Chapter 25

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Troy

Anna puts together a simple but tasty dinner of bowtie pasta topped with a thin garlicky sauce with sautéed mushrooms, bacon crumbles, and sliced cherry tomatoes with a salad and toast on the side. Despite the postage stamp footprint of her kitchen, we manage to work together to make the meal, me slicing the mushrooms while she got the pasta boiling, then sautéing the mushrooms and making the sauce while I cut up the tomatoes. She also pulls out a bagged salad mix, serving up a couple of handfuls of lettuce for each of us and getting a bottled vinaigrette dressing out of her fridge.

"This is my favorite dressing." She passes it to me, and I glance at it.

"Sounds perfect." I take advantage of the moment to bend and kiss her, intending for it to be little more than a quick peck. But she's so responsive that it turns into something more, and she grins up at me shyly when she turns away to finish plating our food. I'm smiling too. I have been since I got here. I can't help it. Being here with her makes me happy. I like this cozy domesticity, spending time with her in her space, seeing what she likes, how she moves, what makes her tick. She's tidy and orderly, everything planned out in a specific manner. She cleans up as we go and seems flustered when I insist on helping both with the cooking and the cleaning.

"Oh, you don't have to—" she starts to protest when I lightly hip-check her away from the sink and take the dirty dishes from her hands.

"But I want to," I tell her, and that melts her resistance.

She gives me a small smile and nods. "Okay." It's a whisper, and she moves just enough to give me space to work but doesn't entirely leave me to it. I'm not sure if she doesn't trust me to do it right—which is entirely possible and not unreasonable considering we've only known each other for a few days—or if she just wants to be near me.

I'm choosing to assume the latter.

She pops bread into the toaster while I finish cleaning up, then slathers each piece with a generous amount of butter. My mouth is watering as we carry our food to her little dining table.

"I always think it's funny that we eat bread with our pasta," she comments, holding up her piece of toast. "But it's yummy, so I do it anyway." She grins around a mouthful of bread.

Chuckling, I dig into my pasta, groaning at the explosion of flavors, the perfect combination of richness balanced with the tart acid of the tomatoes. "God, this is delicious."

She beams at my praise. "I'm glad you like it. And thank you for your help."

"My pleasure."

For some reason, that makes her cheeks color, and she ducks her head, avoiding my gaze and pushing her pasta around a little before loading up her fork and taking a bite. "So what did you do today?" she asks after a moment, and I grin, telling her about my morning playing with Shelby and Noah in the lake.

She laughs at my stories about the kids, and I love the flush on her cheeks, the way she takes delight in what I'm sharing with her, as though I'm fascinating, even if I know that I'm actually kind of boring. Oh, sure, everyone thinks playing professional hockey is the coolest—and I'm not gonna lie and say it isn't—but the day-to-day isn't nearly as exciting as it's romanticized to be in the minds of the uninitiated. So much of my life has been given to working out, drills, and studying plays. So much time spent on the inside of a bus or a plane, figuring out how to rest in cramped seats, what to do to keep from going crazy from boredom and the inability to move. That's the other part of being a professional athlete—sitting still isn't in our blood. Which is what made riding the injured list even harder. I wanted to move. To exercise. And while I could do some things, babying a hurt shoulder or knee sucks, and there's no way around that.

What's worse is that now that I don't have all of that in my life, I don't really know what to do with myself. This vacation is fun, and spending time with Nick and Tina and their kids gives me something to do for now—and now spending time with Anna too—but what happens when I'm back home? Nick and Tina'll be back into their own groove. Sure, I'll probably see them occasionally during the off-season, but once preseason starts? All my friends will be too busy to hang out with any regularity.

I'll be on my own.

That thought makes the delicious pasta I'm eating solidify into a lump in my stomach, and I clear my throat, needing to distract myself and think about something—anything—else. Because the only answer I have is a glimmer of an idea about working with teenagers somehow. Youth sports or something, but I have no idea where to even start with that. And besides, it's not like I can do it right now . I'm here with Anna, and that's what I want to focus on. "What about you?" I ask, turning Anna's original question back on her. "What did you do?"

