When a Girl Likes a Boy

Ryan Miller is, arguably, the best goaltender in the NHL. The money he makes in one year is more than I will probably see in a lifetime, and the attention he gets from women is more than I can get from men in my wildest dreams.

I spent a majority of my childhood in the slums of New York until my widowed mother married a man who had the kind of money that could uproot us to a nice part of Buffalo for the remainder of my life thus far. Despite having, probably, the worst childhood imaginable, I can now accept the mantra everything happens for a reason, because if I hadn’t been living in the slums where crime rates were very high, my mother wouldn’t have met my stepfather, Detective Daniel Foxx, who had presumably knocked on our door during a raid five doors down in an effort to collect some information on the man that was evidently making meth in that apartment.

And if my stepfather hadn’t moved us to Buffalo, I never would have gone to Buffalo State and met Ella Smyth. If I hadn’t met Ella Smyth, I wouldn’t have ever met Ryan.

So I guess something good did come out of a meth dealer. Because if that lowlife hadn’t existed, my life would have been drastically different.
…
The Reason I Should Be With Him #1: He’s so good looking.

At the local Sporting Goods store, he sits in a plastic chair between Jason Pominville and Derek Roy, and in front of several rectangular white collapsible tables lined in front of all the players. On his face, masking the boredom is a smile that pushes back his cheeks but doesn’t reach his eyes. It isn’t genuine, and I can tell. I can tell in the way he continually runs his hands through his hair, and the way he can’t stay in the same position for more than five seconds.

But I’m not allowed to go and try to pull him out of it, because I am in no way affiliated with the Buffalo Sabres. So instead I have to settle for sitting off to the side of the guys, fiddling with my phone until everyone’s gotten their fill of their heroes.

I’m not even sure why I’m here – he told me to show up here at this time, and as I sit here, my presence isn’t even acknowledged by anyone. I’ve gotten a couple of wayward glances from the young teenage girls who’re trying to figure out who I’m with, since nothing I have on me screams I work for the Sabres.

One girl, with a short brown asymmetrical bob glares at me, and in shock I look over my shoulder to see if there’s someone making a crude gesture that would provoke that kind of reaction. Then I realize that I’m sitting close enough to the wall to lean back, so I’m the only person she could’ve been giving that look too.

A frown crosses my features as her attention is pulled away from me to Ryan. He looks at her with a faux smile, and then over to me since he noticed her glaring. For the first time since I’d arrived at the Sporting Goods store, Ryan’s smile reaches his eyes. Our connection only lasts for the briefest of seconds, but I can already tell by the way the genuine smile stays on his face as he signs the young girl’s poster that he’s glad I’m here. It warms my heart a little bit.

After he signs the poster, he immediately bounds up in an attempt to get away from the next fan. I feel kind of bad for the fan who – and this is complete speculation on my part – probably has his little heart broken, but I feel awkward and out of place sitting here.

The team’s PR person nearly rushes over to Ryan. Ryan puts his hand on her elbow and leans in to talk quietly in her ear. I have no idea what lie he’s feeding her, but when both their gazes travel to me, I have some inkling that his lie has to do with me. I give him a pointed glare, but don’t give any more indication how upset I am that he has just used me as a scapegoat for his responsibilities.

The middle-aged woman looks at the table indecisively, over to me, and then at Ryan before what I can only assume is a sigh of admission. Ryan smiles at her and weaves behind the other people to get to me.

I stand to greet him and immediately turn as he smoothly curls an arm around my shoulders and steers me away. He uses me as a crutch to get through the crowd without an issue, and as soon as I realize it, I purse my lips in distaste. As soon as we get outside, I pull myself out of his grasp and turn my pout on him. “You used me to get out of doing an autograph signing?”

Ryan seems completely unperturbed by my accusation as he gives me a one-shoulder shrug. It’s an insincere gesture that means he doesn’t believe anything he’s about to say. “I told Loretta I had to take you to your ultrasound appointment.”

I blanch at the thought of being pregnant. Obviously Ryan’s statement has shaken me more that it should have, because when I talk, my voice hits a squeaky peak. “I’m pregnant with your baby?”

“Ah!” Ryan says, and the genuine smile is back on his face. He takes a step towards me, into my space, and shoves his hands low into the pockets of his jeans. “Here’s the interesting part: it isn’t my baby.” He leans in as if he’s about to tell me a secret. I’m not thrown off by his proximity, though; he tends to invade me whenever he feels like it. “You’re cheating on me, you know.”

