Sunday Mornings

"How's it going?" James turned to Shea, who was sitting beside him at their large, round table in the conference room of their hotel in Washington for team breakfast. They had a game that night, and then tomorrow afternoon they would be headed back to Nashville for a stint of both home games and off days and James had to admit that he was looking forward to those off days just a little.

He shrugged his shoulders in a silent response to Shea's question and then he answered him verbally, "Alright, you know. Day by day, that kind of bullshit."

Shea couldn't help but let out a small chuckle, one that James was thankful for because it made him feel like less of a social pariah. Shea nodded and told him, "Is that gonna be your answer now? Because, you know, I think you might get into some trouble with the media for that one."

James chuckled and said, "Yeah, see I thought of that but then I figured one; no one from the media even wants to talk to me anymore and two; if they did that might make them not want to talk to me again."

"New year, new set of bullshit man you're everyone's favorite request in the locker room again." Shea informed him.

"Seriously?" James asked him, and when Shea nodded he rolled his eyes.

Shea explained, "You got a good couple months without having to deal with them. I know it's not right, but it is what it is. Eventually, you have to face that three ring circus at some point."

"Yeah, but I was thinking like... the day I retire, you know?" James asked, a small smile on his face and Shea let out a laugh at that.

"Tell me about it."

To get the focus off of himself James asked Shea, "So how's Riley?"

Shea let out a laugh and told him, "Mad at me."

"Another girl?" James asked him curiously. He felt a little guilty that he hadn't really paid much attention to Riley and her third pregnancy. He wanted to be the type of person that could ask questions and want to know about things but the truth was seeing everyone else move on with their lives was a little hard for him, even now when everything seemed like it was starting to move forward again for him.

"Yes, and no." Shea told him and James' brow raised so he grinned and said, "One of each."

"Twins..."

Shea nodded, "You know, she made the joke and she jinxed herself, that's all I'm gonna say about that one."

James let out a chuckle and then he said, "Four kids under the age of four? Good luck with that one man."

"Yeah... she's pretty pissed. I keep reminding her that we still have like four months to prepare but that just makes her even angrier... imagine that." Shea said with a laugh. He then told James, "Next time you see her you should ask her for two of everything, see what happens."

"I'm not suicidal, dude." James stated.

Shea grinned, "For like a week straight after we found out I kept bringing her two of everything. Like two glasses of water, two sets of shoes, two yogurt tubes, two apples."

"Yeah, what did she do?" This seemed like a story James definitely wanted to hear.

"She threw both apples at my head, I ran upstairs before she could get her slipper off to throw that too." Shea explained, and the both of them caught the attention of most of the guys in the room with their loud laughter.

Curiously James asked him, "Is Noah pumped for another sibling?"

"Only if it's a boy." Shea told him, chuckling as he added in, "Boy is he gonna be in for a really mean surprise."

"Yeah, here's the baby brother you wanted oh and here's another baby sister too." James finished, the two of them laughing again.

Craig dropped into the seat beside James and he glanced at the two of them before he asked, "Do we all need to get drug tested? Because I think they put something in the food."

Shea rolled his eyes and said, "We were just talking about Riley."

"I'm so telling her you said that." Craig told him with a grin, and then made Shea and James laugh again when he asked curiously, "Or should I not? Has she reached the point of no return yet?"

"She threw food at Shea, and then tried to hit him with her slipper. I'd say she's well past the point of no return." James told him and Craig's eyebrow raised and his smile grew as James and Shea laughed again.

Shea couldn't help but state, in the midst of trying not to laugh even more, "At least we're done having babies now, we always said four. Surprise two for one means we're done. That should bring her some peace."

"I will pay cash money for you to say that to her when we get back." James told him, and Craig, for good measure, pulled his wallet out of his pocket in agreement.

"I may be playing with fire with her lately but I don't have a serious death wish." Shea told them both, chuckling when they sighed dramatically.

- - -

With a win in the books James was feeling good. It felt like, for the first time in a long time that things were finally starting to look up. He popped by his room to change out of his suit and into something a little more comfortable, which, really, was just his dress pants and a different button down before he headed back down to the lobby and into the hotel restaurant.

He had, of course, been invited to dinner with teammates but James was, oddly enough, looking forward to having a meal really, truly, alone. He couldn't remember the last time he had done that. So he took a seat at the bar, it felt slightly less ridiculous than taking up a table by himself, and he ordered himself a somewhat health conscious steak sandwich and then he glanced around the restaurant.

