She said nothing as he closed up the pre-wrap.
“Big night coming up for your dad, huh?”
“Yep.” She sucked in her cheeks and angled her body away from him.
“Is he nervous? Doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who gets rattled easily.”
“Mostly he just wishes my mom was here to see it.”
“Yeah. Must be tough.” Lucas finished the taping with figure eights, then two heel locks on each side and one more figure eight. “You guys celebrate Thanksgiving?”
“He started doing it for my mom before I was born. Last year was our first without her, and it was just…weird. My uncle Matt can’t make it this year, so I don’t know if we’ll do anything at all.”
“My family is all over the place. Too hard to get everyone together anymore—and my parents are divorced—so we leave that for Christmas. Thanksgiving is me, a six-pack, tacos, and football.” Lucas patted her ankle. “All set.”
“Tacos?”
“Real tacos, not the shit that passes for tacos to most Americans.” He puffed out his chest a little and offered a proud smile. “Even make my own corn tortillas. My grandmother taught me. She’s from Mexico.”
This added a whole new tier of hotness to the seven-layer dip that was Lucas Donovan.
“That’s an interesting expression on your face. I’m only a quarter Mexican. My father is Irish. Hence, Donovan.”
“You can’t spend it alone,” Anya blurted. “Have it with us.”
“You just said—”
“He needs company other than me.” True enough, though perhaps not the company of a man young enough to be his son. Or a man his daughter had been fantasizing about since their first meeting.
Lucas scratched his cheek. The shake of his head was so slight it appeared subconscious rather than deliberate. “I have the strangest feeling this invitation isn’t for your father’s benefit. And you know I can’t—”
“Volynsky,” Coach Landers said from the doorway. “Get to the locker room and get your equipment on.”
“Be there in a minute.” She hopped off the table and stood before Lucas, so close the tips of their fingers touched. “See you after practice.”
He stepped—almost stumbled—back before anyone saw the contact. “See you.”
Few things in this world distracted her once she hit the ice, but the hour couldn’t pass quickly enough. Every season, they started with the basics: skating, stick handling, and passing, all of which she could do asleep. She wasted little of the mental energy she’d rather spend on Lucas, even when Coach Landers called on her to demonstrate those basic skills.
As soon as Coach dismissed them, she skated off, shed her equipment to change back into her shorts and T-shirt, and scurried into the fitness room for her untaping. Which she was more than capable of doing herself. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
This time, however, he evaded eye contact as he unwound the tape and pre-wrap. “Are you massaging it?”
“Every other day.”
“Pain or swelling?”
“A little pain. No swelling.”
Lucas pressed one finger to her tendon and kneaded deeply, backward and forward across it, his lips set in a tight line. He increased the pressure in gradual increments until she hissed in pain, then relented a little. “How does that feel?”
Amazing. So amazing she wandered into a daydream featuring his hands massaging other parts of her. “Good.”
“Great. Make sure you’re resting it.”
“I am.”
“Okay, all done.” He offered a polite, bogus smile. “See you next practice.”
“That’s it?”
A pointed aversion to eye contact. No desire to let her in, to reveal who might be inside the rooms hidden from her. Dismissing her with his back, already headed to the next player. An obligatory glance over his shoulder. “Did you need something else?”
“No. Nothing.” Anya scrambled into her warmups and jacket, tears stinging her eyes. Why did she have to be like this? Why did he? Did he see nothing but a distorted image of the person she tried to project, a mirror image turning in on itself? A reflection missing an essential component. Every girl needed her mother, but she was half-orphaned. Incomplete.
Anya clutched her stick with such force her knuckles hurt, and stalked out of the fitness room.
***
Alex
The front door swung open. Anya strolled into the kitchen, slung her backpack over a chair, and engaged in her customary ritual of scouring the refrigerator and cabinets for a snack.