I gape in disgust at how much of a whore I was becoming in our fictitious relationship. Ryan straightens, a smirk marring his features, and takes a slow stride around me. “Why am I always the one who cheats? Why can’t you be the cheating bastard for once?”

Ryan looks over his shoulder at me. The look he gives me is magnetic to my feet, and I find myself following dutifully after him. “Because I’m Ryan Miller; I don’t cheat.”

I scoff as I finally catch up with him. His modesty is like trying to feed a zebra uncooked meat – you know something is off. “You know, it scares me that you can fake things so well. I almost believed you that time.”

By now we’ve reached his car. The passenger side is closer to us, so it’s where we stop. I go to open the door, but he puts his hand out to stop me. I stare at the door handle, trying to get my rapidly flaring temper under control. My gaze then lifts to his hand, above my head where he keeps the door closed at the top corner, and then to his face. His brown eyes stare right into mine. “There are some things I wouldn’t fake even if I could.”

My breath catches in my throat and I swallow rapidly to try and get rid of the lump. I look at him desperately, pleading with him silently to break eye contact first so I don’t appear weak. But he doesn’t take my hint because he keeps searching my face for something. “People who lie often make a lot of eye contact because they want to watch the other person accept the lie.” It’s a feeble, weak attempt at getting him to look away, but it works. Sighing loudly, Ryan releases the door and walks around the hood of the car.

I bite my lip and jump in his car. Please don’t let our entire afternoon be like this.
…
“Hey.” I look up from my platter of onion rings and fries at Ryan after he bumps my shoulder with his. He leans on his left arm and snatches a fry from the platter. He takes a bite of it and points out into the distance with the remaining piece. “What do you think of them?”

I scrunch my nose and look over to wear he had been pointing. Out of the corner of my eye I can still see him watching me, like I’m something he hasn’t seen in a while. “I think that blue and green should not be seen, together except for in a washing machine.”

I look back at him, completely serious. He’s sitting closer on the bench than I remember previously, but I know I’ve brought it on myself. Commenting on the girl’s choice of clothing coordination isn’t what Ryan had wanted me to say – he had wanted me to comment on something about them based on their body language.

But Ryan’s leaning in my personal space, and it’s distracting. I exhale softly, and focus my gaze at the table out of the corner of my eye. “He’s going to try and kiss her,” I mumble softly about the woman’s companion, “but she isn’t going to let him. Her shoulders are too rigid.”

Ryan hums his approval of my observation, and the distance between our faces closes. “So who do you think has a better shot?” His voice is low and gravely, but alluring and lulling me into a warm suffocation with his breath.

The air thickens between us, and I have to take an even deeper breath to keep from getting light-headed. The hair on the back of my neck stands. “Y-You,” I start out shakily. “Your shoulders are facing me, which makes me think I’m the focus of your attention.” He leans in. “Your shoulders are rounded and your back is hunched, which means you either find me endearing, or you’re trying to appeal to me as a female.” He tilts his head to the side slightly, and my mind just completely freezes up. His mouth is so close now that I can only keep my eyes closed to ingrain this feeling into my brain.

“Anything else?” he murmurs.

“And I really, really want you to.”

He closes the space between us in a nanosecond and presses his lips to mine. There’s a lump in my throat when we pull apart. We shouldn’t have done that; it’s not good for us. My heart thumps painfully in my chest, like there’s someone sitting on my chest and I strain for everything to get back to normal. But it doesn’t – for me anyway.

Ryan seems to have gotten what he wanted, so he goes back to eating my food. But I know he’s feeling some sort of connection to me, because his shoulders are still pointed in my direction.

“Ryan?”

He turns to me slowly, and I take him by the jaw and kiss him. The facial hair along his jaw is short and sharp against my fingers, but I don’t mind. It doesn’t take long for his hands to find my hips as I move my head to the side in order to comfortably press my lips closer to his. I move my mouth against his, and after a slow start, he matches my passion, kiss for kiss.

I pull away suddenly, surprised by my own boldness, and immediately push my face in his right shoulder. We shouldn’t have kissed the first time, and we sure as hell shouldn’t have just started making out. It’s a known fact that I harbour some serious feelings for the veteran goaltender, and kissing him doesn’t make it any easier to get over him. Because Ryan Miller isn’t the kind of guy a girl should have a crush on.

“Can we leave please?” I mutter into the fabric of his dress shirt.

His body heaves beneath me as he sighs, but all he does is stand up, pulling me by the hand. Like I knew he would, he drops my hand as soon as we’re standing. I watch calmly as he takes my platter up to the counter to get them to wrap it up so I can eat it later.

We should be dating – he knows my habits down to a science.

