Page 34 of Two for Charging

“My mom says hi,” Breezy told him, muffled into Luca’s shoulder.

Swallowing his impulse to tell Breezy where his mother could shove her greetings, Luca said, “Thank you.”

He’d met Breezy’s family once, a few weeks into his start with the team. It was right after the locker room blowup when Hayes called him incompetent and blamed him for being “Mexican,” while Howie had claimed he was “queer.” Luca hadn’t known what to say to either accusation. Still brand new in the NHL, he didn’t want his teammates to see any weakness in him but lacked the right approach to call Hayes out himself. Telling the man he wasn’t Mexican would have been a slap in the face to Mooney, who had been standing right beside him.

Telling Howie that he wasn’t queer would have been worse, given he’d be lying.

Thankfully, Tom had rescued him by shutting down the entire situation, and then Breezy had cleared up the misunderstanding of Luca’s nationality and taken him out to dinner with his family.

For Luca, the dinner had seemed a reprieve from the tensions of the team—at least until he gained some insight into a whole new world of tension.

Breezy’s parents spent the entire evening bickering about what to order. Breezy’s father, a stout man in his mid-forties, told his wife she ought to reconsider dessert since she was getting fat. She retaliated by describing to the waitstaff in great detail what an embarrassment her husband would be if they kept refilling his wine glass.

Breezy’s brother, who looked just like Breezy but with forty pounds less muscle and black-framed glasses, egged them both on with pseudo-scientific facts about the dangers of obesity and off-color anecdotes about things their father had done while drunk.

Trapped in the middle, Breezy spent half the evening reassuring his mother she looked wonderful, which she did, and letting his father mock him for his performance during the games—a distraction technique, Luca assumed.

Ever since, Luca had been skeptical of Breezy’s close relationship to his family.

“Your family is terrible” wasn’t the sort of thing you could say to someone else though. Instead, Luca carded his hand through Breezy’s hair again, letting it fall across his forehead.

“That feels so good,” Breezy rumbled. “You should have a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend, I guess. Someone to give head massages. You’re depriving the world.”

Luca snorted a laugh. “You should get a girlfriend to do this for you.”

Breezy made a buzzer noise. It vibrated against Luca’s collarbone.

“You love dating. Why not try again?” He knew such encouragement counted as self-sabotage, but he hated to see Breezy hurting.

Sighing, Breezy pushed himself upright, and Luca mourned the loss of his touch. “You know why.”

Luca rolled to a seated position. “Is this about Amélie? I told you then she was shallow and rude and—”

“She wasn’t,” Breezy said, just as he had every time Luca mentioned the girl.

“She was, and I am sorry I ever introduced you.”

Breezy kept quiet for a long time. He stroked his fingers over the bedsheets, flattening creases. Finally, he looked up at Luca. “Why did you?”

Luca swallowed. “I watched you date three different women in two months because your parents picked them for you. I wanted you to meet someone for a different reason.”

“So you thought it would be better for me to date someone you picked?”

“I thought maybe you would get along.”

The full and unvarnished truth was that Luca thought Breezy would be so taken by the novelty of dating someone not chosen by his parents he would settle down with her. Everything about Breezy, from his generosity with his time and means, to his love for companionship, to his tendency for physical affection, screamed “relationship material.” He only needed to find the right person, and at the time, Luca believed it wouldn’t take much to convince him Amélie could be that person. In turn, Luca hoped seeing Breezy fall for someone so unlike him would mean he’d finally be able to move on from his unfortunate attraction.

Amélie had studied history with him in Italy, though her focus had been more on fashion history than anything else. She’d moved to Stanford to get a master’s in marketing a year before Luca finished his BA and decided to brave the NHL. She was beautiful in the toothless way fashionable French girls were. She spoke decent English and didn’t have strong opinions about Québécois. (Luca asked before he introduced them.) Actually, Amélie didn’t have strong opinions about much of anything. She was just…nice. Or so he’d thought. As soon as Luca set them up, Breezy started asking insightful, interested questions about her degree and her career plans.

It should have been perfect.

Instead, within a month, Amélie had dumped Breezy and told him his heart wasn’t in it. Whatever else she’d said must have been so heartbreaking it had driven him to drink. When Luca got home from the All-Star Game, he found Breezy sleeping on the couch, unshaven and with five empty beer cans stacked up on the coffee table next to him. Shortly after, he announced his intention to quit dating, and he’d stuck to it ever since.

“I did like her,” Breezy said.

“So why…”

“Liking people isn’t the problem. I like everyone. I also liked Brittany, and I liked Chloe, and I liked Vanessa. I liked every other girl my parents set me up with, but it’s never enough.”