Lena couldn’t breathe. She could sense her lungs trying to work as they normally did, but they had nothing to work with. Every major organ in her body had frozen over when Keane stood up. She hadn’t registered him at first. But when she did, he became all she could see. For seconds…minutes…eternities on end.
“Mom…mom….”
Somebody was calling her name. Somebody important. Even more important than Keane.
She raised her eyes to the son she’d chosen over her previously easy marriage to Rohan. Without thinking twice.
And in that eternity moment she chose him again.
Blinking, she wrenched her attention from Keane to the son who meant more than anything to her. “Max,” she said, using all of her fierce love to shore up the voice box that had collapsed at her first face-to-face sighting of Keane in over ten years. “C’mon. Let’s go.”
“But, Mom—”
“Let’s go now, Max. Right now.”
“But, I wanted to ask you if I could—”
“No, buts, Max. You’ve broken several rules and have violated my trust. If I have to tell you to come again, not only will there be consequences for your actions, but the automatic answer to whatever you want to ask me will be no.”
Luckily, this wasn’t their first battle. Calling Max headstrong was like the ocean waves calling the moon a little tuggy. That was just one of the reasons his and Rohan’s relationship fell apart. She’d learn early into his childhood to set consequence examples that ensured he understood until he was eighteen she had the ultimate say when it came to coming and going.
Without another word, Max sullenly shouldered his backpack, which she could only assume had a pair of skates inside, not just the lunch she’d packed him this morning.
“Bye,” he mumbled to the ghost from her past, then joined her at the bottom of the steps.
She could tell from the hunch in his shoulders that he’d like nothing more than to argue with her. But whole child centered as Lena tried to be, old coding died hard. And Max knew pulling her into embarrassing public scenes trophied at number one on her parental Don’t Ever List.
“Is that public enough for you?”
Keane had asked her that after coming to her internship and humbling himself in front of a crowd, then kissing all the doubts out of her, when she agreed to give him a chance. Kissing in public had been #4 on her shake it off list. GIVE KEANE A CHANCE, number 10.
But he had written that one in himself. She’d thought that write-in gesture so romantic as the former school bully kissed her nerdy self in public, like he no longer cared who knew he liked her. But in reality, it had been the first step in a ruinous journey.
She’d learned her lesson about playing with Keane. He was fire disguised as a human being, and the last thing she should do was touch it. Or let her son anywhere near it.
So she shuttled Max out of the hockey center, doing what she should have done eleven years ago when Keane unexpectedly re-appeared in her life after the disastrous end to their Spring Break hook up. Run. Run as fast as she could to get away from him.
And this time, she refused to look back. She kept her eyes on Max, her son, the only person who mattered. But Keane’s eyes burned into her back as they left. She was in Boston now, but his green gaze enflamed her skin just the same as stepping out into LA’s scorching hot sun.
“Slow Down, Lena, slow down…explain to me why you need me to look up hockey programs again?”
Lena didn’t blame Vihaan for sounding alarmed with a big scoop of worry on top. He hadn’t been required to calm Lena down since their senior year of high school. And how crazy that both meltdowns had been inspired by the same boy.
“Max snuck off to this hockey camp today after I dropped him off at the Better Boys’ day camp.”
Lena cursed herself again for being in such a rush to get back to the Sisyphean task of helping her father box up the EasyStop store this morning. Trusting her son, she’d simply dropped him off curbside and told him to let Nancy know she’d take care of signing him in and out when she picked him up.
“And now he’s upstairs sobbing because I told him he couldn’t go back.”
Vihaan let out a snort on the other side of the phone. “You’re much better than my mom. She would have done more than tell me I couldn’t go back. I wouldn’t have been able to sit for days!”
“Yes, well. Your mom did the best she could with the limited resources she had. And I probably should have guessed that ripping Max from both his therapist and his hockey team in California and putting him in the Better Boys’ day camp here might backfire. I was trying to solve two problems with one program, and hindsight being 20/20, that was probably unrealistic of me.”
This very mature observation only earned another derisive snort from her longtime friend. “Okay, Lena. Somehow make your son stealing your credit card and running off to some hockey program he didn’t tell you about is your fault. I can almost understand that logic. But if you’re feeling so guilty about making him give up summer hockey, why can’t he just stay at the program he found?”
“Because it’s at the Keane Hockey Academy.”
“Oh, shit!” Vihaan said before exploding into laughter.
“It’s not funny.”
“No, it isn’t,” Vihaan agreed, still laughing. “How are they actually letting that mean bitch teach children?”
“And that best friend of his from high school was there, too. He was like wearing a polo, so I think that makes him the head coach.”
“Oh my God, it’s like all those high school nightmares I have whenever I’m stressed out about a deadline came true. Did Con also make you take a math test you forgot to study for?”
Despite herself, Lena laughed at Vihaan’s question. “No, but you’re right. This is a nightmare.” For more reasons than even her best friend from high school understood. “Can you please just look into this for me. Max keeps on talking about them having this great summer travel team, and I have to find something equivalent—with what money, I’m not sure. But whatever, I need to do this for him, and I don’t know Boston as well as you do these days.”
“Well, I was planning to spend my Monday, dusting the many cobwebs that have accumulated on the Last Jewish Mistake side of my bed, but since you called…”
“Thank you, Vi,” she said, tamping down the urge to remind him that alone time after the break-up of a long-term relationship was allowed and sometimes even needed.
She should know. Rohan and she had separated over two years ago and she’d only been on a couple of dates since the divorce had been finalized in December.
“Seriously, Lena, no problem,” he answered, his tone magnanimous. But then he said, “Please tell me Con has a beer belly now and one of those ugly comb-overs.”
Lena bit her lip, trying to remember. The truth was, she’d only squinted at Con a little, trying to figure out where she knew him from before the Keane bomb went off. “He was wearing a hat, so I didn’t see his hair. And I don’t remember a beer belly…”
Vihaan let out a frustrated sound. “Ugh, that coach look is so hot without the beer belly. It’s not fair that the guy who called me a fag every day for two years still gets to be cute….”
Her friend probably had a lot more to say on the subject, but she had to cut him off when the doorbell rang.
“Sorry, the pizza I ordered just got here. I have to go, but I’ll call you back later.”
She got off the phone and rushed to the door, grateful that reinforcements had arrived. She was starving, and talking to Max about switching camps would go a lot easier after they both had some food in their bellies—
That gratitude died an instant, painful death when she saw who was at the door.
“Keane,” she said, her heart dropping into her stomach. “What are you…what are you doing here?”
People don’t grow past the age of twenty-one, do they? Somehow Keane looked like he added more inches since she saw him ten years ago. He loomed over her, his ice green eyes burning, his entire body radiating strength and energy even though he stood utterly still.
In fact, nothing but his lips moved as he answered her question with, “Is he mine? Tell me the truth. Is that kid my goddamn son?”