Out of pure boredom my eyes land on Ryan’s back as he stands at the counter. The girl behind the counter looks over at me, confusion written all over her face. Her gaze is pulled back to Ryan, as he leans forward on his elbows. It’s like a complete 360 for the young girl – she giggles, blushes, and shyly bites her lip. I narrow my eyes. “You have got to be kidding me!” I exclaim.

Apparently I still haven’t learned to use my inside voice, because both Ryan and the young girl look at me. The girl, surprised, and Ryan, a solid pointed look. Ryan turns back around, and the young girl’s giggling resumes.

“Honey,” I call in a sweet and fake falsetto, “your brother’s baby is kicking!” For added emphasis, I touch my stomach. There’s a woman sitting at the table two down from the one I’m standing near, and I smile politely. “It should have been his baby…” I pause and swing my gaze back over to Ryan in an exaggerated motion, “if he could satisfy me as a woman!” I call loudly.

I take note of how Ryan’s shoulders square off. His tense posture tells me he wasn’t expecting me to say what I had. And in a blur of swift movement you’d expect from a spectacular goaltender, Ryan was in front of me, thrusting my Styrofoam container of leftovers in my hands, and steering me away by the elbow.

I stroll happily beside Ryan out in the parking lot. “At least I can admit I’m cheating on you now,” I announce happily.

“Believe me!” He says right after. The tone of his voice implies he isn’t happy with me. But hey, he fakes things so well I’m not really sure how much of that is genuine. “If we were sleeping together you wouldn’t need my brother.”

I calmly jump into the passenger seat and wait until Ryan pulls himself into the driver’s side. “Why do guys have such a problem with jokes about sex? Other girls can tell when friends are joking around, you know. Studies show that women are more apt at reading social situations than men.”

His jaw tenses, but he stays silent. When he doesn’t say anything, I sigh and put my head against the window. Fine. The car rumbles to life after Ryan harshly sticks the keys in the ignition – I can hear the metal scraping against the ignition. I don’t have to be looking at him to know he’s still ticked off at what I said. We pull up to a red light, and after watching a squirrel bounce down the cement sidewalk, I pull my head up. Just as I turn to Ryan, I open my mouth to speak. “Look, Ryan –”

“It isn’t other women I’m worried about!” he exclaims as he slams his hands down on the steering wheel. When he turns to me, his eyes are narrowed and his eyebrows drawn tightly over his eyes. His forehead is pinched, and his jaw is tensing. “You could be everything to me, Lauren.” His eyes search mine, and his lip twitches slightly in contempt.

I raise my one eyebrow at him, and try to hide my pleasured smile. “Now that was genuine.”

The light turns green, and Ryan drives off without another word spoken. Maybe there are things that even he can’t fake.
…
Usually white bread toasted with seedless strawberry jam is like heaven on earth for me. But today, like yesterday, everything I try to eat tastes bitter, and my stomach feels like its two seconds away from upchucking all over my kitchen table.

I sigh. Ella seems completely unperturbed across the table from me as she eats a bowl of cereal and flips through a magazine at the same time. The guilt is eating away at my insides and I need to say something before I hurl.

“I slept with him, alright?”

With more calmness than I would’ve expected, Ella stops chewing and looks up at me from the magazine. When I say nothing else, she finishes chewing and swallows. “And?”

“And?” I repeat shrilly, “It’s Ryan! He’s –” I pause as I remember back to that day after we’d gone to the bowling alley and not bowled. I can still feel his warm and slick skin sliding against me, and the feeling of his dark hair in my fingers.

We shouldn’t have done it, and it made me feel sick. “It’s Ryan!” I repeat softly, feeling tears building at the corner of my eyes. “It was a mistake – he said I could be everything to him.” I look away from Ella and down at my table. A few of my tears slide down my nose and hit the tabletop. I had foolishly eaten up what he’d told me, and now I felt like one of those girls.

“I don’t know what you’re crying for,” Ella says.

“You don’t know why I’m crying?” I repeat, looking up at her in disbelief, “I’m in love with him and I just slept with him! How am I supposed to get over him when we have sex like that?”

Ella’s lip twitches like she’s trying to conceal her laughter. “You know, usually when people admit they love someone else, they aren’t crying like it’s the worst thing to ever happen to them.”

I scowl at her. Her eyebrows raise in response, and her forehead wrinkles. She’s testing me. “But it is the worst thing to ever happen to me! It’s Ryan Miller, for Pete’s sake! The man manipulates the situation around him to get what he wants! The other day, we went to a bowling alley and he hit on the girl behind the counter as she was packing up my food.”

