Retrouvailles

Despite all the negative memories it held, Loren found Erie a very peaceful place to have grown up. The winters were bitter cold—a by-product of being located in the snow belt—but she spent her summers the way a typical child would. There were barbecues with family and friends, late-night games of manhunt that spanned the entire neighborhood, and scorching afternoons spent at the pool. After Loren’s mother passed away, she traded in her summer nights for the hammock in the backyard. Citronella candles were her only company as she swung lazily, not a thought clouding her mind except how much the fireflies enjoyed swarming her mother’s garden.

She’d told Sidney all this one night while they were still in Philadelphia. Over their nightly game of 20 Questions, Loren asked how he spent his summers growing up. Unsurprisingly, he attended hockey camps and did nothing remotely interesting, but asked his girlfriend to tell him stories of her own childhood.

That’s why, when he got up for a glass of water at 2 AM, he wasn’t shocked to find the Hamilton’s backyard lit up like a baseball stadium, the hammock slowly rocking back and forth. He watched for a few minutes from the window in the kitchen, wondering if it’d be relationship suicide if he went outside to join her. They hadn’t spoken since the argument in Loren’s bedroom; they especially hadn’t spoken since she opted to sleep on the couch.

Sighing, he grabbed her a can of Pepsi from the fridge and slipped through the French doors in the dining room. The temperature had dropped significantly since the evening when he’d assisted Bill in grilling the chicken for dinner, and he momentarily contemplated going back inside to grab a sweatshirt.

Loren spoke first, not moving from her position in order to face him. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” Sidney took a seat in the grass next to the hammock. Bill had kept it groomed meticulously. “I got this for you,” he said, handing her the can of soda.

“Thanks,” she replied, popping the tab. “So, I was thinking—”

“Wait,” Sidney cut in, hating the way his hands immediately clammed up and started trembling. “Before you say anything, I was thinking too, and I’m not leaving. I don’t care if you want me to, I don’t care if I’m on your last nerve and you want me to fall into the Great Lakes, I’m not leaving.”

Loren looked genuinely shocked, like she hadn’t expected either Sidney’s decision to stay or his outburst in general. It immediately melted into a smile. “I was going to ask whether it’d be incest or masturbation if you cloned yourself and had sex with it.”

“What?”

“That’s assuming you’d go through with it, of course, but I don’t know what it’d technically be considered.”

“Are you drunk?”

“No,” Loren laughed, “I’m genuinely stumped on this one.”

Sidney seemed to mull over the question before responding, “I don’t think it’d be masturbation. I mean, it’s you, like your clone, but it’s not a one-person party so it’s not technically masturbation.”

“I guess that’s true.” Loren took a sip from the can. “This is hard.”

“Been thinking about it for a while, then, eh?”

Loren shrugged, finally moving from her laying position. Even in the dark Sidney could make out the Penguins logo on her sweatshirt—no doubt she’d stolen it from his suitcase—and the bright hue of her eyes. They looked so full of life now; the complete opposite of how they looked in the midst of their argument.

“I’ve been out here since you went to bed. It’s quiet. Gives me time to think.”

“Want to talk about it?”

She didn’t. A few hours to digest what she’d said left her embarrassed and the last thing she wanted to do was admit that. But she knew they’d have to discuss it at some point—she couldn’t imagine living with the uncertainty Sidney was undoubtedly feeling—and pushing it off would only make things worse.

“We probably should,” she said, swinging her legs over the side of the hammock. They were mostly bare, covered only mid-thigh and north by a pair of cotton shorts, and goosebumps had started to form sometime around midnight.

“I’m scared this isn’t what you want,” Sidney admitted. “I’m scared you’ll realize how insane it is to be in a relationship with me and you’ll leave.”

Loren sighed. “I’m scared in general.”

“Still?”

She nodded, already feeling embarrassed and romantically broken. There were literally thousands—if not millions—of women who’d kill to be in her shoes. There were thousands of women that wouldn’t dare second-guess any type of relationship with Sidney, and there were thousands of women who’d willingly murder Loren for doing just that. Yet here she was, second-guessing everything the couple had been working to build since February.

Four months. Loren almost recalculated the time in her head, figuring there was no way they’d only been an item for that amount of time. From their arguments over Claude to meeting Sidney’s parents and dealing with Pittsburgh’s early exit from the playoffs, it felt like they’d been together years.

“That’s bad, isn’t it?”

