by Anthology
“I made a mistake,” Jim interrupted.
I scowled and held up a hand. “Let me finish, please. You’ve had twenty years to beat yourself up over your mistakes. But you weren’t alone.”
“I haven’t been beating myself up over it all this time.”
“Haven’t you? Tell me why it is you’re so intent on helping everyone you come across who’s made a mistake, then?”
“Everyone makes mistakes.”
I raised my brows to make a point. “Right. Everyone makes mistakes. You did. And so did I, because I gave up on you. I didn’t give us a chance to get through the bad times. For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health. All marriages go through tough times. When I married you, I promised to stick by your side when we hit those tough times. But I didn’t. I walked away, even though I loved you more than I loved anyone but Dillon, even though it ripped my heart to shreds to leave you. I know you, Jim.”
“You knew me.”
I shook my head. “No, I know you. I know you’ll do anything in your power to make someone smile. I know you’re always looking out for everyone around you, often to your own detriment. I know you beat yourself up when you make a mistake and then work ten times harder than everyone else to be sure you’ll never make that same mistake again. And I know I was wrong to not give you another chance, because if things were reversed—if I were the one who’d cheated—you would have given me another opportunity to prove myself. Because that’s who you are. It’s what you do.”
Jim stared out the window for a long time, and I could practically see the wheels spinning in his head. Which meant I was starting to get through to him. I was chipping away at all the doubts that had been eating him from the inside for years. He took off his glasses and folded in the earpieces before meeting my eyes.
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying it’s my turn. You give everyone a second chance. I want mine. And I want you to take yours, for once.”
“I gathered that much,” he said. He fumbled with his glasses before finally setting them down next to the mistletoe. “I guess what I mean is why? Why now?”
And that was the question I’d been asking myself ever since the moment I’d told Dillon what I planned to do. I took a sip, stalling for time. The hit of warmth and caffeine gave me courage, and I decided to spit it out before I could change my mind. “Because I love you. I’ve never stopped loving you, and I don’t think I ever will. And I think you still love me, too.”
Tears started pricking at the backs of my eyes again. Because I was afraid. What if I was wrong? What if Dillon had been right when he’d told me I’d lost my mind? What if Jim really did have some other woman in his life, but he kept her out of the public eye? What if I’d just left everything out there on a whim, laid my heart on the table between us, and it was all for nothing?
The truth was, he might not love me anymore. I hoped he did. I’d taken a huge risk on that hope, and it could come back to bite me in the butt. When I’d left and taken our son with me, it had to have hurt him as deeply as his infidelity had hurt me. Was it too much? Or the time? Had it been too long?
He hadn’t said a word since I’d made my declaration. Seconds kept ticking by on my watch, counting down to the moment he would either hand my heart back to me—carefully, of course, because this was Jim—or he would accept my olive branch. And I didn’t have the first clue which it would be.
The longer he took to answer, the further my heart dropped. If he had to think about it this long, it couldn’t be good. Could it? Or was it just my anxiety getting in the way of thinking clearly? The music switched to the Frank Sinatra version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” A sign? Or a slap in the face? I wasn’t sure. I finished off my latte and got up to toss the cup in the garbage, but Jim reached for my hand when I would have walked past him.
“Elaine?”
My pulse skipped a few beats from his touch and the torment in his voice. “Yes?”
“What about Dillon?”
Our son was absolutely the last thing I wanted him to ask me about right now. I swallowed down the lump in my throat. “What about him?”
“What does he think about all of this?” He looked up and held my gaze as firmly as he held my hand. His grip was so warm I didn’t want to break contact.
“He thinks I’m making a huge mistake,” I finally said. “But he refuses to see that I forgave you for your mistakes a long time ago, and I’m trying to mend fences with you now. He’s stubborn like that, kind of like his father.”
The corners of Jim’s lips quirked up for a moment. “Glad he’s like me at least in some ways.”
“He’s like you in a lot of ways. Every day, he does or says something that makes me think of you.”
Now, a full smile took over his face. Except for his eyes. It wasn’t quite there yet. “I bet he hates that.”
“He might if he knew how much alike you two are.” I bit my lip, pondering my next move. “He blames you. But he should blame me just as much. It takes two to make a marriage, and it takes two to break a marriage.”
“I don’t want him to blame you.” He teased the pad of his thumb over the back of my hand. “A man needs his mother.”
“Dillon needs his father, too. He doesn’t want to. But I think he’ll come around.”
“Do you? What makes you think that?”
I shrugged. “Just a hunch. Because I don’t have any intention of walking away again. Maybe you don’t want me to stick around. If you tell me to leave, to go back to Minnesota and Dillon, I will. But you’re going to have to tell me to go. Otherwise, I want to make this work. And if we manage it, he’ll have to get over the grudge he’s holding if he wants to keep his relationship with me.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Our son is a good man, Jim. But he’s a man now. He’s making his own decisions. He doesn’t need me the way he once did.” I threaded my fingers with his, and a shot of adrenaline coursed through me because he allowed it. “You know, he’s dating a really sweet girl. I think he’s going to ask her to marry him soon.”