“The bowling alley doesn’t pack up food.”

“W-What?” I ask, my startle evident in my blue eyes.

“The bowling alley doesn’t pack up food. He was probably hitting on her to get what he wanted for you.”

“That’s even worse!” I exclaim, throwing my hands up in the air. “Hitting on other women?”

“Other women? Lauren, the two of you aren’t dating. He’s free to hit on whomever he wants. Unless –”

I advert my eyes as she tries to study my face. It unnerves me, until she all of the sudden makes a victorious sound. “You’re already together in your head!”

I look up, my eyes wide. I open my mouth to protest, but I don’t even know where to begin.

“Exactly my point,” she says, and stands up from the table.

“Exactly my point,” I mumble childishly under my breath.

As she passes the big bay window of my apartment, she looks at me over her shoulder. “It really isn’t surprising how much he likes you – what with how mature you are all the time.”

I flare my nose at her in distaste, but don’t respond. She continues towards my kitchen, but then stops suddenly at the edge of the bay window. “Oh my God,” she says, and starts laughing uncontrollably.

Curious, I get up and move over to my window. I can’t see what Ella sees, so I go over to the sliding door to my balcony and go outside. I put my hands on the railing and lean over, and whom do I see?

Ryan, of course, standing outside and hitting on my perky next-door neighbour, Ali. What a little –

“Ryan Miller,” I cry forlornly, if not a bit dramatically, “you told me you loved me!” I grasp for something, and feel a plastic pot with a single white lily growing out of it. My niece had given it to me last week, and I’d put it out on my balcony to let it get some grade-A Buffalo air and sun.

I throw the plastic pot at Ryan and Ali. Ryan saw the movement just in time, and ducks out of the way. “What the fuck, Lauren.”

“I gave myself to you, Ryan Miller. Did you know I was a virgin? You took away my innocence and act like it was nothing! But it wasn’t nothing, Ryan – not to me! You broke me, Ryan Miller.”

Ali, bless her little naïve heart, looks like a deer caught in the headlights. She turns slightly away from my vision and hands something to Ryan before dashing off. I raise my eyebrow challengingly as I put my chin in the palm of my left hand. As soon as Ali’s out of earshot, I let a smile crawl across my face. I honestly don’t know what happens to me when he’s around. “Door’s open. Come on up.”

And with that, I straighten my back and turn to go back into my apartment. Before I can get in, however, I run into Ella who’s standing in front of the door with her arms crossed over her chest and a disapproving look on her face. “See, mature,” she deadpans.

I grin triumphantly as I push passed her. “I’m in mourning,” I tell her as I walk towards my front door, “for the loss of my virginity and everything. How I grieve is personal.”

“You’re unbelievable!” Ella calls to me as I open my front door.

I offer her no response as I just continue out into the hall. I meet Ryan at the elevator to my floor. He says nothing to me as he slowly walks up to me. By the time he’s finished walking, I have to tilt my head up to look at him.

He looks good, up close. His dark hair falls into his dark eyes, which are carefully masked. I can’t get a good read on him, and part of that scares me. I like to know what kind of battle I’m going into, and this time I don’t know.

“Do I mean that much to you?” He asks after a second.

I chew my lip nervously, but I can’t break eye contact. I swallow slowly. “It doesn’t matter what I feel,” I tell him. My voice cracks and shakes with emotion. “Because that’s the kind of shit you pull when the person who’s supposed to be your everything isn’t your everything.” I gesture blindly behind my head, and Ryan would have to have been stupid not to understand where I was gesturing.

It’s like I’ve gotten through to him somewhat, because he looks pained. I can see him try to swallow something. He exhales softly, and it rakes through his entire body. His large hands cup my jaw, and it takes everything I have not to just lean into him. I haven’t felt his skin since we’d had sex, and the feeling ignites images and feelings in my brain and body. “Don’t ever doubt the way I feel about you,” he says.

“Here’s the problem, Ryan. You always look genuine. You looked genuine with Ali outside, with the girl at the bowling alley, with Loretta at the autograph singing, the girl at the bar, the girl at the hockey game…” I sigh. “Do you see my point?”

He downcasts his gaze to the ground, and let’s go of my face. “Everyone is someone to you, Ryan. And I don’t think I can handle that.” I can feel tears poking at the back of my eyes again, so I turn before he can see.

I can’t be with someone who isn’t genuine. And despite all the reasons I should be with him, this is a pretty big reason why we won’t be. So I walk away. I walk away because Ryan Miller isn’t the kind of guy a girl should linger on.