It was the wrong question to ask someone like Sidney Crosby. What did he know about relationships? But that truth seemed to be lost on both of them, and somewhere in the back of her mind, Loren knew that was dangerous. Assuming Sidney knew anything about how a true romance was supposed to work meant assuming he knew right from wrong. More importantly, it meant someone else had taught him.

“I don’t know,” he said, because what he really wanted to say (“I’m tired, Loren.”) wasn’t an option.

He was tired; tired of coddling her, of having to hold her hand and look both ways, of not knowing how she truly felt about him, of feeling like he wasn’t good enough one second and she the next. Putting up with her was exhausting, and suddenly he understood why his teammates and friends went after the women they did. All Loren had to do was quit her job and things would become infinitely easier. They wouldn’t have to stress over the distance, everyone involved in the Flyers organization would finally be out of the picture, and it’d force her hand in having to decide if she truly wanted to be with him. Maybe his teammates had been right all along—maybe there was a pattern amongst the WAGs for a reason.

“This is a fine mess we’ve got ourselves in.”

Sidney scoffed. “Speak for yourself. I didn’t do this.”

They were fighting words, and that’s exactly what he expected. However, what he got in return was a very quiet “screw you, Sidney” from his girlfriend as she made her way into the house. There was no fury behind her words or in her body language—not like there usually was when he pissed her off, anyway—and he marinated in the knowledge that this conversation was now over. She wouldn’t risk waking up her father to tell him to go fuck himself at the appropriate volume.

He stayed planted in the grass, not caring that it was the middle of the night and he should probably get some sleep. Sidney knew there’d be no escaping the media in Ontario—especially not when they were all on high-alert with Jordan’s upcoming wedding—and he’d need all the energy he could get, but he’d only toss and turn and stare at the ceiling if he tried now. Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final could be the next day and Sidney still wouldn’t be able to sleep when he and Loren were fighting.

Not that it’d matter soon, he figured. Every voice of reason inside him was telling him to cut his losses and move on, to save himself even more hurt down the road and end things now before they got more serious. It was similar to how he felt just a few weeks ago in the playoffs—that helpless feeling he got in the pit of his stomach when his team was on the brink of elimination and down four goals. All he could do was watch, and that’s how he felt now, like he was literally watching his relationship crumble around him and there was nothing he could do.

He wondered which of his teammates would feel the same. Jordan was too blasé and probably wouldn’t give a shit one way or the other. His married teammates would kindly explain how big of an asshole he was being, but Tanger—Tanger was a completely different story.

After everything that’d transpired in Pittsburgh that resulted in Loren’s termination, Kris wasn’t the same. He and Sidney all but stopped speaking, and after his trip to Ottawa, he seemed completely deflated. He was playing like shit, he was less-than-enthused to attend team functions, and the last time he bothered to contact his captain was that time he blew a tire and needed a ride to practice. Only an idiot would make assumptions and excuses and try to convince himself that his teammate wasn’t in love with his girlfriend, and Sidney wasn’t an idiot.

Good, let him deal with her, he thought bitterly as he passed her in the living room. She was on the couch with the television muted, her long hair now tied messily to the top of her head.

“If you’d like I can call Tanger in the morning and see if he’s available to take to Jordan’s wedding.”

Loren got a good chuckle out of that. “Would you please? It’d be a good idea to have a backup plan in case Claude’s busy.”

“Asshole,” Sidney muttered over his shoulder, not bothering to stick around for the rest. He locked himself in Loren’s bedroom and, just like he knew he would, spend the rest of the night staring at the ceiling.

He heard Bill get up and get ready for work. He heard him talking to Loren in hushed whispers, heard him moving around in the bathroom, and heard his truck finally leave for work. Sidney considered taking that as a cue to pull out his cell phone and book a flight to Ontario, to leave this headache behind, but he couldn’t. Just a few hours ago he told Loren he wouldn’t leave her, and no matter how much they argued or how terribly she infuriated him, he wouldn’t lie to her.

“Did you seriously lock me out of my own bedroom?”

“Yes.”

On the other side of the door, Loren rolled her eyes. “Well, can you un-lock me out of my own bedroom?”

“I do believe your dad told me to make myself at home, so—”

“Sidney!”

“Fine,” the captain grumbled as he threw the bedding off his legs and stomped his way to the door. Upon opening it, he was met with the humored smirk of his girlfriend. “It’s, like, five-o’clock in the morning. Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

Loren cocked an eyebrow. “Are you going to ground me?”

Sidney shrugged, figuring a bout of angry make-up sex wouldn’t be too bad. “Maybe.”

