Page 94 of The Game Plan

Jax bends to his hunkers. “Are you okay?”

I sort of laugh, sort of cry as I shake my head and sniff a big, ugly, snotty sniff. The version of me who is suddenly in touch with her emotions has impeccable timing for showing up.

Jax helps me to stand up and smooths back my wet hair, as TJ collates and hands to his brother an untidy stack of the papers I brought along with me.

“Divorce papers?” Jax asks, reading the text. Suddenly, all the words I’ve been rehearsing. My big speech. They get stuck in my brain as Jax looks at me, wide-eyed. “You want to get divorced? Now?”

“Well, not right this second, but…” I nod. “Yes.”

Before I can start reeling off the speech, Jax whispers something to TJ, too quiet for me to hear. To which TJ asks, “Now? Here? Like this?”

“Yeah,” Jax tells him.

TJ leaves the rink and Jax gives me those big doe-eyes, again, giving me the strength I need to take the plunge and explain myself. I have to try. Like my dad said, I have to put myself out there and hope for the best.

“Jax—”

“Sienna—”

“You go,” we say simultaneously, then briefly laugh, breaking the tension that’s palpable. I don’t dare look but can sense his teammates’ eyes on us.

“Can I go?” I ask. He nods. “Jax, I’d like a divorce.” I hear a whistle and a sharp intake of breath from somewhere on the ice.

Jax rolls his jaw but I steady myself and I tell him, “Because I’d like to take you on a date.” His brow furrows. “I’d like to take you to dinner and maybe stroll under the moonlight holding hands afterward, having the internal dilemma of whether I’m going to put out on the first date.”

He chuckles as I whisper, “I would, by the way,” and wink. He raises his hands from his sides toward me, almost reflexively, I think, then lowers them again. Good. Touching is a distraction I don’t need until I’ve finished what I’ve come here to say.

“I want to try things the conventional way and hopefully…” I swallow, staring into those pools of light and dark and complexity that I didn’t know eight weeks ago. “Then hopefully, Jax, you’ll fall for me, as hard as I’ve fallen for you.” He’s rigid. Quiet. Expressionless. There’s a first, though highly inconvenient, time for everything.

“So, I want a divorce, Jax, to take away the pressure. We don’t have to live together and you don’t have to put on a PR show. Screw what other people think and if we’re not pleasing the public opinion. Because I don’t want you to feel forced into a relationship with me. I want you to want to date me. And if that means I jump from caretaker job to caretaker job for a while, until I figure out that part of my life, I’ll do it, happily. So long as you’ll come on a date with me.”

He says nothing. Nothing. Stares at me blankly.

Lord, Jesus. I’ve put myself out there. Everything on the line. In front of his entire team and the people I work with and… nothing.

TJ appears, says something into Jax’s ear and hands something to him.

Then Jax is – rather composed and skillfully by comparison to me falling into the arena – taking a knee.

Huh?

“I wasn’t going to do this here, like this. I had a plan, can you believe that? But you’ve forced my hand.”

“What are you doing?” I ask, anxiously looking around the faces on the ice with us.

“What I should have done before getting dressed up as a minion eight weeks ago, Si. The moment I stood on the sidewalk in Las Vegas and realized that… I’m in love with you.”

He tosses the divorce papers across the ice. “No, I won’t divorce you. Just like I never had any intention of getting our marriage annulled.” He holds up a Tiffany’s box and when he opens it, I recognize instantly the ring we chose for me as a wedding band, the one we couldn’t wait to have resized. And with it, a hefty, sparkling diamond ring.

“If something is worth doing, do it properly, right?” he asks, repeating my own words to me.

I hold my hands to my mouth, looking from the rings to my accidental husband.

“Conventional is overrated, Si,” he says. “Nothing about us has been ordinary. Not the way we met, or the way I fell in love with you dressed as Marilyn Monroe. We jumped ahead to our happily ever after and forgot to tell the story first.”

Hot tears start leaking down my cheeks. “I don’t remember everything that happened in Vegas, Sienna, and I’m glad I don’t because now we get to go back to the beginning and write our story. But I already know that it ends with us being married. So, I’m asking you now, Sienna Jamieson, would you please stay married to me? Because I want to take you on that first date, and I absolutely want you to put out on it, too. And because I want to give you the gift of time to figure out what your next life move is, so long as I’m in it.”

He comes to stand and wipes away my tears. “I don’t love you because you’re superwoman, Sienna, I love you in spite of it, the way I know you didn’t fall for me the hockey player. Because I feel it. You love me, if not in spite of it, then for everything else, even the annoying bits.”