He waves a hand, like he’s swatting the whole thing away. “Nah, that was like three years ago. I’m fucking sick of that. Quit using it as an excuse not to find happiness. You’re not fucking up just your life, Bohdan. It’s hers, too.”
“Maybe I don’t deserve happiness.” I tug on the ends of my hair. I don’t, not for the way I treated her and the person I became. “Maybe I don’t deserve her.”
Jay sighs. “No one, and I repeat no one, has ever loved someone the way you loved her.”
Jay’s only ever had one real love: hockey. He loves us, and he loves his dads, but it’s not the same and I don’t expect him to understand what it’s like to love someone and to watch them be torn apart at your hands.
I shake my head. “I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again, and that’ll be the last time. Neither of you lived in that house. You sure as shit didn’t live in my brain. I was not good to her. I couldn’t take care of her. I couldn’t take care of myself.”
The lines of Talon’s face change when he shakes his head, all contempt. “My sister said she found your name by the wordmasochist, but I’d bet my last endorsement deal you’d find it beside the wordmartyr, too.”
In a weird turn of events, Jay takes the final shot, and it’s a stupidly simple way of putting it, but I’m not sure it matters, the damage is done.
He’s got this weird air of maddening patience about him, and he claps my shoulder. “What would you say to Sloan if she told you she felt like she was an unfit partner because her brain worked a bit differently from everyone else’s?”
I don’t say anything, and he widens his eyes, angling his head forward in wait.
“That I wouldn’t want her to have a different brain. That it’s what makes her exactly the way I love her.”
I’m sure it’s what she would have said to me, if I’d ever given her the chance.
Talon taps the centre of my forehead. “You’ve got a different brain now. But it’s still yours, at the end of the day.”
Pulling back—he’s going to give me another migraine if he keeps tapping like that—I mutter, “Jesus, maybe you really should think about that talk show.”
“It’s the retirement, I’m telling you.” Talon smiles, running a hand through sweat-damp hair. “Maybe some of it can rub off on you.”
“Uh—are you guys almost done?”
We glance over to the boards. Enrique’s hanging over them before he points towards the end of the rink where another attendant waits with a small ice resurfacer. “The performers need to warm up for the show tonight and you carved up their ice.”
“Fuck yeah, we did.” Talon claps both of our shoulders. “Let’s go grab a drink, it’s disco night.”
“I actually have just the outfit.” Jay smiles when he skates off, dropping to the bench to undo his laces.
“I’ll bet you do.” Talon’s eyes find the chain hanging around Jay’s neck before he glances at me, a bit of remorse living in the sad bend of his smile. “We okay?”
I tug on my laces, look at him, and nod. “Yeah, we’re okay.”
And we are—okay. I’d categorize the time skating with my best friends, something I never thought I’d have again, the same way I do almost everything related to hockey, skating, and Sloan now.
Maybe that’s just my life now.
Wonderful, but fucking painful.
Sloan
Then - Seattle
It’s cruel how quickly a home can become just a house.
How one of your favourite things about it can become this suffocating thing that traps you.
I used to love the big floor-to-ceiling windows in our apartment.
I loved the view of the Sound, of the pier, of the mountains stretching in the distance.
I loved the way our love made the whole apartment feel.
