11. Aaron

11

AARON

I step onto the pristine, untouched ice and take a deep breath, ignoring the stomachache I currently have from demolishing way too much pie last night.

It’s 6am on Black Friday, and as I speed-skate circles around the rink to warm up, letting my body work on autopilot, I try to organize my thoughts.

The stupid cockroach debacle is still haunting me, but more than that, the questions around my captaincy. I know I can’t risk further pissing Lieberman off.

As stressed and under pressure as I’ve felt since being named captain, I still love hockey. I also love this team, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to stay in this role. Getting demoted is not an option.

So, the best thing I can do is to continue staying away from Brandi. It’s the only surefire way to avoid giving her any little morsel of a story that she can pass off to the media.

Which means that she cannot, in any circumstance, “win me” at the auction.

I have to throw it. Get someone else to bid on me—using my own money, of course—and keep on bidding until Brandi gives up.

It might not be a long-term solution, but it’s the only one I can think of. For now.

Extinguish one fire at a time.

With that conclusion, I finally feel somewhat at ease.

I skate until there’s sweat pouring down my face and my body feels loose and warm, as it always does after a good session on the ice. I make my way to the edge of the rink to grab my Gatorade and check my phone to see that there are twelve missed Facetime calls from my mom.

Normally, twelve missed calls from your mother would be alarming, but in my family, silence is the only thing worth worrying over. I once came back from an all-day training camp to twenty-one missed calls from Mom—turned out she'd run into the mother of my first girlfriend at the grocery store and was struggling to remember her name.

With a chuckle, I call her back, and within seconds, my mom’s and my nonna’s faces both fill the screen.

“Hi, baby!” Mom greets me. No matter how old—or successful—I get, I’m still baby to her. “Happy belated Thanksgiving.”

“Hey, Mom. Happy Thanksgiving to you, too. You look great.”

And she does. Smiling and happy and relaxed. I love to see it.

“Sorry I didn’t get a chance to call you yesterday. Your uncle Dino had a very unfortunate accident involving the crabs he was planning on cooking.”

“Is he okay?” I ask, picturing a pot of boiling water upending.

“His butt is out of commission for at least a week!” Nonna pipes up from behind my mother, her lined face pulled into a grimace.

“Excuse me?”

“Kylie and Sasha took one of the crabs from the bucket and put it on Dino’s chair,” Mom explains, chuckling. “Long story short, he did not see it.”

“The darn thing pinched him so hard, he ended up at the emergency room. Four stitches,” Nonna declares.

The mental image is so good, I have to laugh. “Sounds like an eventful Thanksgiving.”

“Assolutamente!” Nonna clucks her tongue. “Your uncle Sal decided that the crab deserved to live after putting up such a fight, so he made a detour on the way driving Dino to the hospital. He wanted to go to the docks to set it free in the ocean. He took my car, and there was such bad traffic on the highway that the detour took over an hour and Dino’s butt blood got all over my new upholstery!”

At this point, I’m shaking with laughter. “Man, I wish I’d been there,” I say as I wipe a tear from my eye.

I take a seat on the bench, feeling a pang of missing my family.

We’re a close-knit, rowdy bunch. Always have been.

When I lost my dad to a long battle with MS when I was nineteen years old, my uncles, aunts and cousins wasted no time stepping in and helping us through the dark days. Words cannot express how much that meant, especially as I was playing for Atlanta by then, living a thousand miles away from Mom and Nonna. I’m grateful to know that they have a solid support system back in New Jersey.

My dad was my hero, and I miss him like crazy to this day.

He ran a business with my uncles that had him working long hours, but he always made time for me and came to every game he could. My family made a lot of sacrifices for me growing up, letting my crazy hockey schedule pretty much dictate all of our plans.

I so badly wish that he could have lived to see me become captain of the Cyclones.

Makes me even more determined to make his memory proud.

“Did you do anything nice yesterday, honey?” Mom asks. “After the game, I mean. We watched it on TV while we cooked.”

“Just took it easy. Had some pie. The team is having dinner together later today at my place.”

For some reason, this makes me think of Olivia. The memory of the expression she made yesterday—the one when she realized she was being kept in the dark as to the change in her Thanksgiving dinner plans—was priceless .

I can’t help but wonder if she’ll turn up today.

A part of me really hopes so.

“Dinner?” Nonna peers past Mom with narrowed, scrutinizing eyes. She has the same eyes as me; my dad had them, too. And for the past, I don’t know, six to eight years, Nonna has been demanding that I give her a green-eyed great-grandbaby asap. “That reminds me. Have you been making my soup?”

“All the time,” I lie. Nonna’s Italian Wedding soup recipe is beyond delicious, but I don’t really have time in a day to cook.

Nonna sniffs, like she smells a rat. “You look skinny. Tired. Always so hard on yourself and never giving yourself a break. Are you stressed about hockey?”

“Nah,” I lie again. I don’t need to relay what went down yesterday with the media. They’ll just worry for no reason.

“Stressed about that girl?” Nonna throws out.

“I wouldn’t say stressed ,” I muse absently, my mind tumbling back to Olivia again and the hilarious look on her face yesterday. I wonder how Jake broke the news to her that she’d be having dinner with me tonight. Well, me and a bunch of other hockey players, but I have a feeling that Olivia only focused on the “dinner with her nemesis” aspect.

“Good.” My grandmother tsks. “Silly story, anyway. Nobody will believe such things about you.”

“Oh. That girl,” I say, the penny dropping that they have, indeed, heard about the mess with Brandi.

My mom’s eyes narrow. “Who did you think your grandmother was talking about?”

“Uh… nobody.”

“Well, are you bringing this ‘nobody’ home to meet us at Christmas?” she asks with a sly smile.

“No, Mom.” I shake my head. “It’ll just be me.”

“As per usual,” Nonna mumbles, which makes me laugh. Her lined face softens. “It’ll be good to see you, Nipotino. Christmas wouldn’t be the same without you.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I promise. I’ve returned home for the holidays every single year that I’ve lived in Atlanta. I know how much being together for Christmas means to my family, but I also want to be with them.

As I end the call, my thoughts return to a certain holiday dinner I will be enjoying later with another family of mine. Despite my lack of domestic experience, I can’t help but feel excited to host my teammates and the girl who lives to hate me.

It’s gonna be a good day.