On the Surface (In the Zone) (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Erin regretted spilling the beans, but it was too late to take it back.

“You know about Waverly?”

Nodding, she said, “Tammy and I Googled you when we went to San Francisco.” Technically, Tammy had done the Googling, but having willingly participated, Erin felt she deserved equal blame. “I’m sorry. It felt like an invasion of privacy, but I did it anyway.”

He scoffed. “It’s an unusual day when my privacy is
not
invaded. Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you sure? I feel like such a jerk,” she said.

“Erin, I seriously don’t care that you Googled me.” He picked up his dishes and put them in the dishwasher. “I would have done the same thing if I were in your shoes. We have any frozen yogurt?”

She nodded. “There’s some strawberry shortcake in the freezer.”

“You want some?” he asked, opening the cupboard.

“Sure.”

He pulled off the cardboard top and started scooping. “So was there a lot about me and Waverly on the internet?”

“Not really. Just the bare bones. But I did find out about your daughter and what happened and I’m so sorry.”

He nodded. “Thanks. I guess I should be grateful I don’t have to bring it up now. I thought about telling you a couple of times, but it never seemed right.”

“I can see how that would be.”

“You should probably know the whole story.”

Erin had been curious about Tim’s romantic past ever since unearthing those gossipy tidbits with Tammy. Part of her wanted to know everything about his ex-wife. Erin sincerely hoped Waverly was a colossal bitch who only married him for his money, or got pregnant on purpose so she could milk him dry. That would be the ideal. But it was just as likely that they’d cared for each other. What if he still carried a torch for this Waverly woman? What if, someday, Waverly realized what an idiot she’d been for letting Tim go and came after him?

Suddenly, Erin felt stupid for having brought the subject up at all.

“You don’t have to,” she said.

“No, it’s better if it’s all out in the open.” He put the frozen-yogurt carton away and picked up the two bowls. “Let’s go into the living room. It’s a long story and we might as well be comfortable.”

They sat next to each other on the sofa. Erin tucked one leg underneath her. Tim sat diagonally with his back in the corner and ate a couple spoonfuls of frozen yogurt. Beyond the huge windows, the lights of the city sparkled cool blue, silver and arctic-white. Beyond that the waters of the bay shimmered with moonlight.

“When I was twenty, I was pretty stupid,” he began.

She ate some of the yogurt but didn’t taste much. She set it aside. “We’re all stupid when we’re that age.”

He gave her a look. “I was stupider than most. I was pretty reckless and full of myself too. Thought I was the shit when I got called up from college. It wasn’t long before I realized how wrong I was.” He chuckled humorlessly. “At the time I was going out with this society girl. An heiress, believe it or not. Waverly Evans. She was just as reckless and stupid as I was, so we were perfect for each other. Long story short, she got pregnant.”

Erin said nothing. So, the pregnancy was an oops and Tim didn’t marry her for love. Relatively good news, she guessed.

Tim let his head fall back against the couch and he stared at the ceiling. “We talked about abortion, but neither of us wanted to do that, so we got married. We liked each other well enough to try to make a go of it for the kid’s sake.”

He paused and still she said nothing, mostly because she had no idea what to say.

“We named her Mollie,” Tim finally said after a heavy sigh full of memories. “She was my world, the one thing that meant more to me than hockey. But then she got sick with leukemia. She was only five years old when she died.”

Tim seemed to contract, as if going into an emotional fetal position and Erin felt a sharp pain in her heart.

She spoke in a whisper. “Tim, I’m so, so sorry.”

He nodded, a strained jerky motion. His lips were drawn in a tight line as he set his bowl aside.

Erin’s eyes stung with tears. He’d obviously loved his daughter very much. She wanted to ask him questions about Mollie’s treatment, to make sure they’d done everything in their power to save him, but knowing Tim, he’d probably moved heaven and earth to get the best care for his daughter.

“Ah, fuck.” He put a hand to his face, covering his eyes. “I miss her so much.” His voice cracked and Erin saw he was weeping. “I keep thinking this’ll be the year it doesn’t hurt so bad. But I’m always wrong.”

Erin’s heart broke into tiny pieces.