It wasn't that busy, at least not for nearly ten-thirty. There were a few people in tables, and a large and rather boisterous crowd in the back with four tables pushed together and a seemingly never ending flow of beer pitchers. That was about it, aside from James at the bar and a teenager across the way, also eating, with a textbook and notebook in front of her. He wondered what the kid was doing here this late, but when a waitress passed him and ruffled the hair on his head James figured she was waiting on someone.

So, much like the kid across the bar from him, James ate his food in silence, only checking his phone once to see if Riley had text him at all. She hadn't. He wasn't surprised, Riley had very slowly begun to send him less and less text messages about Peyton when they were on the road and he wasn't surprised by that. He knew it was a little crazy to want to know everything she did; when she ate, what time she had a nap and when she went to bed but at the time it made him feel comfortable with the idea of leaving her behind to go play hockey.

That was another thing that was seeming to change for him now; he didn't have a constant need to control everything and to know exactly what was going on when he wasn't around with Peyton, something he was grateful for.

His attention was stolen when someone took the spot two stools down from him. James glanced over, and he smiled politely at the blonde woman who did the same to him. She ordered herself a drink, and he heard her not so subtly tell the bartender to put whatever he was drinking on her tab. She then turned to him and asked him, "What are you drinking anyway?"

James glanced at his empty glass and then he told her, "Manhattan."

She made a face and chuckled gently as she said, "Whisky."

"Not your thing?" James asked her, slightly amused by his reaction.

"No, I'm more of a tequila kind of girl." She told him, lifting her own glass just a few inches off of the bar top and then setting it back down. James nodded his head slowly and he looked over at his own drink, before he took a small sip. That was when she asked him, "So... business or pleasure?"

"Hmm?" He asked her, brow lifted.

She smiled and explained, "What you're in Washington for. Business or pleasure?"

"Oh, business, leaving tomorrow." James told her, and then after a pause, he asked her, "And yourself?"

"Well I was here for business but that finished up earlier today and I'm still here for another two days so I guess it's for pleasure now." She stated, shrugging her shoulders gently as she took a sip of her drink. James had another gulp of his own.

"So what's business for you?" He asked her curiously.

She turned in her seat and leaned her side against the bar top as she told him, "Pharmaceutical sales, and no it is not as fun and exciting as medical dramas on tv make it seem."

"No? Fancy clothes, nice car, travel all over the country. Seems okay to me." James told her with a small smile.

She motioned to him, "Says the guy in the 2000 dollar suit."

"1500 actually." He told her, and then he smiled again as he said, "Left the jacket upstairs."

She let out a laugh and asked, "So what is it that you do?"

"I'm an athlete." He was vague on purpose, he didn't know if she knew anything about hockey and frankly, he wasn't sure if he wanted her to or not.

She laughed, "Figures, you look the type."

"I do?" He had to admit he was a little amused by that comment.

Nodding her head she told him, "Yeah, you just do."

"And what kind of athlete do I look like?" He asked her curiously.

She seemed to think about it for a moment before she said, "Well my first thought was baseball, but then I realized you actually have a nice body. So, I'll go with golf."

"Alright, I don't mind that one. We can go with golf." He stated, nodding his head for good measure. He did golf in the summer.

"What's your name anyway?" She asked him, brow lifted in questioning.

"James." This time he was honest with her.

She held her hand out to shake as she introduced herself, "Laura."

James motioned to the bartender for another round of drinks, and after that came three more and then Laura got up from her barstool and stretched before she handed the bartender a piece of plastic to pay for their drinks. James took out a handful of bills from his pocket to leave a tip, at the least.

Laura turned to him when she put her credit card back in her clutch and she smiled gently, "I think it's time to head up to my room."

"Yeah, it's late." It was nearly midnight.

So she turned away from him and started walking, and then she turned to look at him and with a playful smile on her face she asked him, "You coming?"

He wasn't sure what had possessed him to get up from his chair and follow her, but he did so without a single thought.

- - -

James had snuck out of Laura's hotel room the minute she had fallen asleep, and he was glad that he still made it back to his own room four floors up before curfew. Colin was already asleep, which James was thankful for, and he slipped into the bathroom and hoped that turning on the shower wouldn't wake him up. The last thing he needed was Colin bugging him about what he was doing.

