My hockey number.
My eyes snap back up to hers.
“Abby, is this…”
She nods, her forehead wrinkled. She chews on her bottom lip, uncertainty set deep in those gorgeous ocean-colored eyes.
“Abby, when did you get this?”
My randomly assigned jersey number on the Orlando Storm was 86, but my number on my very first jersey in youth hockey and the number I carried through my college years was 33.
“I was… I was going to show you at Thanksgiving. But…”
We spent the whole summer after graduation together, her at my place, me at hers. We drove hours for day trips to the beach, and I helped her set up her first classroom when August rolled around. Before I went off to training camp in September, we’d made vague plans to see each other over Thanksgiving, whether that meant she would fly to me or me to her, whatever it was. We promised we’d never go more than three months without seeing each other in person.
We broke up after two months. Before Thanksgiving.
I trace the faded numbers on her ribs with the tip of a finger. “Tattoos are…permanent, Abby.”
“I thought I was going to marry you, Miles.”
I thought I was going to marry her, too.
“You could have gotten it covered,” I say.
“I thought about it. A million times.”
“And your ex? Surely he didn’t like that you had this. Your college boyfriend’s hockey number.”
“He didn’t know.”
“He didn’t know about the tattoo?”
“He didn’t know it was…for you. I told him it was my lucky number.”
“So he just thought you were insanely superstitious?” I ask.
She barks out a laugh at this. “I guess so,” she says.
That Abby never told her ex the real meaning of the tattoo is really fucking with me right now. I’m just trying to process that she has it at all. That’s she’s had a secret tattoo for a decade. A secret tattoo…for me.
“Hazel knows about it?”
“Hazel went with me to get it. She thought it was stupid, but supported me and never once said ‘I told you so’ after you broke up with me.”
“Do you regret getting it?” I ask.
Her smirk is paired with a small huff of laughter. “Sometimes. But the tattoo represents who I was at the time I got it. Plus, you were my first love, and even if I didn’t have that tattoo, you are marked on my life in a permanent way.”
They’re her words, but they land true for me too. Abby isn’t just a marker in my life, though; Abby is the standard. It doesn’t matter how many dates I went on over the last decade—I spent every one of them searching for her in every woman I met. No one measured up. No one compared.
There was no one who made me feel as safe or seen as Abby did, especially at a time in my life when no one felt safe and I didn’t want to be seen. Of course, Abby isn’t the same girl she was a decade ago. She’s more. More of everything she was then. More patient. More kind. More thoughtful. More beautiful.
And now here is she is, half-dressed and on my lap in a lighthouse in Cabo, looking at me like she’s waiting for something.
Maybe she’s waiting for me to say something, but I’m at a loss for words. I am not, however, at a loss for how to communicate everything I’m feeling right now.
I know exactly how to tell Abby how I’m feeling.