She put her arms around him and murmured soothingly as he buried his face in her neck. She felt hot tears on her skin. She felt his body shake as he struggled with his emotions and memories. To lose a child had to be one of the most painful things a person had to live through. And Mollie had been so young. In her experience, the younger they were, the harder it was to see them suffer.

“And where’s Waverly now?” she asked when he seemed to get a hold of himself.

He took a deep breath and wiped his eyes with his T-shirt. “Still in Chicago, as far as I know. We don’t really keep in touch. After Mollie was gone, there really wasn’t any point in staying married. I think we both wanted to escape the memories. That’s one of the reasons I was glad when I got traded here.

“Most of the time, I’m okay, but sometimes it hits me like a fucking freight train.” She saw fresh tears slide down his cheeks. “I’ll see a little girl at the grocery store or in a restaurant, anywhere really, and it’ll be like I hit Play inside my head on a Mollie memory. I’ll remember her little dimple. She only had one. And how much I loved the sound of her laughing. And how I felt when she held my hand or looked up at me or rode on my shoulders...”

By now, tears slid down Erin’s face too as she imagined a little girl she’d never met, but loved anyway.

“I’m so sorry that happened,” she said again. As sharp as his pain was now, it had to have been a hundred times worse five years ago.

She kissed him, tasting salt on his lips. It wasn’t a conscious action. She just did it instinctively. Their mouths met again softly, and again a little longer in a communion of support and comfort. When he started taking her clothes off, she didn’t resist. He was in a stark, desolate place and needed her to soften the sharp edges of his grief and draw him back. She knew she could do that by sharing her body.

Tim removed his own clothes and then laid her gently down on the roomy couch. She raised her arms above her head as he moved to her breasts to capture a nipple in his mouth. He sucked on it with long exquisite pulls, licking and tonguing until she was breathless.

“I need you, Erin,” he said. “I need this.”

“I know. I’m here.”

After a brief pause while he rolled on protection, he sank into her with a low groan. His breath was hot against her neck. She hoped every stroke soothed his anguish. He’d hidden his tragedy so well she’d almost forgotten about it.

She ran her hands up and down his back as he thrust faster and with gathering force. She urged him on with her hips until he threw his head back and cried out, ground himself against her, slammed into her, every muscle taut and straining as he came.

In that moment, as he spent himself inside her trying to rid himself of both his grief and the frustration from tonight’s loss, she realized she loved him. She’d probably been in love with him for a while, but it wasn’t until just now that it hit her full force. He might appear to be an unshakable rock, strong and confident and invincible, but he wasn’t. Stuff got through his armor. Big things, like the death of his daughter, and little things, like failure to get a rebound. He needed her. And she needed him.

Love, in a nutshell.

* * *

When they went to bed, Erin nodded off almost immediately, but Tim lay awake. He should have been exhausted. He’d played hard, bared his soul, relived Mollie’s illness and death and had cathartic sex. But he didn’t want to sleep yet. He wanted to look at Erin for a while. Even in the darkness he could see the streaks the tears had left on her face. It touched him that she’d mourned Mollie even though they’d never met. He found himself wishing they had. They would have liked each other.

It was a relief to have everything out in the open. He’d been dreading telling her and now, thank God, he didn’t have to. Weird how that first night he’d been humiliated by having been sick in front of her. Looking back, that was nothing compared to emotionally stripping himself naked and breaking down like a goddamned infant. Where he might have felt embarrassed before, now he felt...closer, more connected to her, almost as if they’d walked through fire together and come through unharmed.

Still not sleepy, he carefully reached out to get the TV remote from the nightstand. With the volume on the lowest setting, he turned on the NHL Network, where unfortunately, they talked about him spending eight minutes in the penalty box, joking that he should have pitched a tent.

Erin shifted. He glanced over to see she was awake.

“Did the TV wake you?”

The screen flickered in the otherwise dark room and cast a blue light over her features as she shook her head.

She scooted closer and tucked herself under his arm. “I wish I could have been there tonight,” she said. “Maybe I could have brought you some better luck. More than my kiss does anyway.”

“Do you believe in luck?” he asked, muting the TV.