Smiling, she rolls her eyes and shakes her head. "Nothing nearly as fun as you did. Spending a day splashing around in the water is way more interesting than my boring stories of managing the front desk of a dental office. I checked people in, scheduled appointments, and ran billing information. Same old, same old."

I shrug. "I think we all think the things we do every day are boring. But there must be something you enjoy about your job."

Her mouth moves from side to side, and she spears the last of her pasta on her fork, sliding it around in the bits of sauce left on her plate. "I mean, I do enjoy keeping things running smoothly. When I started a few years ago, things weren't very well organized. Or maybe they were for someone else's standards, but not for mine. There weren't many systems in place. Things were kind of haphazard, though it wasn't obvious until I dug into the job that there weren't codified workflows and logical places to find information. It was a challenge, but I've managed to create and refine all of the systems that keep the office running smoothly, which I know Dr. Banks appreciates. He has a hard time showing it, but he's made several comments over the years about how nice it is that he doesn't have to worry about any crises in the office because he knows I'll handle it before it ever gets to him."

"That sounds like high praise," I murmur.

She flashes a smile. "You have no idea. Dr. Banks isn't exactly free with compliments." She wrinkles her nose in that adorable way I love, tilting her head to one side and shifting her glasses with the back of the hand holding her fork. "Honestly, he's kind of a stuck-up asshole." When a guffaw bursts out of me, she claps a hand over her mouth, her face red. "I can't believe I said that out loud." The words are muffled behind her hand, but I hear them clearly.

Shaking my head, I reach for her hand. "You can say whatever you want to me. I promise I won't judge."

She lets me slide my fingers through hers, giving mine a squeeze as she takes her last bite and shakes her head. "I usually try not to talk badly about my boss."

I shrug. "This is a safe space. It's your house, after all. If you can't say whatever you want about your boss here, where can you?"

Tipping her head in my direction, she gives me a small smile. "I guess that's a good point."

"So tell me, how insufferable is he?"

Her cheeks pink, she shakes her head. "Not totally insufferable. At least, not all the time. Like I said, I keep things running pretty smoothly. As long as everything is going according to his taste, he doesn't have anything to say about it. He's only insufferable when his plans are disrupted, even if he knows about them. Christmas time is the worst." She rolls her eyes, her pink lips pulling into a wide grin that lets me know she finds her boss's antics amusing, like when Nick talks with indulgent affection about Noah throwing a tantrum that his granola bar broke in half and screams for his dad to glue it back together. Sure, it's annoying in the moment, but it's also funny as hell.

"I've told you about ChristmasFest." She waits for me to nod before continuing. "I mean, the man's lived here for most of his life, you'd think he'd be used to it by now. Between that and the influx of summer tourists, it's pretty rare for Arcadian Falls to be inhabited by only its residents. Tourists at least double our numbers, if not more, at the height of both seasons. I guess the summer doesn't bother him as much because the weather's nice, but with the snow and cold in the winter plus the out-of-towners, he's nearly unbearable. Which is extra funny, because it's not like tourism has a big effect on dental appointments. But there are more cancellations in the winter, too, what with colds and flus. And he hates cancellations, especially same-day ones. And there's not a thing I can do to prevent those, though he always acts like I should be able to do something about it." She holds her free hand palm up in a gesture of helplessness. "But what am I supposed to do? Sometimes I can call people who want or need to be seen as quickly as possible to come in for fillings or whatever, but it's not that big of a town. There aren't that many people on that kind of a waiting list, usually. I guess he wants me to go out and break someone's teeth just to give him something to do!"

I laugh at that. "Maybe we should start a hockey team here. That might get him more work. Between flying pucks, high sticking, and fights on the ice—not to mention falling —lots of hockey players need more dental work than average." There's that glimmer of an idea again.

