Page 9 of Grief & Glitter

“I wear eyeliner. I wear dresses. I’m gender fluid.” He threw the words out one after another, watching me for every flicker.

“Okay,” I said again.

“You don’t think it’s weird?”

“I don’t think it’s any of my business.” I shrugged. “If it makes you happy, then I’m happy for you.”

He searched my face so long I started to wonder if I’d said the wrong thing anyway. Then the tension went out of his shoulders in one long drop. “You really don’t care?”

“I care that you look terrified.” I nodded at the bag still crushed against his chest. “I don’t care what’s in there.”

The smile that broke over his face was small, but it was real, and my chest tightened. He said he should let me get my suit, and I told him I still needed one. For a second, he just stood there, as if he wasn’t sure he was still invited.

I thought about Walker decking him outside that hotel, about how they both apologized and moved on afterward, and about how maybe Ryan had just met people on the worst nights of their lives more often than he should have.

“Do you still want my help?” he asked. “After I did the whole stupid made-up friend thing?”

“I asked for your help because you look so—” I gestured at him. “That part hasn’t changed.”

His smile grew another fraction. The sales assistant reappeared with her tape measure already out, running it over my shoulders and chest and waist while Ryan hovered close, watching everything. “Classic navy?” she asked, tablet in hand.

“Probably.” Safe. Reliable. Hard to screw up.

She walked us to a wall of navy suits, fifty of them at least, some priced at more than my mortgage. My stomach dropped when I looked at the tags. People assumed hockey meant money, and maybe it did in the NHL, but not down here in the AHL. I was one of the best paid on the team, and it was woefully short of the millions that NHLers earned. Having watched too many guys my age burn through contracts as there’d always be another one waiting, I’d drilled it into myself from the day I signed my first deal: save first, spend never. I drove a truck that still ran fine after six years and lived in a condo well under what the bank said I could afford. Every dollar that hit my account got siphoned into investments before I could get ideas about it. I wasn’t dropping a thousand bucks on a suit I’d wear twice a year.

The sales assistant lifted a jacket off the rack. “This one’s popular.”

Ryan looked at it, then at me, then back at the rack, and asked if I’d thought about a different color.

“I wear navy every day,” I said.

“Exactly.” He was already moving. The nerves from a minute ago burned off by something more familiar. “You’re tall, dark hair, blue eyes. Navy’s fine, but it’s boring.” He pulled a jacket free that looked almost black until he turned it under the light and a deep red came up out of it.

“Maroon?” I guessed.

“Oxblood,” he corrected, already holding it against my shoulders, already stepping back to look. “Oh.”

He turned me toward the mirror. “Look,” he said. “It does something to your eyes. Makes your skin look warmer.” He studied me for a second longer. “It looks good.”

“Wow.”

“I know,” Ryan said, sounding a little breathless about it.

The sales assistant came over and admitted she’d never have picked it for me, but he was right. Ryan’s shoulders dropped another inch at that, and then he was moving again, pulling a shirt off the rack. “Crisp white, not cream.” He grabbed a tie next, deep oxblood with a subtle texture to it. “Nothing shiny.” Then he crouched at the shoe display. “And dark brown, not black,” he said when I started to argue.

“Trust me,” he said.

“I already said I would.”

His ears went pink.

He fussed over ties and pocket squares and lapels with a confidence that had nothing nervous left in it, and I stood there and watched him and couldn’t stop smiling.

Ryan checked his phone and went still. “I have to go. I’ve got a meeting.”

“Go,” I said. “I’ve got this.”

“Thank you.”