“What, that you’re a pork product with no emotional depth?”
“No, the love thing. And shut up.”
He waved his hands when he spoke like I’d knocked him off-kilter.
“Then I’m on to something,” I said. “And it’s not stupid, Kayden. It’s a really important thing in any relationship. I told the girlfriend I had in Canada that I loved her all the time.”
“Did you actually love her, though?”
“Of course I did.”
“Then why aren’t you with her right now?”
“Because we…well…I don’t know!”
I stood up and found myself pacing because I was no longer winning the argument?
Leave it to Kayden to hijack the conversation, especially when I had him on the ropes. Worse, he’d actually raised a good point this time.
I had been in love with her, at least at the time. Things change. People change. Sometimes we’re meant to take different paths and wind up with different people.
Maybe even different sexes, my inner voice told me.
In fact, if I’d stayed with her, Kayden and I almost certainly never would’ve found each other. And I could’ve played hockey for other schools. Maybe it was fate that brought me to Buffalo, but I couldn’t tell my boyfriend that. He didn’t think in those terms. My love for Kayden felt more intense and powerful than for my ex-girlfriend, but I couldn’t mention that either. Yeah, I get it, he was a hockey player, but then so was I. Some of us can manage having feelingsandexpressing them freely.
“The whole I-love-you thing is overrated, don’t you think?” he asked.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“No way, dude. It’s one thing to say it. It’s another to actually show it. That’s all I’m saying.”
Now my head was spinning. Kayden acted like that made more sense than anything in the world. Thank God I knew him far too well to ever buy that bullshit.
I wanted to turn my back to him. I couldn’t let him see disappointment on my face. He could be such a pain in the ass. And I knew what he was about to say. He was going to tell me that we wouldn’t be having this argument if I hadn’t brought up something that didn’t matter.
“You know,” he said, “if you hadn’t brought up the whole love thing, we wouldn’t having this argument right now. Not like it’s a big deal.”
See? I could practically read his thoughts.
“You don’t have to make it sound like such an inconvenience, Kayden.”
“Excuse me, but you’re a hockey player. You’re not supposed to get all mushy. Do you think all the other guys on the team scold their boyfriends for not telling them that they love them enough? Yeesh!”
“The other guys on the team don’t have boyfriends. At least none that we know of. And what are you talking about? You haven’t told me you loved me at all.”
“But you know how I feel.”
He made it a statement, not a rhetorical question, the way guys like him tend to. That statement was just as dangerous, though.
“Maybe I don’t. Maybe I’m just a piece of ass to you.”
I said it mostly to challenge him now. If he wanted to be an insufferable pain in the ass, I could be every bit as difficult.
“The problem is, I know how I feel,” Kayden said. “You know how I feel, but it’s hard to come right out and say it.”
“What the hell are you talking about? You say it all the time.”
“I’m not following.”
