Deep End

Kris picks up his phone and dials her number a thousand times over the next few days, but every time it starts to ring he panics and smashes his thumb down so hard on the ‘end call’ button that he’s surprised he hasn’t pressed it right through the phone. He considers sending her an email like a total chicken shit, but of course he doesn’t even have her email address. Then he considers something romantic, like sending her flowers with a card written in French (because if there is one thing his native tongue is good for, it’s impressing the ladies), but of course he doesn’t have her home address either. All of these things serve to do nothing but remind him that perhaps Skylar was right in her assessment that they really don’t know anything about each other. Except there is still a part of him that can’t help but feel that he knows the things that matter. Tiger lilies are her favourite flower, probably because orange is her favourite colour. She will eat rocky road ice cream for days and gets teary eyed watching the news. She is terrified of heights, but even more so of spiders. She calls him Kris except when she is faking angry and then she calls him Kristopher. When she is real angry she doesn’t so much say his name as spit it. He knows how she feels, how she tastes, how she thinks. He also knows, although maybe he knows it too late, that she is young, they are both young and not everything can move at warp speed. Right now, things are not moving at all, they might even be moving backwards, so Kris decides that he has to do something. If he is too chicken shit to call her, he will do something else. It feels a little bit wrong, a little creepy to look up addresses in her hometown via 411.ca, but he does it anyway. He finds the address to the local diner he remembers her mentioning through the ‘find a business’ section and sends a very modest bouquet (because he also knows she thinks huge bouquets are ostentatious) and a letter, addressed to her. He is hopeful that they will find their way into her hands and that she won’t think a letter is cliché or overdone.

---

Over the past few days, her phone has rung at least a hundred times. Every time, it rings once, maybe twice, then the call disconnects. Once, she catches it fast enough to see that it’s Kris. After that, she picks up the rather pathetic habit of walking around the house with her phone in her hand to try to catch him the next time before he hangs up. Except that whenever it rings and her heart jumps, she can never seem to make her finger press down on the ‘accept call’ button quite fast enough. She won’t back down from what she said, but she knows she played dirty and that deserves an apology. More importantly, she has begun to realize that while she may not be ready to go as far forward as Kris would like, perhaps her black and white, all or nothing approach to their current predicament isn’t exactly the best mindset either. She had been so quick to dismiss Kris’ idea of moving to Pittsburgh that she hadn’t even given herself a second to consider his motivations for asking her to move. She had been so worried about it all ending and there Kris had been, offering her up a solution on a silver platter. It wasn’t exactly the solution she had wanted, but he was trying. It was no wonder he had reacted harshly to her shut down. Still, she can’t bring herself to call him or to pick up the phone when he calls. It’s all starting to make her brain hurt so when she gets a call from Eva telling her to come down to the diner to collect a package, she is thankful for the distraction and practically runs from the house.

When she walks into the diner, Eva is sitting at the counter next to a bouquet of flowers wearing a shit eating grin and fanning her face with an envelope.

“Someone got a love letter.” She crows, brandishing the letter at Skylar, who leaps for it, frowning when she turns it over and finds the seal broken.

“You read it!?” she yelps as she smacks Eva over the head with the letter.

“Oh come on, like we could wait!” Eva holds up her fork in defence.

“Is it good?” Skylar asks, her palms sweating. Maybe it’s a break-up letter. Eva just shrugs.

“He’s a man of few words.” is all she says. Skylar pulls out a stool and flops down next to Eva, opening the letter.

Skylar,
I miss you, very much. I am sorry, so sorry. Too much, too soon, I understand. I don’t want to lose this, please say I have not sent you walking away from me.
Kris

She smiles softly, folding the letter and looking over at Eva, who is watching her with a raised brow.

“What?” she asks.

“Look at you.” Eva gestures up and down with her fork, “You’re all young and flushed and in love. Where the hell is this boy and why isn’t he here with you?” Skylar opens her mouth to protest, then frowns and says something else entirely.

“You think I’m in love?” she asks. Eva shakes her head.

“I’m not the one you should be asking.”

“But you think I look like I’m in love?” Skylar insists, poking and prodding at Eva’s shoulder until she huffs in frustration, knocking Skylar’s hand away.

“Yes, alright? I do. I think you’re all loved up over there. You’ve been clutching that phone waiting for a call for days and then you get that letter, all four sentences of it and you might as well have little cartoon hearts dancing over your head.”

“In love. In love with Kris.” It sounds crazy and not at all crazy all at the same time.

“So where is he, if you’re so in love?” Eva asks.

“In Pittsburgh.”

“He lives there?”

“Lives and works, most of the year anyway.”

“So if you’re so in love and he’s in Pittsburgh, then I guess my next question is why are you here?”

“I live here.”

“You think so?” Eva has put down her fork and spun on her stool to face Skylar, resting one elbow on the counter, her chin in her hand, regarding her intently.

“What do you mean ‘do I think so?’ I think I know that I live here.” Skylar mimics Eva’s posture and stares her down.

“I’d bet more than half of your stuff is still in boxes from when you moved home from Brown months ago.” Eva insists. Skylar shakes her head stubbornly.

“No way. It’s not more than half.” She argues weakly, knowing that in fact, the only things she has unpacked are suitcases and one box of kitchen supplies. Eva just waits patiently. “Okay, fine. So I don’t like unpacking, I still live here.”

“You know you’re always going to have a home here.” Eva starts in her ‘Listen closely because I’m about to impart my wisdom’ voice, “But I don’t think you’ve really lived here since you moved out to go to Brown when you were 16. This is a great town, filled with great people, but I think you’ve always been bigger than this, Skye. You can write from anywhere, but I think somewhere with some real energy flowing through it would be good for you, better than this sleepy little town. This sleepy little town that will, by the way, always be here if you need to come back.”