Rolling her eyes, Loren pushed past him, heading straight for her bed. “I’m sleeping in here. I don’t care where you sleep, just don’t touch me with your ice cube feet.”

She’d been accusing him of having ice cube feet since they first spent the night at Sidney’s place in Cole Harbour. His retort was always for her to sleep in long pants, but then she’d tell him to sleep in socks. Neither did as the other said, totally unwilling to compromise (which, if they paid attention, would’ve told them a lot about their relationship as a whole), so they usually fell asleep in some sort of pseudo-argument. Shocking.

Loren’s bedroom was, simply put, boring. There was no television or computer, no closet filled with board games or decks of cards, no video game console, and only a handful of books littered the glass top of her desk. Sidney didn’t know how she could stand it, living in a room so plain. Even as a kid his walls had been plastered with posters of the players he idolized and newspaper clippings and Habs memorabilia, but Loren’s sported nothing of the sort, which was why staring at the ceiling for hours on end was exceptionally painful.

“Are you awake?” he whispered.

“Yeah.”

“Can we talk?”

“Sure.”

“What was up with you earlier?” Leave it to Sidney to be especially blunt. The only part of his off-ice persona that was gentle was the facade he wore when dealing with the media. Or maybe it was just the way he dealt with Loren that made everything feel like sandpaper. “And don’t lie to me.”

“How’d you know about Kris?”

Loren’s counter caught him off guard. He was expecting a long, drawn-out apology for her earlier behavior, not a question about his teammate. “What, that he has feelings for you?”

“Had,” Loren corrected. “He had feelings for me.”

Sidney rolled his eyes. “That’s semantics at this point.”

“Grow up. It wasn’t anything serious.”

“A teammate having feelings for my—”

“Your what?” Sidney didn’t say anything. Once again, Loren backed him into a corner and blocked every possible exit. They hadn’t been anything in Pittsburgh. She wasn’t his girlfriend, he’d never voiced his feelings for her to anyone but Jordan, and he hadn’t even made a move until four months ago. “What’s your deal?”

“My deal?”

“You’re the world’s greatest hockey player and you have the mentality of a fucking high school kid.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Loren rolled her eyes. “Everyone intimidates you. You’re jealous and insecure even though I’ve never given you a reason to be and most of the time you’re annoying as hell.”

“Wow, thanks for enlightening me,” Sidney snapped. “Like you’re any better.”

“I never said I was.”

“You sure act like it. Everything’s my fault. One second you love me and the next you’re kicking me out of here and telling me to go fuck myself, and god forbid you go ten seconds without mentioning Giroux, that stupid fuck,” he seethed. “God, Loren, I don’t know which way’s up with you anymore. Would it kill you to stick with something for once in your life?”

“I’m sorry I’m not you, Sidney. I’m sorry I didn’t let one thing dictate my life from the second I could walk and then make it the focus of my whole goddamn life.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You think it’s different, but it’s not. You think I’m somehow supposed to have this unrivaled sense of dedication and purpose when half the time I don’t even know what the fuck I’m doing, let alone how to figure out what I’m doing plus how you factor into the equation.”

“Loren—”

“I like my life, Sidney. I like my job and my friends and my apartment, and I don’t want to leave that behind just because you don’t, but I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do here and you don’t either.”

She’s breaking up with me was his first thought. He swallowed that as it rose to the tip of his tongue and articulated the less harmful one: “So…”

“I don’t know, okay? I don’t know what to do and it freaks me out. We can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“You can’t spend your summer hiding in my apartment and I can’t spend mine following you around Canada. I have to work and you have to train and do whatever it is you do during the off-season.”

“Why can’t I do those things in Philly?”

Loren’s face warmed with frustration. “Are you kidding? Have you learned nothing from dating me? The media there is a nightmare—ask Bryz if you don’t believe me—and if they ever found out you were traipsing around town…”

Sidney tugged on the roots of his hair, ready to rip it out. “This is why I told you to do the interview.”

“I’m not doing a fucking interview, Sidney! I’m a normal fucking person and I’m not going to go on national television and answer bullshit questions just because I’m dating you.”

“At least it’d give me an excuse to be there. It’s better than spending the whole summer however many miles apart.”

“Look, I’m too tired to argue about this right now. Let’s just go to Toronto for Jordan’s wedding, I’ll fly home Saturday morning, and we can figure out the rest later.”

Sidney scoffed. “You mean you’ll go back to Philly and leave me to figure everything out myself. You’ve already made it clear you don’t want me coming with you, so where does that leave me?”

Loren rolled onto her side, away from him. “Goodnight, Sidney.”