“Yeah?” Jim’s eyes filled with both joy and sadness over that.
“Yeah. And he thinks he knows what marriage shouldn’t be. I think we need to show him what a marriage should be. He needs to see that marriage is hard work. That sometimes you make mistakes in your marriage, but when you do that, you need to fight to make things right instead of running away from the things you’ve done wrong, or the wrongs that have been done to you. Because when you love someone the way I love you, it’s not always easy. But it’s still worth it.”
He blinked a few times, weighing his words. “Is it really?”
“You know it is. And more than that, you’re worth it.”
Chapter 5
Jim
My head still reeling, I wheeled Elaine’s suitcases behind me as we walked into the hotel lobby to the strains of Elvis’s “Blue Christmas.” That was one I related to all too well. Even if I spent the holidays with the family of someone on my staff—I usually got invitations from no less than a dozen people to join them—it wasn’t the same as being with my own family. The holiday season was always rough on me. It would be easier if the NHL didn’t shut down for those days, but I couldn’t begrudge my players and coaching staff the time off.
Family is the most important thing in this world. I knew that better than anyone.
I waited while Elaine got checked in, the whole time rethinking my decision to bring her here. Why not just take her home with me? Before we’d left Starbucks, we’d agreed to spend as much time together as possible until she went back to Minnesota after the New Year, trying to work through all the decades of hurt between us so we could make a decision about the future. We hadn’t so much as kissed each other yet, though, so taking her to my house felt like skipping over a bunch of crucial steps.
Tucking her wallet back into her purse, she crossed over to me and reached for the
handle of one suitcase with a shy smile, shrugging her way out of my suit jacket.
I shook my head to stop her before she got the jacket all the way off. “I’ve got them.”
She tugged on the lapels again, tightening my jacket around her body. It looked good on her, taking me back to our early days together.
“I just—I thought maybe you’d be ready to go home for the night. This has been a lot to take in. For both of us.”
“It has been, but that’s not a good enough reason for me to leave you until I’m sure you’re safe in your room.”
She chuckled and shook her head in a familiar way, but then she headed toward the elevator bay. When we got in, she pressed the button for the eighteenth floor. The strains of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” filled the space as we rode up. Elaine kept fingering the piece of mistletoe she’d been carrying around all night, staring down at it in her hands. It made me want to be Santa right now.
We’d held hands earlier, and she’d let me put a hand on her waist as we’d walked. But we hadn’t come close to a kiss. Taking her home with me might be moving too fast, but a kiss couldn’t be a bad thing. Could it?
I hadn’t decided yet when the elevator doors opened and she led the way to her room.
She opened the door and held it for me to follow her in with her bags. I lifted the heavier one onto the luggage rack so she wouldn’t have to struggle with it later.
She was smiling when I faced her. “See? You haven’t changed a bit. Not in the ways that matter. You’re still getting me safely to my door and doing all the heavy lifting.”
I couldn’t stop myself from smiling right along with her. This felt good. Being with her again. Talking. Hearing her voice and remembering how good we’d been together before. “Old habits die hard,” I finally said.
“We’re really getting old, aren’t we?”
“I am. I don’t know about you.” To my eye, the years hadn’t been as hard on her as they had on me. There was still that youthful excitement in her eyes that had initially drawn me to her, and even though tears had come easily to her eyes tonight, they hadn’t stopped her from smiling and laughing.
“We were really stupid to let so many years pass,” she said, sighing as she sat on the edge of the bed. She kept playing with the ribbon on the mistletoe, tangling it between her fingers and unfurling it a moment later.
Now or never. “Are you just going to play with that all night, or are you going to put it to use?”
Her eyes flickered up to meet mine. “Sophie gave it to me with a specific purpose in mind.”
I raised my eyebrows in question, waiting for Elaine to take the lead. She’d been doing a good job of it all night long.
She patted the spot beside her on the bed. “Come here, Jim.”
I didn’t waste any time taking the seat she’d offered, heart in my throat and blood roaring through my veins.
Her chest rose and fell with shaky breaths when she tipped her face back to look at me. “We weren’t this awkward the first time, were we?”
I shook my head. “It didn’t mean as much then. We didn’t know any better.”
The first time I’d kissed her was after the first real date I’d taken her on. It was fall, and we’d gone to a park people liked to take their dogs to. Back in those days, there wasn’t any such thing as a dog park, but this was as close as you could come to it. Neither of us had dogs, but it hadn’t mattered in the least to either of us. We’d gone, and we’d played with other peoples’ dogs in the massive piles of autumn leaves, laughing until our stomachs hurt too much to laugh any more but unable to stop.