Now that Alex had consigned himself, at least intellectually, to selling the house, no surface existed that wasn’t imprinted with a specific memory designed to talk him right back out of it. He and Stephanie having sex on this granite countertop, and forty guests—including her brother and his new husband—a mere pane of glass away. His first attempt at spaghetti and meatballs. Everything about the master bedroom.
“Dad, you have a really weird look on your face.”
“Sorry. Nostalgia.”
“Oh, God.” Anya made a retching noise. “Did you and Mom do it in here too?”
He glared at her.
“I’m not deaf, Dad. Although growing up with you two sometimes made me wish I was.”
Alex cringed and pulled his collar away from his throat. “Anyway, how was practice?”
“Fine.” Anya picked at her cuticles with manifest disinterest in the conversation.
“You are so goddamned moody, you know that?”
“You would know all about that, wouldn’t you?”
Alex slammed his fist on the counter, hard enough to make her jump. “Anya! What the fuck is your problem?” What if I did this to her? What if she has it? He unclenched his throbbing hand. He’d never forgive himself, not even given his and Stephanie’s awareness of the odds.
The color drained from Anya’s face. She folded the plastic bag inside the box and replaced it in the cupboard. A few pale crumbs clung to her glossed lips.
“I can’t fucking win with you. One day you’re my sweet little girl, and the next I don’t know you at all.”
“I’m not depressed or bipolar, or whatever you think is wrong with me.” She leaned against the sink, her eyes wide and wet, and smeared her forearm over her lips. “I think I’m in love.”
“O Bozhe,” Alex moaned. At least depression could be medicated. “Who is it?”
She shifted her gaze away. “I can’t tell you.”
“Well I’m your father, so you’re going to tell me.”
“I really can’t, Dad. You wouldn’t understand.”
He drummed his fingers on the counter, splayed them, and filled his lungs before speaking. “Anya, it can’t be like this for the next ten months. The fighting and hiding things…We can’t. I can’t.”
“It’ll never happen, so it doesn’t matter, okay? Forget I said anything.”
“Forget it? You told me you didn’t want a boyfriend, and now all of a sudden—”
“Yeah, I get it!” Tears splashed her cheeks. “The daughter of the great Aleksandr Volynsky better play hockey, and she better be the first woman on a starting roster in the NHL, and she better not show any normal human feelings while she does exactly what her father expects her to!” Anya blew out of the kitchen, a hurricane, her helpless rage all too recognizable, too capable of consuming all in its path.
“Anya!” Alex hobbled after her, but she was too quick. She banged her bedroom door shut before he’d climbed a third of the stairs.
Give her a minute.
He retreated to the kitchen, put on the teakettle, and prepared two cups of instant hot cocoa with marshmallows. With a steaming mug in each hand, he made a sluggish ascent to Anya’s room and tapped his toes against the door. “Can I come in?”
The lock clicked, and Anya gazed up at him with red, puffy eyes and tearstained cheeks. Alex handed her a mug. She stepped aside to let him enter a room he’d left to her devic
es, the baby blue paint all but invisible beneath a hodgepodge of rock band and hockey posters, in contrast to the calming cherry blossom duvet cover on which he sat.
“Can we talk?”
“I guess.” She sank onto her desk chair across from him.
“Pressuring you into playing hockey was not my intention. I saw something in you that reminded me of why I wanted to play, but it wasn’t meant to force you in a certain direction.” Alex sipped the hot chocolate. Too hot, it seared his tongue, and he winced. “I want you to be whatever you want to be. Whatever makes you happy.”
“I do want to play. I just…” She curled one leg beneath her and with the other foot swiveled the chair back and forth. “I don’t know. I feel like everything is changing.”
“It is, and it’s scary. I know.” Alex set his mug on the nightstand. He lacked his wife’s and daughter’s sweet tooth. “I’ve been trying to hang on to you, because you’re all I have left of your mother.”
“I’m going to college, Dad. I’m not leaving you.”
