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“Do what?”
“Be charming all the time,” she says, seeing through me.
Fucking hell.
I should have known she’d be able to. Her radar’s maddeningly good. “My older brother, Daniel, had cystic fibrosis,” I say, and even though it’s been a decade, even though I’ve been to grief counseling, I still miss him. “He died when he was twenty. He was sick a lot. We never expected him to even get that much time. But still, we wanted it. I wanted it all.”
“Of course you did.” She pauses but doesn’t look away or try to hide from whatever grief might be on my face. “What was Daniel like?”
Hearing her say his name does something funny to my chest. “He was funny and delightfully mean. But in a hilarious way. He loved to make me laugh with his nicknames for doctors. Doctor Prick. Doctor Knob,” I say, furrowing my brow. “I guess he mostly named doctors after penises. There was one named Doctor Ball Sack though.” Briar snort-laughs and I point at her. “You’re a snort-laugher?”
She swats my arm. “It was funny. That’s your fault.”
“Well, imagine if you had to see Doctor Ball Sack.”
“I’ll try not to imagine that,” she says.
I let out a relieved breath then go on, a touch more serious now. “He was in and out of hospitals when we were growing up. Some months, some years were better than others. Some were hard. For him,” I add quickly.
“Sure, for him. But for everyone,” she says, kindly.
I close my eyes as a kernel of guilt swirls in me. I open them and with a wince, I admit, “It’s selfish, though, to think that it was hard for me. What was hard, really? Being able to run? To play sports? To do anything I wanted?”
She squeezes my arm, her eyes brimming with sympathy. “I have to imagine it was hard to be able to do that when he couldn’t? To be able to do anything, physically, you wanted?”
Yes. Fucking yes. She gets it without me having to overexplain it. But still, she deserves an answer. I wasn’t the only one who put the pressure on me. My mum and dad did. They never let me forget that I was the lucky one. “My parents always reminded me that it was a gift to be able to walk. To run. To skate. I never want to squander it. I don’t ever want to lose it,” I say with an intensity, but a fear I’ve never been able to shake either underlining my words. Especially with that ankle sprain last season. That only intensified my…tension.
“That drives you on. That’s why hockey is precious to you?”
“Every day. Every practice. Every game,” I say, and her reaction is an absolute relief. When I told Samantha about my brother, her response was, “Good thing it wasn’t you.” I was a daft idiot to stay with her. The biggest fucking knob.
“I get it,” Briar says, pulling me from my thoughts. “Your health feels like the gift your brother never had. You don’t want to squander the things that matter most.”
“Yes. Exactly,” I say, and maybe Gavin was right in his assessment yesterday morning. I needed a distraction but not simply to get laid. I needed to be able to unburden myself.
Briar opened up easily last night about her mother. She’s not someone I need to be afraid of sharing with so I don’t stop. “And now my agent is talking to the Foxes about my contract, and it’s winding me up. It’s just a lot to think about.”
“That is a lot,” Briar says. “Let me know if I can help. We’re friends, right?”
It’s an offering. A promise that what we agreed to last night—to stay friends on the other side—was real. Something we can stick to.
“We are,” I say.
“Good. And friends don’t let friends worry alone.”
I laugh. I’m not even sure why, but I do. Maybe because no one has ever said that to me before. Maybe because I only really let Amira and the guys know about my worries. Or maybe because she made it so damn easy to share.
I set a palm on her thigh, give it a squeeze. “Let’s get you to your tent. This is your chance too, right? You’re here to show people how brilliant Briar Delaney’s brand of flowing and flexing is.”
“So damn brilliant,” she reiterates, then I walk her the rest of the way.
We reach her tent on the festival grounds. “Thanks for walking me,” she says as she turns to face me. “I get it now. Why this is something a good boyfriend would do.”
“So’s this,” I say, then I brush the faintest kiss to her cheek. It’s chaste enough. A safe kiss.
But what’s happening inside my body and heart doesn’t feel safe.
I spend the next several hours at the obstacle course, demonstrating the rope climb, the tire run, and the water balloon dodge as I emcee the event with my closest mates.
