Don't Be Stupid

I was suffocating; I don’t even mean that in an overly dramatic figurative way. Clawing at the blankets, I sucked in breath after breath of cool air and tried to calm my racing heart. Glancing around half asleep in the darkness, I idly wondered what it was in a person’s psyche that subconsciously convinced them that hiding beneath a pile of blankets equated safety. Mother nature kindly offered me a reminder as to what had caused me to seek refuge in the first place, illuminating the room momentarily to near daylight levels. I’d barely started counting Mississippi’s before the resulting thunder rattled the building and sent me diving back under the covers.

I wasn’t too proud to admit that at 27, I was still terrified of thunder storms. I found myself fortunate that they were a rarity in the desert, but it seemed as though that meant nature saw it as justification to make them more severe when they did make an appearance. I had learned to dread monsoon season in Phoenix. I made my way across the room on embarrassingly shaky legs and pulled the curtains closed, then climbed back into bed, hugging a pillow to my chest. “You’re a grown ass woman, Ava, you can handle a little storm.”

Despite my pep talk, sleep was obviously not happening, so I collected my ear buds and phone off the night stand and attempted to drown out the storm. I made it through half of The Black Keys latest album before anxiety won out. Giving up on that particular distraction, I took to pacing the apartment until something by the front door caught my attention. My neighbor had bestowed the key upon me under the pretense that I use it to check on his apartment when he was out of town, to clear his browsing history in the event of his untimely death, and for emergencies. I wasn't too proud to admit that I considered sixty mile per hour winds and thunder an emergency.

“Please don’t let anything inside scar me for life.” That mantra was muttered under my breath as the key slid into the lock and rolled the tumblers into place. The door swung open silently revealing an apartment that was a mirror image of my own, which aided my navigation in the dark. It also helped that my neighbor’s fog horn snoring offered a beacon to my final destination. His snoring, a result of having had his nose broken more times than he could keep track of anymore, usually annoyed the hell out of me; tonight, the sound brought comfort. A flash of light around the edge of the curtains confirmed that the bed in front of me was singularly occupied and I couldn't contain a startled “eep” at the accompanying blast of thunder. Instantly, the sound stopped.

“What are you going to do when I move out and you lose your thunder buddy?” Even freshly awakened, Paul Bissonnette’s snarkiness was intact.

“I’ll be eternally grateful that monsoon season only comes once a year.” He chuckled and lifted the covers in invitation. I dove gratefully, and gracelessly, beneath the warm sheets. We settled into our customary positions quickly, my neighbor’s large hand rubbing gentle circles on my back as I buried my face against his chest; I could feel my muscles relax incrementally as I melted against his warmth.

It was still raining hours later when I woke to the awareness that I was alone beneath the covers. Well, beneath the few inches of blanket that hadn't been stolen from me in the middle of the night anyway. A camera shutter clicked from across the room and I rolled my eyes as I turned to see my neighbor’s shit eating grin. “Is my ass being immortalized on Instagram or Twitter this morning?”

“Why can’t it be both? YOLO or some shit.” He tossed the phone on the night stand and launched himself onto the mattress beside me and tossed the blankets back over us both.

“Nobody’s ever going to believe that Mr. Panty Soup himself had a woman sleep over and actually keep her yoga pants on all night. You’ll lose your cred.”

Paul chuckled. “Nobody will even pick up on that detail while they’re oogling your ass in those pants, Ava.”

“Whatever, BizNasty. I guess I asked for it by crawling into your bed at 2am.”

We settled into comfortable silence for a while as I thought back to the day Paul learned that I was terrified of storms. It had been the first big storm of the season at the end of the first summer we were neighbors and he’d come over to mooch dinner off of me. Halfway through preparations, lightning struck nearby and plunged the apartment into darkness, rendering me into a hysterical mess. He had laughed before calmly leading me to the couch, pulling me down against his chest and proceeding to belt out the thunder buddy song from Ted.

With a smile on my face, I nearly drifted off to the memory before his voice broke the silence. “What were you up to last night while I was holding the bench down?”

I snorted a laugh at his self-depreciation. “Hot date.”

It was almost comical how he immediately and involuntarily scowled at those two words. No sooner than the jealous glare appeared, did he carefully school his features once again. It was a reaction I’d seen from him a lot in the past few months and I still found it intriguing. “How’d that go?”

“Fine.” I tried to sound flippant, but the reality was that it had been a nightmare. My date, an eHarmony find, had seemed like the perfect gentleman online. When he arrived late to the restaurant he’d chosen for us to meet at, standing a full six inches shorter than he claimed in his profile, I was beginning to doubt the intelligence of online dating. By the time appetizers had arrived at the table, he had regaled me with every detail of the vacation he had taken last month with his mother and I made up my mind that getting a pap smear during a root canal would have been more fun. I was canceling my account the moment I got to my computer this morning.

“Couldn't have been too fine if it was my bed you crawled into in the middle of the night.” I grunted noncommittally. “You've been going out a lot lately.”

“Got to get back on the horse sometime, I guess.”



I had met Paul just over a year ago when I moved into the apartment across the hall to hide from the world and lick my wounds following the mother of all break ups. The last thing I expected to find when there was a knock on my front door on a random Friday evening in May was the NHL’s notorious party boy wearing nothing but a black Speedo and Jason LaBarbera’s goalie mask playing mini stick in the hallway with a handful of miscellaneous NHL players. Without being given an option, I was handed a beer and invited to referee the game. It was the first time I could remember laughing in weeks.

Though he was unconventional in a lot of ways, and made my inner publicist cry with his online antics, Paul gave me no choice but to become his friend. I was in no place to become involved with anyone romantically just then and he seemed to sense that. Instead, he’d spent the next two months pulling me out of the shell I’d crawled into after watching my fiance ride off into the sunset with someone else, and he’d done a damn good job of it. I hadn't realized how much his presence had helped me during those first weeks until he disappeared halfway through the summer to visit his family in Welland, then plow his way through anything with a skirt in Vancouver and LA. Suddenly, I found myself alone again, working as much overtime as possible to escape the sadness that had started to creep back. It took about two weeks of miserable solitude to realize that somewhere during the healing process, I had actually started to fall in love with my neighbor.

By the time Paul returned for Coyotes training camp, I had myself halfway convinced that my feelings were misplaced gratitude, and tucked them away into a neat little box in the far reaches of my heart. Our unconventional friendship continued just as it had before, though I don’t think any of his friends or teammates truly believe BizNasty capable of maintaining a platonic relationship with a woman and I’m certain most of them remain convinced that we hump like rabbits at every available opportunity. I once asked Paul why he even bothered to hang out with a spinster like myself. His candid reply surprised me. “You don’t give a shit whether I play grocery stick for 56 minutes a night or if I’m the game hero and that means more to me than you’ll ever know.”

I was enough of a fan of hockey that I could discuss the game without embarrassing myself, though I rarely watched more than the occasional game prior to meeting Paul. Now, I tuned in faithfully from the comfort of my living room, repeatedly turning down the tickets he made available to me. Though I had met a majority of his teammates in the past year and even a few of their wives and girlfriends, I didn't feel as though I deserved to assimilate myself into that inner circle. I was not Paul’s girlfriend and I didn't want to give anyone the false impression that I was trying insert myself into that place in his life.