sneak out to get her some breakfast. Maybe that will help. Before this midnight misadventure, the last time I was in the same room with Mac was when she was in college. I remember back then she was a vegetarian.
So that's how I find myself in the Trader Joe's staring at the Meatless Magic section at eight in the morning. I'm like a toddler looking at a trigonometry textbook. Completely clueless.
“Why do they flavor meatless food like meat?” a female voice from behind me asks. “It’s like, hey cow, I won’t eat you I’ll just eat stuff flavored like you. That feels morally gray. Not that morally gray is a bad thing, necessarily.”
I turn to locate the person speaking and, oh shit. It’s Tenley. My cousin. I frown at her. She blinks her green eyes and her expression turns from flirty to utter horror. “Oh fuck! I thought you were a hot guy. Sorry. What the hell are you doing back?”
“First of all, I am a hot guy,” I reply. She immediately makes a gagging sound, which I ignore. "Second of all, why are you cruising the vegetarian aisle at eight in the morning?”
“Because…” Tenley pauses, tilts her dirty blonde head, and smirks. “Never mind that. Why are you in a vegetarian aisle? In Silver Bay. Why aren't you in that baller penthouse loft of yours in Brooklyn?"
“I’m home for Christmas. I always come home for Christmas.”
"Yeah… but you aren't home. I was at Aunt Callie's and Uncle Devin's last night. Everyone was there. They threw their annual tree-trimming party. And NYC is five and a half hours away in good weather, eight hours in the post-storm conditions we've got happening right now. You expect me to believe you woke up at like… two in the morning to drive here? So you could come to TJ’s to make bedroom eyes at fake meat? Something you’ve never eaten a day in your life.”
Tenley is not my most annoying relative, but she's in the top three. Why? Because she's too smart for her own good. Also, I used to have to threaten to fight my teammates to keep them from trying to bang her when we were kids. People say she's good-looking. Stunning, hot, and beautiful are the most common words people use to describe her, actually (but she's my cousin, so gross). Another tick in her annoying column is she actively flirts with any guy in skates. But my biggest pet peeve with Ten is she's afraid of absolutely nothing, which makes her terrifying.
“Tenley…” I could lie to her but it’s no use. She’s got her eyes narrowed in on my face, scanning it for any twitch or flicker of deceit. Did I mention she’s minoring in criminology? Who minors in that, like it’s a hobby? “I got back last night, but I saw all the cars at Dad and Callie’s, and… I didn’t feel like peopling, so I stayed elsewhere.”
“Oh my God, you totally didn’t lie!” Tenley whoops, the bright smile of victory so wide on her face her dimples are showing. “I’m kind of impressed. But it means I don’t get to practice my more advanced interrogation techniques, which sucks. FYI, I knew you were in town. Saw your car hidden behind the barn late last night. I had to go out there with snowshoes to double-check the plates because the snow was like four feet deep and I thought I might get swallowed up by it, but yeah. I knew."
“You are a special kind of crazy, Ten.”
She shrugs, neither confirming nor denying my accusation. "So why does your family's unwavering support annoy you?"
“Well, when you put it that way I sound like an asshole,” I mutter and sigh.
She smiles. “Nah. I get it. We’re a lot. And I know you’re having a rough season and half the family will probably shower you with unsolicited hockey advice. All the ones with testicles for sure.”
“Yes. Exactly.” It’s a win that Tenley doesn’t realize the Brooklyn Barons still have a game to play before the holiday break. If she followed my team, her Unsolved Mysteries brain would be in overdrive.
Instead, she latches onto something else as a smile spreads across her wide mouth that she inherited from her dad, just like her light hair. "So…you’re with Mac?”
“I’m not with Mac,” I counter quickly, absentmindedly reaching up and rubbing the spot on my forehead where there’s still a little cut, now all scabbed up. Tenley’s eyes follow my hand, but she likely thinks it’s a hockey incident and I don’t explain otherwise. “I didn’t know she was living there. I figured it was empty. And I knew the keys were hidden under the garden gnome.”
Tenley and my cousin Harlow do pottery in their spare time and Tenley likes to make lawn ornaments. There are fourteen gnomes, fairies, rabbits, and other ceramic wild things peppered about the yard at her place. “His name is Sir Geoffrey Gnomeo,” Tenley informs me.
“You are so fucking weird.”
She slaps my arm at the insult, then wiggles her eyebrows. “There’s only one bed in that apartment at the moment.”
“Get your mind out of the gutter,” I demand. “My team is dead last in the entire league and you think I’m out here trying to hook up with a woman I haven’t seen in… like a decade?”
“It’s a possibility. As for your team, it’s only temporary, Con. You’ll have them back on top soon, I know it,” Tenley says, and she’s completely sincere. She gives me a small smile. “You’re a Garrison. You don’t fail.”
If only she knew what she was talking about.
“The whole pep talk thing is exactly why I’m avoiding family, remember?” I turn back to the vegetarian foods to avoid making eye contact. She’s creepily good at reading expressions and I don’t want her to realize there’s more to my melancholy than a losing streak. I don’t want to tell her I’m about to lose my whole career.
