Page 46 of Trick Play

“Then why did you think it would be different here? You were on two teams then, traveling and the school. How would it be any harder?”

He shrugged, and I wanted to shake him.

“Why didn’t you talk to me?”

There was a long moment of silence before he straightened. “Because I knew you could convince me we would make it work. You would make me see how we could stay together, and I didn’t want that.”

There it was. Finally. The truth.

“You didn’t want me?”

His eyes widened. “No. Kenny, no. Never. I wanted you more than anything.”

“Not your career.”

He rubbed his face again, his frustration coming through. “I didn’t want you to sacrifice anything. I didn’t want you to resent me. I didn’t want you to quietly fall out of love with me because I wasn’t around. I only ever wanted you to be happy. I wanted you to have everything and more, and I knew, I just knew, I couldn’t give that to you. Not until I was done. Not until I made it and was drafted.”

“You’re an idiot. A selfish, stupid, pushover. A coward with the most punchable face I’ve ever seen.”

And there was Lo’s contribution to the conversation. It was surprising she’d lasted that long.

“Lauren,” I said quietly, “Can you give us a second?”

She glared at Ethan as she stood and went down the hall to her room.

“She’s not wrong,” I said.

“No, she’s not,” he admitted.

“You gave up on us.” I waited for him to argue, but he didn’t. “Why?”

His eyes flickered to the carpet before trailing up my body and meeting mine. “I was scared. Terrified, actually.”

“Of what?”

This felt like the first time we were getting somewhere. Not yelling or fighting or storming off. This was a conversation three years in the making. I’d been waiting so long for these answers, and I refused to let anything get in the way this time.

He stood and came to sit next to me, where Lo had been. He didn’t look at me as he spoke. “After graduation, I swear each person that came up to congratulate me said something about how the next step wasn’t college or making it to the NHL. No, it was you and me. It was us getting married. Your parents. My parents. Teachers, neighbors, your priest. Every single person. They could see so clearly something that seemed like a very distant dream. Something that may happen eventually, but years and years from then. We were eighteen and had our entire futures in front of us. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to marry you one day, but I didn’t want either of us defined by that. You had bigger goals than being my wife, and everyone knew what my one dream was. Marriage was supposed to be something that came somewhere along the road, after. After we graduated, after I made it, after you started your big, fancy art career.”

He rubbed at his knuckles in his lap.

“Suddenly, the world felt too small. There was all this pressure. I felt like everyone was watching me, waiting for me to propose. It felt like that was all anyone cared about. They wanted the high school sweethearts to make it. I wasn’t opposed to marrying you, but I didn’t see it happening for years. Then, right before we left for college, I found out about my dad’s affairs.”

I gasped. He’d never told me.

He continued, “My parents didn’t know I was home, and I heard them fighting. Dad was getting mad at Mom because the doctor called saying he couldn’t refill her prescriptions again so soon. Dad figured out she was abusing her pain medication, and she blamed him. Said she wouldn’t have to numb herself if she wasn’t hurting so much. He said it wasn’t his fault, and that’s when she screamed that she knew. She knew about the other women. Dozens, and several of them were from their circle. Their country club. Women she had to smile at and pretend around.”

I couldn’t imagine what his poor mother had gone through. But they were still married. “Why are they still together?”

“Image. It’s the only thing that matters to either of them. They pretend to be the perfect couple with the perfect family. Haley doesn't even know. It was partially why they wanted to send her here. They offered to let her go home after what happened last year, but with several rules. So many that they knew she wouldn’t want to go back. They forced her to come here to keep up appearances. They didn’t want anyone to ask why she was home, but they also didn’t want her to find out what was happening between them.”

My gut twisted. I didn’t have all the information about what happened to Haley, but I knew she’d needed her parents back then. If she had been desperate enough to come to Ethan, who she swore she would never be linked to again, then it was bad. How could her parents do that to her?

“That’s terrible.”

He turned and faced me. “And I didn’t want that to be our future. I didn’t want to drag you down with me. Sixty to eighty percent of marriages with professional athletes end in divorce. I couldn’t doom you to that same fate, or worse, my mother’s—being trapped in a loveless marriage either because we don’t want to hurt each other or because one of us felt stuck.”

This was where I was supposed to argue that those people weren’t us, but he knew that. I could see the argument he’d had with himself in the storm in his eyes.