Chapter 21

& the moment you've all been anxiously waiting for...drum roll please



“My life is over.” Tabby stares down at the pocket of extra fabric at the front of the jeans she’s trying on and feels tears fill her eyes.

“Well what did you think? You could wear your skinny jeans forever?” Katie muses as she looks up from the magazine she’s reading. For her part, Mel at least covers her mouth to try and hide her giggle.

“Do you know what I was wearing when I first met him?” Tabby sniffs, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand, wishing she’d chosen waterproof mascara that morning. “Daisy Dukes. Do you have any idea what I’d look like in those right now?”

“You’re not really showing,” Mel gets up and tuggs down the loose, slightly flowing tunic top, “and if you have the top down no one knows, see?”

“This screams maternity,” Tabby moans, picking at the hem of the long top.

“Well what you have to ask yourself,” Katie reminds her quietly, “is whether you’re going there to tell him that he’s going to be a daddy or if you’re going there to jump his bones.” A kind of hush falls over the little group as Tabby stares disconcertedly at her reflection.

“I don’t know,” is her honest reply as she turns sideways and smooths the top down over the now more than barely discernable bump.

“She doesn’t have to tell him,” Trina mumbles from behind the ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting’ Book Mel had picked up for Tabby. She’s been making faces and uncomfortable noises ever since she opened it.

“He has a right to know,” Mel interjects. Tabby sighs. This is the very reason that she hasn’t been able to come to a decision. Her friends are split and every time she thinks about it her stomach rebels and she ends up lying down until the nausea passes.

“He might not want to even see me, let alone talk to me,” Tabby says calmly, reaching for the empire waist dress that she’d first tried on. She takes it and herself back into the changing room. Slipping the top she’s tried on off, she stands in front of the mirror and turns sideways. It had seemed to happen overnight, the expansion of her stomach to where it now looks very much like she’s swallowed a football. It isn’t that she’s regretting her decision, exactly. It’s more like she can’t quite picture herself facing him looking and feeling like this. The problem is, whenever she thinks about him, she thinks about them together and in her current condition she can’t make that picture come clear.

“I never really believed that shit about pregnant women glowing.” Tabby turns to find her friend Trina leaning in the doorway of the change room, “but damn girl, you’ve got that whole maternal goddess thing going on right now.”

“You don’t have to try and make me feel better,” Tabby mumbles, quickly stepping out of the ‘mom jeans’ as she had been calling them and grabbing the dress, she pulls it over her head.

“Hey, would I bullshit you?” Trina grabs the ties on the back of the dress and makes a careful bow. “I mean it. If I was a guy, hell if I even swung a little that way, I’d totally do you.” She tugs the bow to be sure it stays tight and then slides her hands around Tabby’s waist and over her little bump. “And if he did love you, even a little, then I’m telling you girl, he’ll see you like this and he won’t be able to keep his hands off of you.” Tabby’s eyes well up and she shakes her head.

“I’ll be lucky if I don’t throw up on him,” she sighs, turning first one way and then the other in the dress. It ‘s a definite improvement on the ‘mom jeans’ and it doesn’t exactly scream ‘maternity’ but it’s far from shouting ‘sexy’. Maybe it’s a good balance or maybe she’s just tired of thinking.

“You’re supposed to be past that, in the second trimester,” Trina leans her chin onto Tabby’s shoulder. “And if he doesn’t want you, then that’s his loss. You’ll just have to get Bieksa to start a rumor that he’s a raging fag,” she adds with a grin.

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“Whatcha doin’?” Kris pokes Sidney’s skate with the blade of his stick. Sid drags his attention from the empty arena and turns it towards his friend and teammate.
“What’s that?” he asks, narrowing his eyes in consternation. He hates having his pre-game rituals fucked with.

“Qui es-tu recherché?” Kris asks, looking around at all the empty seats. There are, as there always seem to be in every city they visit, a few reporters, a few company reps from Tim Hortons and other sponsors and a spattering of lucky kids. None of them, however, appear to be what Sid is looking at, or is that for?

“I was just wondering…imagining I guess if she came tonight….”

Tanger raises an eyebrow and then shakes his head, making his hair fall into his eyes. “You don’t think she’ll actually come to a game do you? I mean, if she actually figured out who you really are, do you think she’d just come running to a game after all the lies you fed her?”