Not yet. Not for a few years. But she would establish her own life, her own family, free of the darkness in which she had been his light. He would become a weekly phone call—a visit, if he was lucky. A genetic obligation. One of many anecdotes she’d collect over the years. I remember this one time when my dad…College was the first step in the long process of dissolution. In the blink of an eye, Daddy’s little girl stood on the precipice of adulthood. “I know, honey.”
The space between them brimmed with a year’s worth of things unsaid, and Stephanie’s ghost held court in the silence.
“You don’t want to tell me about this boy,” he said, “but I need to make sure—”
“Mom and I had The Talk five years ago.”
Thank God. “I have no right to tell you not to have sex, not given what you know about Mom and me. I just don’t want you to find yourself in the situation she was in at your age. Which was my fault too, of course, but—”
Anya tipped her head. “What situation?” She’d raised the mug to her lips but lowered it back to her lap.
“I thought you said you…”
“The sex talk, Dad. Use protection, that kind of thing. What are you talking about?”
“Uh…” Sweat popped out on his palms and along his hairline. She was supposed to tell her. Not me.
Anya set the cup on her desk. She fixed her attention back on him, giving him the distinct impression their roles had reversed. “Did you get her pregnant?”
He weighed the words, selecting each with a meticulousness he had not often applied to speech. “Da. But I didn’t know until years later. She, uh…Things were bad at home, and she thought it was better if no one knew.”
“She lost it.” The vanished possibilities flickered across Anya’s face. An older brother or sister, someone who’d have helped her negotiate waters a man born and raised in Russia and who’d been playing hockey every free moment since age five didn’t know how to.
He nodded. “We wanted more kids, but she…” Alex flapped a hand at his chest. “You know. So if I seem a little overprotective, it’s not that I’m trying to control you but because of what happened to us. She was going to tell you; she just didn’t get the chance.”
Anya dug her fingers into her jeans. Stephanie’s promise ring sparkled on her right ring finger. “I hate that I feel like I’ve gotten to know you better in the past two months than I have in the previous seventeen years. You’re my dad.” Her chin wobbled. More tears stood in her glassy eyes.
Alex gripped her hands. He ran his fingertip over the ring and tried to breathe around the unexpected hitch in his chest. “I haven’t been a good one recently, but I love you so much. And you can talk to me about anything. Being a parent, especially a single parent, is a lot of trial and error, and I want to get it right before it’s too late.”
“It’ll never be too late. You’ll always be my dad.”
“And no matter how old you get, you’ll always be my little girl. So deal with it.” He cupped her chin. Finally, a smile—a real one ripening until her whole face flowered. “Oh—ey. Mind reading over my speech after school tomorrow? I used to ask Mom to do that kind of stuff.”
Anya gave him a playful shove. “Your English is on point, Dad.”
“Maybe, but a second opinion doesn’t hurt.”
“Of course I’ll look at it.”
“Spasiba, milaya.” Alex kissed her forehead. “Homework time. I’ll let you know when dinner is ready.”
***
“What are we doing in here?” Anya cocked a brow at the Mercedes Alex had spent much of the afternoon washing and inspecting. “Are you letting me drive this thing?”
Alex ran his hand over the cold, glossy hood. He drove it when leaving the house was an absolute necessity, aware he looked like a full-blown midlife crisis, and only since Anya had gotten her license and claimed the BMW. He’d sold the motorcycle on his thirtieth birthday, after Stephanie had implored him to for months. “This ‘thing,’ moya lyubov′, is a work of art. Precision German engineering in a sleek, sexy package.”
“You sold cars in a past life, didn’t you?” Anya snorted at her own joke, an attempt to dismiss her obvious excitement as she bounced from foot to foot.
“This is no mere car. Admire her. Touch her.”
“You are so weird, Dad.” Nevertheless, she engaged in a visual feast of the obsidian roadster as Alex fished into his pocket for the key fob.
“She’s yours, baby. I’m too old for a convertible.”
“You’re not that old.”
“Thanks.” He laughed and dangled the key before her. “Here. I was going to wait until your birthday, but I think it’s time.”