“I know you do,” she said. “You’re the most superstitious person I’ve ever met.”

“It’s part of hockey. It’s the culture. Probably ninety-nine percent of the guys have some type of ritual they perform on game days—”

“Come on, ninety-nine percent?” she blurted, clearly dubious.

“—but a lot of that is just habit. You know, you put your clothes on the same way every morning, brush your teeth the same way, etc. It just happens. But the stick-kissing thing...I’ll admit, it’s kind of irrational. But I can’t help it. I look at it like, it can’t hurt, right?”

“Sure it can. If you can’t complete your ritual and you allow that to affect your game...”

He opened his mouth to argue. Up until tonight, he’d never had a problem with a disturbance in his game-day routine that wreaked havoc with his performance. Never. Shit happened. For instance, if the restaurant he often went to for breakfast after the morning skate was out of Canadian bacon, he’d worry about it for a moment, order sausage instead, and go on with his day, usually forgetting about it, especially once he got on the ice. He preferred to stick to his routine, but didn’t fall apart if it got altered.

But as a Barracuda, he’d scored two hat tricks before the season had even started and elated, Coach Marchand had said to him and the trainers, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

So Tim found himself replacing the lace on his left skate because he’d done that before that first preseason game. He started wearing the same ice-blue tie and onyx cufflinks to the arena and regularly drank iced tea with one packet of Equal exactly two hours before the game started. But the most important part was Erin’s good-luck kiss. He felt that was critical. Having that little bit of her with him on the ice...he felt as if her positive energy traveled from the tape, up the composite shaft, through his gloves and straight to him. Unfortunately, he’d also trained himself to look at the lipstick print on his stick. Every glance was usually a reminder that Erin supported him but tonight, every glance reminded him that the kiss wasn’t there. Those small lapses in concentration had been enough to throw him off. If he’d been smart, he would have left an old one on, but he always peeled off the tape after the game.

“All right,” he said to Erin. “You got me there. I did let it affect my game, and I’m sure it looks stupid to someone who doesn’t play, but all the shit we do helps us focus, and it’s something we all share as a team. If a guy doesn’t have any superstitions, he respects those who do.” He chuckled. “Well, most of the time anyway. I know a player who likes to eat this weird sandwich that a buddy made for him once. It was something like turkey on wheat with mayo, mustard and a Hershey bar.”

“That sounds disgusting.”

“It is. I think it started out as a dare, but when this guy played a great game, boom, the superstition was born. From then on, Scott needed Vandermeer to make that sandwich and sometimes Vandy would mess with him and make himself scarce before the game. It was funny to see Scott running around asking everyone if they’d seen Vandy.”

“Let me ask you this,” she said. “Do you think Scott played better because of the sandwich?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. That’s something that can’t be proven. If it gives him a psychological boost, then I don’t see the problem. Some guys listen to music. Some guys meditate or visualize. We all have different ways of preparing.”

“But don’t you think that believing in that stuff undermines your confidence? I mean, you’re obviously a great player.”

Fucking ridiculous how hearing her say that made him feel like a hero.

But then she ruined it by saying, “It seems to me that if you were really confident in your abilities, you wouldn’t need to rely on crutches like my kissing your stick.”

“It’s not a crutch, damn it,” he said, his voice sounding a little loud. A small mean part of him reared its head.
If she’d been there to kiss your stick
,
your game-day routine would have gone the way it always does
,
and you’d have played better.
He told it to shut the fuck up. Erin had already dealt with two emotional breakdowns—his and Claire’s—and didn’t deserve the blame for his poor performance.

“Sorry,” he said in a softer voice. “I didn’t mean to yell. But I think you’re wrong. A crutch is something you use when you’re injured or deficient. What we do is more like insurance, something you wisely do just in case.”

She thought about that. “Okay, I’ll grant you the crutch argument, but the insurance point is just as weak. Just in case of what?”

He frowned. “Okay. Okay, but how about this? In your line of work placebos can help patients heal. Right? And how do they do that? They harness the power of the miiiiind,” he said in a quasi-mad scientist voice. “That’s exactly what we hockey players are doing.”