This feels like that. Like Jake and I exist outside the bounds of our normal reality. Like we’ve walked right off the set of our lives, breaking the fourth wall.
“When you told me that earlier…” Jake takes a breath, looks up at the ceiling, and as much as I want to give him a hug, I force myself to keep my distance. He pauses, and a long moment passes before he’s ready to talk again.
“The thing is that I always thought hockey was my passion. My destiny. Like it was the one thing I could do to get out of this town, and it’s all that mattered. But now, well, after being in the NHL for a year, I know I’ve still got this empty feeling. Like it wasn’t quiteright.”
He shifts on the couch, turning to me, and I see the tears shining in his eyes, his mouth wobbling. “It’s because you weren’t with me, Lara. For five years, you have always been there, in the back of my mind, through everything - college, the draft, my rookie season.”
I’m already crying again, unable to believe this is true.
“But, aren’t you mad at me?”
“I am mad,” he says slowly, taking a deep breath through his nose like it might help to center him. “But not at you. As much as I wish things had gone differently, I understand why you made the decisions you did. I get why you didn’t tell me back then. And I think that…”
“What?” I whisper.
“Well, it’s impossible to go back and see what could have been, but I’m not going to rule out that I might have always thought about it. If you’d told me about the triplets?—”
“—back then, I thought it was only one baby.” I laugh.
He pauses, laughs, too, then shakes his head and goes on, “If you’d told me about the baby, and I had stayed — because Iwould have stayed — I might have always thought about what could have been. Not knowing what I missed with hockey.”
“Do you want to see more pictures?”
He nods, and we spend the next hour cycling through the pictures and videos on my phone.
“Aster, Chrysanthemum, Daffodil. But we call the girls Chrys and Daffy,” I explain, showing him Aster and Chrys’s first steps, which I caught on video. Daffy went straight from crawling to running, and I never got to see the in-between.
I tell Jake about how we learned Aster was lactose intolerant and how Chrys loves to wear pretty dresses, but Daffy is all about overalls; how every night, they get into bed and hear the same bedtime story.
“Right now, they’re all sharing one bedroom.” I gesture down the hall, and Jake's eyes follow with curiosity, so I show him. Three beds — one pink, one blue, one green. Posters and glow-in-the-dark stars on the walls. A little reading nook in the corner that they mostly use as a fort right now.
“Chrys is the only one who really reads,” I tell him, watching as he steps in, holding himself carefully like he’s in an antique shop or a museum. “But I really want all of them to have a love of books.”
“That tracks.” He laughs, turning and giving me a look. “I remember how Spiderman comforted you.”
Warmth floods through me. I don’t understand how, but less than a day after finding out about what I’ve kept from him, Jake is already back to joking with me. I have the feeling that things are going to be hard — that moving forward, we’re going to haveto work through this and figure out how to proceed, but right now, the only thing I can focus on is Jake in front of me.
“Can I see… your room?” he asks, and though there’s no hint of innuendo in his voice, it still sends a shiver through me. More than the idea of Jake in my bedroom is the knowledge that he wants to know me — that he wants to see the one place in this apartment that is truly mine, and mine alone.
I nod, then I’m leading him down the hallway to my bedroom. When I open the door, I see it through his eyes.
Queen bed in the center of the left wall, bookshelves lining the right.
“Custom?” Jake asks, taking a step toward the shelf and running his hand over part of the frame.
I nod and swallow, tucking my hair behind my ear. “Yeah.”
“I could have built something like this for you,” he says, smiling, his hand still on the shelf. “I’m not sure I want to hear how much this cost.”
That makes me laugh, and we linger in the moment together, smiling at each other, until Jake clears his throat and takes a step toward me, his eyes going serious.
“So, back then, the reason you didn’t come with me was just the babies?”
The breath whooshes from my lungs, and I nod. He takes another step toward me, his eyes searching my face as though looking for the truth there.
“There wasn’t… something I did?”
“No, Jake.” I’m earnest, stepping toward him, too, until we’re close enough that I can feel his body heat radiating from him. High metabolism. It reminds me of the time we sat in the bed of his truck, how his thigh next to mine had kept me warm. “I— it broke my heart. That night was torture, not coming after you. Not telling you the truth.”