“So I should just leave? Just like that? Up and go to some place totally new, without knowing anyone?” Her mouth protests, but in her head Skylar remembers telling Kris just several short weeks ago that she wasn’t sure how long she would stay in Lion’s Head, she had already been entertaining the idea of immersing herself elsewhere. Maybe she had been looking at this in entirely the wrong way. In truth, she had always planned to move to somewhere with more energy, more hustle. Why shouldn’t it be Pittsburgh? Why couldn’t this move be about more than just Kris?

“You’d know Kris.” Eva says simply, “And you’d love him.”

“Love him.” Skylar repeats softly to herself.

---

Three days after he sends the letter, Kris finds a letter of his own in his mailbox and nearly rips the entire thing in half in his haste to tear the seal.

Kris
I was going to call, but (selfishly) I wanted you to have to wait a little longer (but I sent this priority mail, I’m not that cruel). I’m sorry too, for the things I said. I’m not walking away.
Skylar

He has his phone out of his pocket and her number dialled before he has even finished reading.

“I’m sorry.” He says when she picks up.

“Me too.”

“I love you.” He says the words he’s been thinking for weeks out loud for the first time, hoping he hasn’t just made another big mistake.

“I love you too.” She answers so soon, so confidently, that he already feels the tension ebbing away. He doesn’t ask for more than that. They skip right over more apologies and jump into small talk about home in Lion’s Head, home in Pittsburgh, training camp, her novel. Two hours later his phone beeps to tell him his battery is dying and Skylar laughs while he rushes around trying to find the cord to plug it in before it dies. An hour after that, Skylar finally admits that she’s been starving for the past forty-five minutes and they reluctantly part ways. For the first time since she stormed out of his hotel room, Kris goes to bed without feeling the need to beat his pillow into a pulp.

---

Kris comes off the ice at practice, sweaty and exhilarated. He feels good (better than he has in weeks) as he stalks into the room, giving Flower a face wash on the way by. Something in his stall catches his eye and he stops several feet away. A tacked up piece of paper with a message written in slanted Sharpie.

Damn baby. If being sexy were a crime, you’d be guilty as charged.

At first he thinks it must be one of the guys, playing a joke. But the handwriting is a little too neat to be any of his meat-fisted teammates. He starts to think it may have been Potash, whose handwriting had always been freakish. His phone buzzes from the shelf, a picture from Skylar. When he opens it, trying not to look too eager because lord knows he doesn’t need to give these guys any more ammunition (they’ve been all over him for a week and a half, ever since they found out he was back in Skylar’s good books and Sid started making jokes about googly eyes again), it’s a picture of his stall. A picture of his stall with that very sign hanging in it. Before he can open his mouth to ask which of his teammates orchestrated this whole thing and managed to get her in on it, he gets another picture. A slightly blurry shot of him at practice this morning, taken from the hall. He doesn’t even have time to really be confused because his phone just keeps buzzing. Margie, smiling from the front office, Arthur flashing his security badge, the outside of the Consol Energy Center. He is just starting to put it all together, maybe, when he gets a last photo.

A figure, hood pulled up and head turned to the side, obscuring the view of her face, leaned against a U-Haul, ‘Pittsburgh Penguins’ stamped in bright yellow over the front of a black sweatshirt. In thirty seconds flat he has stripped down, thrown on the first t-shirt and pair of sweatpants he finds and races out the door wearing Jordan’s size too big flip flops because his are slid too far under the bench. He’s not surprised to hear his teammates pounding after him like a herd of elephants.

He slams out the back door and she’s right there, perched atop the hood of a black pick-up truck hooked up to a giant glaring U-Haul trailer. He forces himself not to run across the parking lot, because that would look pathetic and too much like a scene out of some cheesy Harlequin romance novel.

“So,” she calls out when he gets close enough, hopping off the hood, “here’s the thing, I just moved and I’ve got all this shit to move into my apartment. I was wondering if you might know some buff, hunky dudes who could be persuaded to carry my shit? I have lemonade. Sugar free for Captain ‘Won’t Eat a Donut to save his Mother’s Life’.”

“HEY!” Sid shouts indignantly from the fray of Kris’ teammates that are clambering over themselves to be witness to the moment. Kris just stares.

“Tell me you are really here.” He finally says. She steps forward; he holds out his arms and she falls into his embrace.

“Flesh and blood.” She promises. Then, and he doesn’t care how clichéd it is, he pulls away and bends her back, laughing against her mouth as he presses his lips to hers in a heated kiss.

---

“You’re really staying.” Kris has to repeat it again to himself as they sit on the floor of Skylar’s new apartment, using a not yet unpacked box of apparently miscellaneous crap, if one believed the label, as a dinner table. Skylar just bites into her burger, nodding along like she has the last sixteen times he’s said it.

“I’m really staying.” She promises. Kris just smiles. “Oh, hey! I picked something up on the way here.” Skylar smiles and scrambles across the floor to her bag, riffling through it. She comes up with something clutched in her fist and tosses it at Kris. “I’ll give you twenty bucks to eat it. Or sexual favours, your choice.” Kris raises a brow, opens his hand and laughs when he finds himself staring down at a Cherry Blossom.

“Do I have to eat it to get the sexual favours?” he asks, adding an extra slow motion hair flip for good measure. Skylar is unfazed.

“Yes.” She says with her arms crossed. Kris is undeterred. Less than a minute later, he has the package torn open and has shoved the entire thing in his mouth. He chews in stony-faced defiance for about ten seconds before he has to grimace. Skylar laughs, even harder when he takes a run at her, lifting her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

“Which way is the bedroom?”

-end-