“You’re serious?” Her mouth went slack. She accepted the key. “I have a Mercedes. Holy crap.”
“Enjoy. But be careful, ladno? She can go almost two hundred miles an hour.”
“I will.” Anya flung her arms around his neck. “Thank you, Daddy.”
“You are so welcome.”
“Will you be okay driving Mom’s old car?”
Always worrying about me. Alex set his hands on Anya’s shoulders. “Anya. Sweetheart. Be a kid while you still can. I’m fine. I can trade in the BMW if I need to.”
“You’re lonely, Dad. I know you are. I want you to go out and do what people your age do, and make some new friends. Promise me you will.”
But he’d never quite learned to trust people. Never allowed himself the belief they were drawn to him and not his name, even twenty years later. Not after so much time without Stephanie’s grounding influence to wonder why anyone chose to be around him. His cracks were all too visible now, his footing unsound. Years of toil expended molding him into someone fit for human company, and by many other hands. He was, as ever, unfinished, yet he craved the most miniscule elements of social bonding. Those coquettish glances from beneath the lashes of girls young enough to be his daughter (Still got it, he’d say to himself, and chuckle at the imagined horror on Anya’s face), the compassionate nods when someone recognized him, swapped between strangers on their way to and from work, in the coffee shop, at school functions. Evanescent, accidental instants temporarily placating the worst of his solitude. Social Band-Aids. “I promise. Although ‘people my age’ sounds like I should be playing bingo at the senior center.”
“I know—let’s go for a ride.” Anya pressed the Unlock button. “You can pretend you’re cool again.”
“Where do you think you got it from?”
Anya, grinning, slid into the driver’s seat.
Alex pushed back the seat and stretched out his legs. He imagined Stephanie in this spot one magical night nineteen years ago, the night it all began again. The way the wind tousled her hair and the moonlight illuminated her sweet face. The way she felt in his arms on the dance floor, and beneath him in her bed. How easily and completely he had surrendered his heart to her once more, forever.
“Dad?” Anya kept her eyes o
n the road but wrinkled her nose. “Oh God, did you do it in here too?”
He snickered. “I was just thinking about the first time your mother rode in this car. Anyway, this college thing is your decision, Anya. I’m not comfortable with Mercy Hill. I had the sense they wanted our name recognition to boost the program.”
“I feel like this is the kind of decision seventeen-year-olds shouldn’t be making.” She pooched her bottom lip and blew out a breath that ruffled her bangs. “We can’t even drink, but we can make a choice that affects our whole future?”
“You’re probably right, but I don’t want to make it for you either.”
“Ugh. Well, I still have time to think about it. None of my friends has even applied yet.” She drummed her fingers on the wheel to a song only she heard. No radio allowed—not while he was riding along, anyway. He played a mental game of “Name That Tune” using the percussion pattern. “I just don’t want to do the wrong thing.”
“I’ll support whatever you choose to do. But please don’t let me be the deciding factor. You have too much going for you.”
“Yeah,” she sighed, an acknowledgement of the need for her mother’s guidance. Alex hadn’t attended university, not that education had been a challenge for him. At the time, there’d been no point. Stephanie’s death had brought so many of his shortcomings into stark relief.
“Do what feels right. That’s the only advice I can give you.”
She glanced over for a fraction of a second, before he started barking at her to pay attention to the road, with a guarded smile. They weren’t talking about college anymore, but he’d lost the plot. “Thanks, Dad.”
Chapter Eight
Alex
Any hockey player who said they didn’t get nerves before hitting the ice was lying, but this level of jitters hadn’t struck since his singing of the national anthem for the first time, the day he’d learned Anya was on her way. All the attention centered on him alone, no teammates or opposing players to distract and deflect. His voice reverberating through the PA system, shaking a little, stumbling over a word or two, mispronouncing something, uttering “uh” or “um” too many times. A litany of things to go wrong, replayed the next day for those who’d missed it live in prime time.
The Pieces Of Us (The Firebird Trilogy Book 3) Page 7