I’m certainly not thinking when I take those same fingers and press them against my eyes, groaning in frustration and leaning back in the chair I sat in for two hours this morning while someone flipped the waves of my hair to the left, and then to the right, tugging on them so they curled over my ears just so.
The oil doesn’t fix whatever the fuck is going on in my head—but it does come off my fingertips and somehow get all over my eyeballs.
By the way it burns, I’m guessing it’s the peppermint.
“Kurva.”Fuck.
“That doesn’t sound good.”
I blink, eyes still stinging, the figure leaning in the doorway recognizable because he’s the only asshole who could get away with wearing a brown suit and still be taken seriously when he’s commenting on plays during the biggest hockey games of the week.
That happens when you’re AJ Stone and you have a perfectly respectable, perfectly long career with two Stanley Cups, and no one’s seen you splayed out on the ice before they have to cut to commercial because everyone thinks you might be dead.
I squint, shrugging. “It’s not.”
AJ tips his chin towards my fingers, back digging in at my right temple. “You alright?”
I nod, pressing my fingers down again before running them through my hair, trying to flatten it. Like a wave might rest on top of the scar in the exact trajectory it snakes across my skin and hide it from him, even though I know he knows it’s there.
Everyone in North America who watches professional hockey knows it’s there.
“Lights bugging you?” he tries again.
“Nah.” I give a noncommittal jerk of my chin and stand, grabbing my suit jacket from the back of the makeup chair. “No sleep last night.”
I’ve already lost the only two things I loved because of this. The last thing I need is for everyone in broadcasting to know I can’t hack it under bright lights, and I’ll lose the last thing I have a modicum of fondness for.
He nods, but there’s a flash of sympathy behind his eyes; they darken for a moment, like he doesn’t quite believe me.
He shouldn’t.
A crease scores between his brows, and he nods again, thoughtful. “You were great tonight. And those one-to-one segments did huge numbers.”
Before I can answer, he pulls a rolled-up magazine from the back pocket of his suit and points it at me, grinning. “Probably helps with numbers when you look like that.”
“Weren’t you just in a cologne commercial with not one, not two, but three unnecessary shirtless scenes?” I offer him a wry look, shrugging my suit jacket on before rolling my shoulders.
My specialist tells me I clench my jaw too much when a migraine starts—referred me to another psychiatrist because he said it seemed psychological—something about misplaced frustration. I never went, and he was probably right. You could flick a quarter off the muscles in my neck, and my traps always start to ache around hour three.
AJ smiles, pushes off the door, and hits the magazine against his abdomen. “Airbrushing. I’m thirty-seven now, Novotnak. Not fresh off the ice like you.”
A brow lifts. “Sounds like a washboard to me.”
He crosses the room with this easy grace—one hand still tucked into the pants of his suit, the other wrapped around the magazine—and it’s not because of the general superiority of whatever makes up the muscles of a generational athlete, it’s the type of ease you see in someone content.
Happy with life and their lot in it.
Tossing the magazine onto the desk in front of us, he tips his chin. “One of the techs dug this up.”
I don’t have to look to know what it is.
But I do anyway.
I even reach forward and pick it up—like I don’t have a copy in a frame stashed in the back of a closet somewhere at home. Like it isn’t framed in my parents’ sad, abandoned shrine to me that’s just a closed-off room now. Like a copy doesn’t sit somewhere in my grandparents’ place in Brno, even though they can’t read it.
Like she didn’t make me a collage of the thing when she was nineteen and I was twenty-one.
There I am.
