Jules – 11:22PM
Frankie…
Do you really want me to answer that?
Damn.
What shewantedwas to be anywhere but here but she couldn’t leave and she reluctantly lifted her gaze from her phone to take in the scene aroundher.
Maybe no one would even notice if she left? It wasn’t as if she’d spent the last hour and a half chatting with people about her work, and aside from a few short lipped conversations about what it meant to be a female in a male dominated industry after she’d arrived, she’d mostly kept to herself.
She should be grateful to be where she was right now, she knew she should. It was an honour to hold her position and something she was so proud of. The people who filled the small but grand ballroom, with its sparkling chandelier centrepiece and disco ball hanging above a raised stage, held her career in the palm of their hands.
Frankie – 11:24PM
Yes, but not like this.
Not when I'm stuck at a party I don't even want. to be at.
After a few minutes of consistent back and forth, Frankie couldn’t mask her disappointment when the conversation went flat, her last message left on read. She sighed and sipped her wine. Maybe Jules thought better of things, realizing she’d crossed a line she wasn’t ready to cross and didn't expect Frankie's willingness to cross it with her.
Or maybe this entire time, everything Frankie had been feeling was one sided. Maybe Jules was drinking and she didn’t know what she was saying under the haze of alcohol.
“Frankie, I’ve been looking for you,” a voice to the left of her said and her head snapped up from the text message she was staring at.
Do you really want me to answer that?
“Neil, hi,” Frankie said as the Halifax Harbour’s head coach and a short brunette woman approached her.
“I wanted to introduce you to my wife,” he said, looking at the woman beside him with a loving smile. “Frankie, this is Jennifer. Jennifer, this is Frankie.”
”So nice to meet you Frankie,” Jennifer said, holding out her hand.
Frankie locked her phone then slipped it back into her pocket to accept the handshake. “Likewise, Jennifer. I can’t believe you voluntarily choose to put up with this guy every day,” she joked, thumbing at Neil.
Neil and Jennifer laughed and she hooked her arm around her husband’s. “Luckily he leaves the work talk at the front door when he gets home. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy hockey, but I don’t eat, sleep, breathe it the way you both do.”
“Frankie here can still say she’s married to the game,” Neil said with a grin.
He’d asked her once during one of their first meetings as coaches if she had a partner or a spouse, someone she could go home to at the end of the day, someone to help take away the pressure of their jobs. At the time, she told him no. Maybe that was changing?
“I have the luxury of being married to this lovely woman right here.”
He pulled Jennifer closer against his body and when he glanced down at her, the look of love and adoration in his eyes and on his face was unmistakable, even in the darkened hotel ballroom.
“The game will always come and go but it’s the people you want to talk to when you step off the ice that matter the most.”
Frankie laughed a little and gave a half smile.
She wanted that, who wouldn’t? She was getting older and with her age and the isolating stresses of her job came a loneliness she hadn’t yet been able to explain to any of her past partners.
Now she was reaching a point in her life when she let herself into her empty condo at the end of a workday, when she rolled her suitcase through the door of a hotel room with no one to text sayingmade it safe and sound.She was beginning to hate how quiet it always was.
“I can only hope to be as lucky as you both are one day,” she said, knowing deep down that she truly meant it.
Just before midnight, her phone vibrated in her pocket. She hadn’t checked it since tucking it away to speak with Neil and Jennifer. She’d somehow been drawn into conversations about the current state of the women’s national hockey team with a man who had two daughters playing competitive youth hockey.
Hockey was a small world and he’d recognized Frankie’s name, knew her beyond the confines of her coaching career, was aware that she was once a top prospect in the country but injury had taken her chance of national team success away.
