Page 29 of Slapshot Kiss

“You look like you’re about to throw up. Yes. Okay. I’ll take the dog.”

The breath he lets out fills the whole car.

"Get in," he says, already reaching over to shove the passenger door open from the inside, which is unnecessary and also exactly the kind of thing he'd do. "I'll explain everything on the way, I swear, I just — I have to be at the airport in two hours and Pickles is still at my place and I haven't even packed his—"

"Wyatt. Drive."

He drives faster than he should and apologizes for it twice, which is somehow more annoying than if he'd just kept driving badly in silence. I don't say much. There's not much to say, sitting in the passenger seat of the same car that dropped me at my building the last time. Except now I got in voluntarily. He knows it, and neither of us is going to be the one to point that out.

The freeway blurs past in strips of gray and green, and he keeps both hands on the wheel like he's holding himself to something, some rule I can't see the shape of yet.

"You didn't have to come get me yourself," I say eventually, watching the streets blur by. "You could've just told me the address."

"Yeah." He doesn't look at me. "I know."

He doesn't explain further, and I decide not to make him.

The radio's off. No music, no bit, no running commentary on of driving directions, just the hum of the engine and the tick of his blinker as he cuts across two lanes without checking his mirror, which earns him a look I don't bother hiding.

"Sorry," he says, before I've even said anything.

"You keep doing that."

"Doing what?"

"Apologizing before I've said a word."

He glances at me then, quick, like he wasn't expecting to get caught at it.

"Guess I figured you were thinking it loud enough."

He doesn't say anything else the rest of the drive, and I let the silence sit instead of filling it, which is new for me. Usually I'd fill dead air like it owes me money.

His building is nicer than I expect and somehow also exactly what I expect. New construction, clean lines, the kind of place that looks expensive without trying too hard, which tracks for a guy who just signed his first major contract in the league.

Inside, it's sparser than I expect. A couch. A television mounted a little too high. A dining table with four chairs, one of which has clearly never been sat in, still angled the showroom way, like nobody's bothered to mess up the arrangement since the delivery guys left.

Leaned against the wall by the window, looking like the only thing in the whole apartment that actually belongs to a person, sits an old acoustic guitar. Beat up in a way that reads earned instead of styled, the finish worn pale where a hand's rested a thousand times.

Interesting.

I don't get to look at it for long, because that's the exact moment Pickles rounds the corner like he's been fired out of something.

He is, I will note for the record, exactly as what I thought of when I heard the name.

Short legs moving at a speed that shouldn't be physically possible, ears doing something entirely independent of the rest of him, a sound coming out of him that isn't quite a bark and isn't quite a growl and is, I eventually decide, just pure undiluted joy given a voice.

He hits my shins at full speed and flops onto his back, belly up, offering himself to a total stranger with the confidence of a dog who's never had a bad experience in his life.

I crouch down before I've decided to.

"Oh, you're a menace," I tell him, and he groans like I've said something deeply moving.

Behind me, Wyatt says, "See, he gets it," already halfway to the bedroom, already down to one sock.

He's a mess in motion. A duffel half-zipped and spilling over the edge of the bed, phone wedged against his shoulder saying "yes, I know what time the plane leaves, I have a system" to someone who very clearly isn't buying it, hunting through a pile of clothes for the second sock like it personally betrayed him.

"Toronto," I say, mostly to fill the space, one hand still buried in the fur behind Pickles's ear. "Big one?"