“Who are you girls yakking about?” Jordy joins them at the boards, and he too scans the nearly empty arena. “Fuck, I thought there might be some hot chick we were checking out. I shoulda known better.”

“Sid’s hoping Tabby shows,” Max interjects, not even having to be told.

“Personnellement, je pense que tu rêves.” Sid opens his mouth to tell his teammates exactly where they can and should shove it and just exactly how hard, when Kris lets out a long, low whistle and for once, his teammates fall silent.

He feels it like a tickle at the back of his neck and it only takes a brief scan of his friends’ faces to tell him that what he’s feeling is real.

She’s here.

He turns slowly until he’s facing the benches and he forgets to breathe when he sees her standing there at the gate, her gaze searching, waiting for his. It takes him another moment to realize that the Canuck's defenseman is standing guard behind her, with a few other obviously interested on lookers peering out from the corridor that leads to their dressing room.

Part of him wants to dig his skates into the fresh ice, toss his stick and gloves down and fly across it to her but the other part of his brain is screaming ‘caution’ at the top of its’ lungs. ‘You haven’t spoken to her in months’, he reminds himself, ‘and Bieksa looks a whole lot like he’s itching to send you head first through the boards, which can’t bode well’ he adds silently as he puts his head down and glides slowly towards her.

The problem is he can already taste her lips, he can already feel the long, dark silky strands of her hair sliding through his fingers. He’s not even to centre ice and he’s sure he can smell the clean lavender soap scent of her skin. His heart is pumping hard, like he’s been doing wind sprints and the truth is he’s hardly made two laps of the ice, hasn’t even broken a sweat and yet he can feel the cold clammy trickle of sweat dripping down from beneath his helmet. This is what she does to him. She unnerves him, unmans him, and that should matter, but somehow it doesn’t. He knows as approaches the boards that he’d let the Canuck's defenseman put him through the boards, let the zamboni drive over him, if it means that somehow, some way, this won’t end badly.
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“I’m going to be sick.”

Tabby reaches out to press the flat of her hand to the cool concrete wall and leans over, shutting her eyes against the wave of nausea that engulfs her as they near the end of the corridor. She’d like to believe that it’s the funk coming from the dressing room but she knows it’s not. She can smell the ice and she can hear the sound of skates gliding through the frozen playing surface, pucks ricocheting off the boards and the glass and that means that he is only steps away.

“You don’t have to do this,” Kevin’s hands settle comfortingly on her shoulders and she feels his thick fingers digging into her shoulder blades. “Someone else can tell him, preferably while I have him in a headlock,” he adds with a mocking tone that’s half joking and half not. He’d do it, no questions asked. All she has to do is nod her head. They’ve gotten to be good friends, he and his wife, even in this short time. He's protective. It's his paternal instincts.

“No,” she straightens and waits for the momentary dizziness of her sudden movement to pass. “I have to do this.” Taking a deep breath, she asks her legs to go forward even though they feel like they’re going to give way beneath her. She wishes she could hold Kevin’s hand, as if she were a little girl. It would be comforting but ‘lily livered’ as her grandfather would say.

Stepping out into the box the cold air makes her draw in a ragged breath, or maybe it’s the black practice uniforms of the skaters out on the ice that says they are different, other. They are not the blue and green and white practice uniforms of the Canucks. That’s not to say she was used to Kevin’s uniform, it just meant that he was out there.

She can feel him, like the tug on the other end of a fishing line. She knows, even beneath the bulky uniform, the helmet and pads, she knows it’s him the moment her gaze settles on his back. She doesn’t need to see the small ‘87’ on the back of his helmet.

She grips the top of the half boards, feeling the meeting of wood and plastic under her hands as he turns, as his gaze meets hers’. She hears herself gasp and her hand goes to her swollen midsection. It’s like she’s been kicked, but from which side?
He puts his head down and slowly, too slowly, begins to skate towards her. It’s like watching him move in slow motion, like watching skate through knee deep water. She’s had time to watch almost every video on youtube and she knows he can skate quicker than he is. Does it mean he’s as reluctant for this reunion as she is?

Her nails dig into the boards and she wills herself to stand there and wait. Say nothing. Just breathe. That, in and of itself, is made more difficult by her racing pulse. With every gliding step he takes, her heart beat quickens until it seems like all she can hear is the rush of her own blood in her veins and the frantic hammering of her heart.

When he gets within a few feet of the bench he raises his eyes and she feels the ice she’s surrounded her heart with melt away. He actually looks as vulnerable and scared as she feels.