The sun had still been out when I’d walked Elaine back to her apartment, both of us out of breath from laughing so hard. She’d nearly tripped on the steps leading up to her door, and when I’d caught her, she’d fallen into my arms. The only natural thing to do was to kiss her. So I that was exactly what I did.
I think I knew in that moment that my life was about to change for the better. But I’d only realized it once my lips were on hers, once she was in my arms.
Now, sitting next to her in this hotel room, it felt even more momentous than that first kiss had. This was it. My second chance—the only one that would ever really matter, because it was with the love of my life.
I didn’t want to screw it up.
Elaine made her move at the same time I did. We bumped noses, and she laughed, the same way she had that day in the park when she’d been buried in a mountain of leaves.
There wasn’t a more beautiful sound in the world.
I changed the angle of my head and tried again.
This time, I got it right.
She was still laughing, but she put a hand on the nape of my neck and tugged me closer. I might have laughed, too. But then I slid my tongue along the seam of her lips, and she opened, and our laughter got lost in a kiss.
* * *
I didn’t sleep much at all that night. My brain wouldn’t shut off. It had always been a problem for me, since I’d been a little boy trying to take care of my mom after my father died. I would lie in bed for hours with thoughts racing through my head—analyzing things I could have done differently, waffling over what I needed to do next—all sorts of things that an eight-year-old boy shouldn’t be thinking about. But I’d done it then, and I still did it today.
For years, I’d spent hours each night replaying the moment I’d taken that woman in the bar back to my hotel room, trying to undo what I’d done. Other nights, it had been the conversation with Elaine that had haunted my mind and kept me from sleep. Should I have pretended it hadn’t happened and kept it to myself? There’d always been a Guys’ Code in the league, so I doubted any of my teammates would have said a word to her. I could have kept it hidden, but it would have eaten me alive. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself. But maybe there was something else I could have done or said to convince Elaine to give me another chance. To stay with me.
The truth was, I hadn’t fought for us. I’d admitted what I’d done, and I was so upset with myself over it that when she’d said she was leaving and taking Dillon with her, it had made absolute and total sense to me. I loved her too much, and at the time I’d hated myself so much for hurting her that I didn’t think it was worth putting up a fight over.
I was wrong. She was right. And that was that.
But now she wanted us to try. To fight for what should have been, not for what was.
After tossing and turning in my bed for hours, wishing she was there with me so I could hold her—she’d always had a way of soothing me to sleep when I got like that—I knew there was only one thing I could do.
Fight with her, for us. When I dragged myself out of bed on Christmas Eve, still groggy and not nearly rested enough, that was the only thing in my mind. Before going to the hotel and bringing Elaine over that morning, I had a couple of things to take care of.
The first was a call to Mattias Bergstrom, the Storm’s head coach, to let him know I wouldn’t be joining his family for dinner after all. I supposed he’d lost the annual lottery and was stuck with babysitting me for Christmas. Granted, he probably wouldn’t have described it in quite those terms, but that was how it always felt to me when someone from the Storm organization shared their holiday and their family with me.
Once I’d backed out and apologized for the short notice, I dug through my kitchen catch-all drawer until I found what I was looking for and made a trip to the mall. Leaving the jewelry store armed with a small gift-wrapped box, I headed over to pick up Elaine.
She breezed out to my car, smiling bright enough to make me forget about all the clouds that had blown in overnight. The weather forecast was calling for snow, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. Not with how brightly Elaine shined today.
When she got in the car, she handed my suit jacket to me. Our fingers brushed in the transfer, sending a jolt of electricity between us. Her lips parted in an O, so she’d felt it, too.
I’d forgotten all
about my jacket last night, since I was so flustered after kissing her for the first time in decades. She was making me feel like an awkward boy instead of a grown man in the wrong half of my fifties.
She gave me a sweet smile that had my heart racing. “You didn’t sleep last night, did you?”
I shook my head.
“Good thoughts or bad this time?”
“A bit of both.”
Once she’d tossed her small bag in the backseat and fastened her seat belt, I pulled out of the hotel parking lot.
“So… Tell me. What did you solve in your midnight ponderings?”
“Just that seeing you now, after all this time, I still love you more than I know how to handle.” When I glanced at her before turning to enter the highway, she had a soft look in her eyes. She was staring at me like she was trying to see into my mind.
“Is that the good or the bad?” she asked after a moment.
“The good.”
“Well, I guess I can breathe again, then. And I suppose I can guess the bad.”
“You think?”
“You spent hours beating yourself up and trying to figure out what you could have done differently all those years ago, so we wouldn’t have lost all this time.”
Despite my better intentions, my lips quirked up in a grin. “Maybe not hours.”
“Oh, really? So how much sleep did you get?”
I tried to pull off an apologetic shrug. “Maybe not hours,” I repeated.
“Mm-hmm.” She set her hand on my knee as I drove, stealing my ability to think. Good thing getting home was like going on autopilot. Her long fingers curled over the kneecap. “Jim?”
“Hmm?”
“I love you more than I know how to handle, too.”