“You should talk to Mac about hating pep talks,” Tenley suggests and moves to stand beside me again in front of the cooler full of fake meat. “She’s about to be a full-fledged psychiatrist. She can figure out why your brain rejects support.”
“Psychiatrist. Right." I suddenly remember Mac mentioning that. If Mac psychoanalyzed me last night, did she figure out why I'm suddenly unable to be good at the only thing I've ever been good at? Should I ask her? Do I want to know?
Tenley reaches out and grabs a package of meatless breakfast sausage off the shelf, and also the fake bacon. She puts it all in my basket.
“She’s the vegetarian, not you,” Tenley says, smiling. "And I think it's cute that you're trying to impress her with breakfast.”
"Not impress her, just thank her for letting me sleep there." Tenley's eyebrows raise. "On the blow-up mattress on the floor in the second bedroom."
Tenley nods slowly, but it’s a nod that basically screams a sarcastic suuure. Before I can tell her to stop it though, she switches gears again. “Also, for the record, you’re not the only one going through a tough time. Mac just went through a nuclear-level nasty-ass breakup with a real cockwobble. She deserves a nice breakfast from a dude some women might say is okay to look at.”
“Just okay? Yeah right.” I snark at her pseudo-compliment. “Mac just broke up with someone? Who?”
Mac didn’t mention it. Then again an about-to-be psychiatrist probably knows better than to spill her guts to some random hockey dude six years younger than her, who she hasn’t seen in almost a decade, and who breaks into her apartment, flashes her, and pitches a bit of a fit.
Tenley’s full mouth squishes up like she swallowed lemon juice. “Well, the breakup was almost six months ago now, but she had been with him for years. I refuse to tell you his name. It doesn’t deserve to be on my lips. Anyway, it was the kind of bad break that lingers, you know? So treat her to breakfast… and maybe even a little of something else… if you’re so inclined.”
Tenley wiggles her eyebrows at me and then she gives me a big, pervy wink. I think I might puke. “Stop doing that! And also did you not just hear me say I do not need some kind of complicated romantic thing right now?”
“Who said complicated? Fucking is super simple if you want it to be, Con. And a little mutual orgasm might do you both some good. You do know how to make a girl come, right? Don’t tell me you’re one of those hockey jocks that doesn’t have the intelligence or inclination to learn where a clit is or what to do with it.” She sighs like she has first-hand experience with those types of jocks and I shudder at the thought, and this entire conversation.
“Leave. Walk away. Stop talking and pretend you never saw me,” I mutter, my eyes closed because I can’t even look at her after that TMI outburst.
She pats my shoulder and I hear footsteps so I peek and find Tenley trotting down the aisle toward the sourdough section. Over her shoulder, she adds, "Don't worry. I won't tell anyone I saw you. But you know Auntie Callie and Uncle Dev will be devastated if you hide your way through Christmas. We all love ya, Con, you big dummy. Now go slip Mac some sausage and I'll see you Christmas Eve."
It’s ridiculous that Tenley thinks random sex is what I need right now. It’s not. But she’s got me thinking about Mac a little bit more. Mac mentioned last night she didn’t have a lot of her things. She said she left her last place quickly…
I’ve never told a soul, but I used to have the biggest crush on Mac. I didn’t see her much growing up, but every summer my dad and uncles would get together with their friends from the league. Their buddies would come to Silver Bay and spend three or four days on the lake with us. When they started settling down, their families would come too. I was the oldest kid in the group until Alex Larue married Brie Bennett and they adopted Mackenzie, aka Mac.
She showed up the summer I was eight. She was quiet and wore indifference like it was a suit of armor. She barely spoke to anyone other than Alex and Brie. She'd watch everyone and everything with hard but beautiful blue eyes. I never spoke a word to her because I was an eight-year-old boy who couldn't fathom how to talk to the first girl to make me think of girls in that light.
Eventually, with each summer that passed, she grew more and more at home in her life and the annual summer vacation to Silver Bay. She started participating in stuff, like water skiing and volleyball. She'd go out on the row boats in the middle of the lake with just us kids, or go with us for post-dinner, parentless walks to town to get ice cream cones. We'd talk and make jokes with each other. We were never what I would consider close, partly due to our age gap and also because I just found her intimidating. Every girl I'd ever met was impressed by me because of hockey, even ones older than me. When I was thirteen I once had a sixteen-year-old slip me her number. But Mac clearly didn't get impressed by my hockey skills, even when I mentioned how many trophies I'd won that previous season. And she always looked at me like I was a kid. Even worse, she made me feel like one. I was too insecure and immature to understand what to do with that. And when our age difference became less of a challenge, when I was eighteen and she was twenty-four, I felt like a timid kid around her. Getting over that would have been a challenge. Other girls my age from Silver Bay didn’t take work. So Mac disappeared from my life without ever knowing about my crush.
Now, instead of being a guy who’s too lazy to take on a challenge, I'm a guy whose entire career has turned into a challenge. So I better stop worrying and thinking about Mac Larue and this mysterious ex-from-hell. I have my own personal drama to attend to and even if Mac is still gorgeous, more gorgeous than ever, I need to focus on hockey.