Her eyes gleam at that suggestion. "There's an idea. Whaddaya think? A junior hockey team? Like for kids? We might need to cast a slightly wider net than just Arcadian Falls, but there are several other towns nearby. I'm not sure where they'd play, though." She chortles. "On the lake, maybe? The closest ice rink is over an hour away, I think."

I shrug, staring down at my plate and pushing my food around. It's uncanny how closely her words echo my own idea. A junior hockey league? Here? When I thought about it before, I always pictured it in the Seattle area. Or maybe back home in Wisconsin. My family's been suggesting I come back, so it seemed like a possibility. Plus, there are leagues there already. But starting up my own … "I mean, you could build an ice rink closer, surely."

She laughs again. "I mean, maybe you could. I certainly couldn't."

It's an off-the-cuff remark, and I know she doesn't mean anything, but it snags in the current of my thoughts, like threads of a uniform getting caught in a rough spot on the boards. I could build an ice rink. I know people who'd probably be willing to invest. Help me run a camp. Build on that to start a junior league. I could do that, couldn't I?

But she's still talking about her boss's hatred of things not going according to plan, and she's pivoted from ChristmasFest to last summer when that movie filmed here. Tucking away the thought, I refocus on her, laughing along.

"Oh man. His face the day he found out he'd have to show up to the cattle call for extras instead of being granted some kind of audition was hilarious. I thought he was going to blow a gasket. And what made it even worse was that Victoria, our old hygienist, got a job helping with costumes for the movie. He acted like he was fine with it at first, but when she really had to adjust her schedule for a few weeks, he was so pissed. He stomped around the office complaining about how people wouldn't have faith in our office anymore if we were flighty and closing early randomly during the summer all the time. Now mind you, this was a one-time thing. It's not like movie production companies come to Arcadian Falls to film all the time! And even if they did, what are the odds that Heather would take a job with them?"

I blink. "Wait. Who's Heather?"

She waves a hand, shaking her head. "Sorry. Heather's the hygienist now. She replaced Victoria."

"Wait. Did he fire Victoria? For having to adjust her schedule when he gave her permission to do it?"

She cackles, shaking her head. "Oh, god. No, no. Nothing like that." She plants her elbow on the table and points her finger at me, and god, it's so fun when she's like this, unfiltered and unselfconscious. My grin stretches wider. "He did threaten to a few times. Or well, not directly to Victoria. But when she was gone because she had to be on set, and he was stomping around and complaining, he'd toss out firing her, and I'd remind him that she'd asked about the adjusted schedule weeks prior and he'd agreed, that he couldn't fire her for believing him. He'd glare at me and stomp back to his office, muttering to himself. But no. Victoria started dating Hayden Maddox."

"Oh, right." I nod. "You mentioned that before."

"Right, so after the movie, she started getting more costuming work, and she also started designing gowns for movie stars like Aurora Cole. Victoria made her dress for the premiere of Julius Caesar . She showed me pictures of it as she was working on it. It was beautiful. Anyway. She's off in Hollywood designing clothes and costumes now. That's why we hired Heather."

"Ah, okay. I get it now."

She grins at me, then stands and starts to gather dishes. I stand and do the same, ignoring her protests that I'm a guest and she can do it.

In the opening to the kitchen, I stop and kiss her, both of our hands occupied by dishes. "I like doing things for you," I murmur. "I want to help."

That seems to mollify her, though it makes me wonder what her life was like growing up. Is this a relic of that? The guest comments make me think it plays a role. But I also wonder how much of it is expectations based on past relationships. Just how terrible was her ex?

My curiosity almost makes me ask as I rinse out my dishes, handing them off to Anna to load in the dishwasher—because she's apparently constitutionally incapable of just letting me clean up after dinner by myself—but I don't want to spoil the evening by dredging up painful stories from the past.

Once all the dinner dishes are cleaned up, I snag Anna's hand and pull her into my arms. "What should we do now?"