Jesus.Nate laughed despite himself. “Stop trying to make me feel better, please.”
“Is it working?”
“No comment.”
Aubrey grinned.
With the two of them working and the oven on, it didn’t take long for the kitchen to heat up. Nate ditched his sweater over one of the breakfast-bar stools before he mixed together the pie filling.
“Exactly how many potatoes do you think four people can eat?” Aubrey asked finally, reaching for one of the final spuds. Then: “It is just the four of us, right? You aren’t springing more surprise family members on me?”
Nate eyed the pile. What was the rule? Two per person, two for the pot? So ten potatoes? Aubrey had peeled fourteen. “What? No, Emily and her husband brought the baby to visit his family in Vancouver. It’s just the four of us.” He paused and did some calculations. Even in his prime hockey days, he’d have had trouble putting away more than two potatoes that size. Oops. “You can probably stop now.”
“Oh, you think?” Aubrey laughed. “You’re gonna be making potato pancakes for a week.”
Nate’s stomach growled. “I can live with that.”
With the pie done, Nate turned his attention to the green beans, stemming away next to Aubrey at the counter while Aubrey hummed along with eighties dance pop. “So this is your first time making Thanksgiving dinner, eh?”
“Was it the potatoes that gave me away?”
“The fact that you didn’t realize how much help you were going to need, honestly.”
Nate shrugged and tossed another handful of beans into the colander. “Mom always insisted on doing Thanksgiving dinner, just her and Dad. Though now that I think about it, she started the day before with the prep work and the baking. She used to say my sister and I got underfoot. Marty….”
Aubrey bumped his hip. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“No, it’s fine. He was just kind of a control freak in the kitchen. He’s a professionally trained chef.”
“Ah.” Aubrey put down the last sweet potato. “That’ll do it.”
“He didn’t even work in a restaurant anymore when we met—he owned a catering company.” Nate had felt judged every time he so much as reheated leftovers. Which was maybe Nate’s problem as much as Marty’s, in retrospect.
But this Nate liked. Aubrey was easy to work around, maybe because they were used to working together in a different context, maybe because Aubrey was also a professional athlete. Maybe because they were sleeping together.
“Can I ask you something?” Aubrey swept the pile of peelings into the compost bin. “What happened? I mean, you must’ve been happy at one point, or else why get married? But…. Shit, that’s really personal. Sorry.”
“It’s nothing I haven’t asked myself.” Not that he’d come up with a satisfactory response. He swirled the remaining wine in his glass for a moment to give himself time to think. Then he picked up a dishtowel to clean up the sugar he’d spilled on the counter. “Honestly, I think what happened is… I retired.”
Marty might have cheated on him before that, but Nate mostly wasn’t around to notice then, and he didn’t want to talk about the cheating with Aubrey. They were having a nice time. He didn’t need to go there.
Aubrey leaned back against the counter, hip cocked, his half-empty glass held at his side. “And suddenly you were spending too much time together, or…?”
“No. I know I make it sound terrible, but we actually got along fine.”
“I mean, you agreed on that travesty of a vase, so….”
Nate swatted him on the thigh with the dishtowel. “You’re hilarious. I think the problem actually was we had different ideas of what my retirement would be like. Maybe we just didn’t talk about it enough, or maybe we weren’t listening. I mean, we had other problems too, but that’s the one that broke us. I thought, okay, retirement, time to start a family. Maybe I’d do some work with the team, but otherwise I’d be home a lot. Only it turns out the whole time, Marty had just been waiting until I hung them up to spring this idea that he wanted to sell the catering company and open a bed-and-breakfast.”
Aubrey winced. “Ah. I can see how that would go over poorly.”
Nate tossed the dishtowel in the general direction of the laundry room. “Yeah. I was used to having people up in my business in my professional life, but that’s different when you literally live where you work. We talked about different things we could try, but ultimately he wasn’t any more willing to compromise his dream than I was mine, so we called it quits.”
“Sorry. That sucks.”
Nate shrugged. “It is what it is. The truth is, we’re both better off. He’s living out his B and B dream with his new fiancé, and I….”
I have you.