‘Don’t forget the bomb you’re about to lay on him’, she reminds herself. She knows the look on his face might…no, will change the moment she tells him. ‘He’s got everything, the whole world at his feet. He doesn’t need this. He’s going to hate this,’ she tells herself. It’s sort of like telling herself not to get her hopes up...or exactly like it.

“Tabby.”

His saying her name tastes like dark chocolate sauce over fudge ripple ice cream. She opens her mouth but the name that springs to her lips is ‘Patrick’ and she catches it just in time, and shakes her head and smiles sardonically. Instead she stays silent until he reaches the boards and they find themselves staring shyly at one another like two strangers, or not quite.

“We should talk,” she says quietly, the words she’s rehearsed in her head coming out almost too quiet but she knows he’s heard her as his gaze searches hers’. He wants to know what it means but not here. She won’t say anything to him here in front of his teammates. “Is it okay if we…,” she lets her voice trail off as she glances over her shoulder to find OB and Eddy and Ehrhoff watching her intently, ready to spring to her defense if needed. She smiles and shakes her head and does her best to look confident even though she feels far from it.
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He manages to open the gate even though his hands are shaking. That’s why he doesn’t take off his gloves, he’s hoping no one will notice if he leaves them on. He can feel everyone watching him and it should be something he’s used to but this feels more like ‘dead man walking’, like he’s being lead to the gallows.

It can’t be good, he thinks to himself as she turns and heads down the narrow, dim corridor, following her retreating form. She could barely manage a smile for him. ‘Well what did you expect?’ he shakes his head at his own naivety. Had he really expected some scene out of some stupid romantic movie with them running into each other’s arms?

‘Just ask her what it’s all about’, he tells himself firmly, ‘get it over with and get back on the ice.’ Sure he’d wanted to see her but if this was all going to go pear shaped….

She turns into one of those rooms the trainer’s used, with an examination table and as she turns to face him, he finds himself speechless. Sure he’d seen her but not really. He hadn’t registered how her hair is now streaked with some colour, is it dark red? Purple? Both? Or that her milk chocolate eyes are rimmed with kohl or that her full lips are stained blood red. He licks his lips. He wants to kiss her.

She’s paler now, but this is Vancouver. It rains here all the time doesn’t it? Maybe it’s the black dress she’s wearing, he thinks and then he thinks it covers too much of her. He can’t help but want to undress her in his mind but he doesn’t want her to see that he’s doing it. He tries to find something else to look at but as soon as he looks down she’s suddenly there, reaching for his hand.

He stares down at her outstretched hand like he expects it to burn him and her eyes go wide. Their hands pause there, mid air, fingertips almost touching but not.

“You left,” he hears his own voice accusing her and he wishes he could take it back.

“You left first,” she says quietly.

“I went back,” he insists. “You were gone.”

“You practically called me a whore,” she whispers back, and withdraws her hand, backing slowly away from him. He can’t stop looking at her. She’s so damn beautiful. He doesn’t want to fight. So why am I? he asks himself. “ I…I didn’t come to fight,” she whispers and he can’t help thinking ‘thank god’ and then he finds himself reaching out for her and now she’s looking at his hands like she expects him to do something to hurt her. He looks down at his stick and smiles. How can he blame her when he’s got a weapon in his hand? He leans the stick against the wall and moves again toward her but she holds her hand out, like a ward. “You…there’s something you should know,” she says quietly and, as he watches, she smoothes her dress over her belly, only it’s not…it’s not the small, feminine sort of swell but it suddenly looks like she’s hiding a rugby ball under there.

He stares at the bulge she seems to be holding between her hands up for a long time before he looks up and meets her gaze. Her dark eyes are welling over with silver tears. He opens his mouth but no words come out. He feels numb. He’s not sure what he should feel. There’s a voice in the back of his head, more like a warning siren, telling him that this is exactly what Troy has warned him about, saying it’s a trap and to deny it and yet….

His hands reach out and though he can see a flicker of fear in her gaze she doesn’t flinch as his hands slide over hers, cradling her stomach until they’re standing close, his body alongside hers’, close enough that he can taste orange juice on her breath.

“I’m here,” he says out loud, as if he’s made a decision he’s not fully aware of making. She turns her gaze up to meet his and all he can see is her full, red, mouth and in the next moment he’s kissing her, her lips moving and parting beneath his.