He stripped out of his clothes, balling the suit up before shoving it into the trash can underneath the sink before he stepped into the steaming hot water and sat in the tub. He soaked his hair, before he pushed it back from his face and rested his elbows against his knees, and propped his head up with his hands as he stared at his feet.

What had he done?

For the very first time in almost seven whole years, he had had sex with someone who wasn't Quinn.

He pulled his legs closer to himself, sitting cross-legged at just the right moment for everything he had eaten and drank over the last few hours came right back up. The sight made him dry-heave, right up until everything had washed down the drain.

Resting his head on the side of the shower wall James heaved a sigh, and scratched at the skin stretched over his knees. He had no idea why he had done that.

It had barely been six months since her death.

Six months and eleven days and he had already gone and slept with someone else.

What the hell kind of a person was he?

This wasn't him. He knew that. Maybe, if this was six years ago it was him. This was exactly something the James before Quinn would have done, so maybe it wasn't all that surprising that now, without her again, he reverted back to who he was before.

James had never, truthfully, considered himself to be a very great person. Sure, he was polite and respectful in the way that his parents had raised him but that only seemed to apply to everyone but women. He was respectful enough but polite, kind, or decent? Not a chance.

Before Quinn had come into his life James had been a train-wreck if he was being entirely honest.

He had just been traded the season before, and all of a sudden he found himself on a team where the arena was sold out every night, in a city that knew the players when they walked down the street. Sure, Dallas had come a long, long way since his days there, and even when he had been there it was never even close to Phoenix bad, but there really was nothing like that first rush when he started in Pittsburgh, with guys like Crosby and Malkin.

All of a sudden people knew him when he was out and about, that sense of mostly anonymous security was gone. He got sucked into the life of people knowing who he was, of women knowing who he was. He had no issue with the fact that women mostly wanted him because he had money and was an NHL player, from time to time he didn't even care that most of them were more interested in Sid than him.

He would promise them an introduction to the captain, or a date, and then he would sleep with them and never call. That was his thing. Satisfaction without strings.

That all changed when he had met Quinn.

Somehow she had seen through the 'tough, fake macho exterior' as she called it, to who he was and she held him accountable to be the kind of man she seemed to think that she knew he was. James had never had anyone do that, and at first, it bugged the living shit out of him, but then eventually he realized he wanted to be that guy not just for her but for himself.

And then she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer for the first time, and they got closer than ever, right up until his season seemed to go to shit and suddenly he felt like all of Pittsburgh, his teammates included, were against him.

When Quinn had finally thrown the towel in and had enough of it and moved back in with her sisters it should have been a wake-up call for him. Only it wasn't. It didn't make him get his life back together to get her back in it. Instead, he found comfort in every Sara, Ashley and Tiffany he could find, which wasn't hard.

It was becoming clear to James that who he thought he was, wasn't really him at all. He was still the same person he had been all those years ago. It seemed that Quinn brought out the better in him, but the more he thought about it the more he realized that every time Quinn wasn't in his life he went back to that arrogant, doesn't give a fuck about anything or anyone guy.

Maybe he hadn't changed. Maybe he was just good at pretending.

He must have fallen asleep because when he woke up to Colin banging on the bathroom door James was still naked in the bath tub, though he must have turned the water off at some point. He mumbled out something incoherent which caused Colin to call through the door, "Dude, I need in there and the bus leaves in ten minutes."

James jumped out of the tub and wrapped a towel around his waist, he flushed the toilet for no reason other than to make it look like he had been doing something in there, and then he ducked his head under the tap in the sink to dampen his hair. He needed a reason to be walking out of the bathroom in a towel.

He slipped past Colin with a mumbled apology and threw the second suit he had in his garment bag on quickly before he zipped his baggage closed and tucked his phone and wallet into his pockets. He followed Colin out to the bus waiting in the parking lot, and he sat down by the window of a row closer to the back without saying a word to anyone.

No one bothered him, not surprising, and when he got on the plane he did with the same fashion as the bus; took a seat by the window. He pulled a pair of headphones over his ears, plugged it into his phone, but didn't turn anything on as he leaned back and closed his eyes. He just wanted the illusion that he was sleeping and listening to music because all he wanted right now was to be left alone.