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“Yes,” all of the Hartigans answered at once.
Blackburn gave them the snarly look that had earned him his reputation as an A-plus fucker-upper in the league. The three men didn’t even flinch. Frankie actually laughed.
“Good thing Astrid is an only child,” Blackburn grumbled, but he couldn’t hide his grin. “Not having brothers-in-law will make your life more enjoyable.”
As if that mattered. Joy wasn’t something he factored into living. Getting healthy? Yes. Finger-clawing his way back into hockey? Yes. Making his life the kind his parents had with inside jokes, kisses snuck in the kitchen, and holding hands on walks around the pond? Not on his radar.
Cal shot Blackburn his best change-the-subject glare. “That’s not something I need to worry about.”
“What? You two are just fucking.” Blackburn let out a loud laugh. “Really? That’s the bullshit you’re going with?”
It wasn’t bullshit. No strings, no love, no tomorrow was what Astrid wanted, and he was fine with that. He was a big boy. He’d known what he was getting into. That he’d started imagining what more would be like didn’t matter. For her, he was just a good time. That was all. And yeah, he’d fucking loved watching her face when she spotted a surprise Diet Coke on her desk. So what if he’d pulled an all-nighter getting the sketch just right? And the fact that during the tea party he’d snuck so many peeks at his phone to see if—against all odds—she’d texted that Freya had confiscated it and shoved it under the stuffed unicorn?
It didn’t matter.
None of it.
Yeah, he’d fallen for her, but he’d get over it. He didn’t have a fucking choice. Astrid had been clear on that.
“She told me to take the job,” Cal said, each word jabbing him in the chest on the way out of his mouth. “I think that makes our positions self-explanatory.”
“Guess it does,” Blackburn said. “Especially for someone who listened when the doctors said you might not walk again and the entire hockey world when they said they were done with you.”
That was different. Hockey was different. Hockey was all that mattered.
“Hey, Ford,” Blackburn hollered at the other man who had just waved goodbye to his daughter. “Did Gina tell you to fuck off before you finally got your shit together?”
“Not in those exact words,” Ford said, his cringe palpable, “but yeah.”
“How about Lucy, Frankie?” Blackburn asked.
“Yeah.” The giant turned several shades of red and shook his head. “I might have messed some shit up before I fixed it.”
Turning his smug I’ve-been-married-for-years-and-understand-women-perfectly expressing face toward Cal, he lifted both eyebrows as if expecting Cal to throw himself down on the deck and give thanks. When he didn’t, Blackburn sighed with disgust.
Call rolled his eyes at the former defenseman turned matchmaker. “Again, she told me to take the job.”
Blackburn let out a little “huh,” settled back in his chair, and stared out at the orange leaves covering the grass in the backyard. “Guess that’s what you should do, then.”
What the fuck? His heart revved up, his thigh started to ache like a bitch, and his breathing went from instinctual to him having to think, In and out. But that didn’t change the facts. He was not the one fucking up here. Flexing his free hand, he stared a hole in the shed tucked away in the corner of the yard and forced a deep breath into his lungs. He didn’t have anything to fix. Damn. Where had that heartburn blasting its way up his chest come from? The truth of it was that there was no there there when it came to him and Astrid. They weren’t a couple, and they never had been.
Fine. He’d thought about it once (a week and then a day and then an hour). But hockey was who he was. It was what he knew. It was why he was here in Harbor City renting the apartment above hers in the first place.
“Taking that job is the best option,” he managed to get out through clenched teeth. “What else am I going to do? Go back home and work with my sisters in the family business? Or am I supposed to follow your path, retire, and buy a bar? Yeah, I can fix a carburetor and I can pour a pint, but neither of those is what I’ve spent my life training to do.”
Blackburn shrugged. “Life doesn’t always go according to plan.”
“No shit,” Cal snapped, his voice loud enough that a squirrel dropped the nuts he was collecting and sprinted up the closest tree. “Is this deep thoughts with hockey’s reformed bad boy or are you really into self-help podcasts now?”
If he didn’t know better, Cal would think that was a sympathetic look in Blackburn’s eyes. It couldn’t be. Blackburn was the guy who’d stood at the end of the parallel bars during physical therapy and shit-talked Cal into making it all the way to the end. The man didn’t do soft, which was why they’d become friends in the first place. Friends told you the truth and called you out when you needed it. This was not one of those times. Cal was sure of it. He had to be. If he wasn’t, then he wasn’t just fucking up. He was ruining things forever.
“Nope. No podcast.” Blackburn tipped his beer toward Cal’s fingernails covered in cartoon characters. “That blue dog is a big hit at our house, too. Charley is obsessed.”
Despite it all, the image of the one-time most hated man in Harbor City sitting down to watch cartoons was too weird not to laugh. “So I’m getting life lessons from a cartoon?”
“Could be worse,” Blackburn said without shame or embarrassment. “You could be listening to Finn, who has worse luck with women than Jonesy did with incoming shots until you helped him pull his head out of his ass.”
The mood shifted, and Cal relaxed back in his chair, his heart rate calming and the urge to yell angry words at the sky like he was in some kind of overdramatic movie abating. The other man was trying to help. Cal got that. But what he didn’t know was that Cal didn’t want to leave Harbor City.
