Darkroom: A Moo U Hockey Romance by Kate Willoughby (reading a book .txt) 📕

I sighed. “Then we’ll have to look at surgery.”

But I really didn’t want to even think about surgery. The idea of someone messing around in my ear with a laser… What if the surgeon got jostled and fucked up my brain? What if I got out of surgery in worse shape than when I went in?

35

Hudson

As I was waiting for the Uber driver to pick me up and bring me to the airport, my dad came out of the house and jogged down the steps to where I stood on the sidewalk. A light snow was starting to fall. Wearing a track suit and no shoes, he had to be freezing.

“Hudson, before you go, I wanted to say I’m sorry about what I said. About Indi.”

Without lifting my gaze from my phone, I said, “Which time?”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and nodded. “Okay, I deserved that. Both times. I just…you have so much on the line right now and it’s not the time to be—”

“Stop.” I held up my hand. “I’ve already heard this lecture a thousand times, Dad. I know what’s at stake. I’m not stupid. But Indi is special. I’m in love with her.”

He sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

“You know, Dad, I really don’t understand why. You said at your retirement celebration that you never would have achieved what you had without Mom by your side. Was that a lie?”

“Of course it wasn’t a lie.” His upper lip curled in indignation. “That was the God’s honest truth.”

“Then, how about a little faith that Indi could be for me what Mom was for you? How about you don’t jump to conclusions that honestly sound paranoid?”

“I’m not paranoid.”

“Then why are you so convinced that Indi’s a gold-digger?”

He blew out a breath that steamed in the frigid air. “Because…” He cast a wary glance behind us. “I almost married one.”

I stared at him in surprise.

“What the…? When?”

“It’s a long story. How about I drive you to the airport and I’ll tell you on the way?”

Burning with curiosity, I agreed. I thought I had heard every story my dad had to tell, but I’d never heard anything about a gold-digger.

Five minutes later, we were on Atlantic, headed for I-278E with an estimated drive time of one hour. I was again reminded how powerful the Camaro was and how you could feel it in your tailbone when he revved the motor.

“I was twenty-three, only a couple of years older than you when I fell for Sabina. She was a knockout. Blonde, great rack, big pouty lips. I thought she adored me. I certainly adored her. She was insatiable in bed. I mean, she could—”

“Dad, don’t! Let’s not go there, okay?”

“Right, right. Sorry,” he said. “Anyway, I was like the frog in the pot of water that heats so slowly he doesn’t realize he’s being cooked. She took her time, conditioning me to do whatever she said, buy her whatever she wanted until eventually, she got me to propose.”

“Did she start dragging you into jewelry stores?”

“That would have been too obvious for Sabina. No. After we’d been exclusive for about a year, we were at this rock-climbing place where this guy proposed to his girlfriend at the top of the wall and everybody there made this big deal about it. Including Sabina. I said, ‘Hell, that was nothing special. I could do better than that.’”

“I can hear you saying that in my head.”

“Right?” my dad said. He was always boasting that he could do this better or that better and the annoying thing was, he usually could.

“So when Sabina heard this, she laughed, patted me on the cheek like I was a little kid, and kept climbing. That’s all it took, son. She didn’t even say anything. That’s how slick she was. Two months later after we were knocked out of the playoffs, I took her to Venice and popped the question on a gondola, which, you gotta admit, was out of this world special.”

It was hard to picture my dad, in his twenties, proposing to a woman in Italy, especially since the woman wasn’t my mother.

“Sabina said yes and we set a date for the following summer. Deposits were made, invitations went out. Everything was all set. Then the morning of the wedding, your Aunt Marty pulls me aside. Says she needs to talk to me, that it’s urgent.

“She was at the bachelorette party the night before and at the time she was three months pregnant with your cousin Garrett, so she wasn’t drinking. Anyway, the rest of the girls at the party got rip-roaring drunk and at one point, Sabina starts bragging about the multi-million-dollar contract I’d just signed and how she was set for life now because I was too stupid to make her sign a prenup.”

I sucked in a breath. “Jesus.”

“I confronted Sabina and she denied it, of course, but you know your Aunt Marty. She would never lie about something like that.”

Aunt Marty was one of the most stalwart, kind women I knew. She wasn’t prone to exaggeration or gossip, so if she said something happened, you knew it actually happened.

“It took me a long time to get over Sabina. I really thought she loved me, but she only loved my money and the life I was going to give her. So, I’m not paranoid, son. I just don’t want you to get caught by a woman like her.”

“Indi’s not like that. She doesn’t care that much about money. If you’d spent more time with her, you would have seen that. She likes economizing. She prefers comfort over luxury. We actually talked about what trip we’d take if money was no object, and she said she’d like to go camping in Yosemite.”

My dad didn’t look convinced. “She could just be pretending to be like that.”

“She could, but she’s not. You just need to get to know her better.”

He tapped his thumb on the steering wheel thoughtfully.

“Until then, give us