Seven
Porter
Another week, and I still hadn’t been successful in getting Asher to come home. It had now been four weeks since I last saw her, six weeks since the whole ordeal.
Fuck, I couldn’t get her to even talk to me.
I really wished Coach would allow me to be a healthy scratch, but game after game, he was banking on my anger to fuel much-needed fights on the ice.
Because that was all I was good for.
The rest of my game was shit.
I couldn’t play, not while knowing Asher was hurting, knowing that she locked herself away from me.
Still, again and again I boarded a plane—coach, business class, first class, wherever the fuck they had a seat—and tried to get even a glimpse of the woman who was supposed to be my wife.
The one who pushed me away to an extent I didn’t even know was possible. Not with the shit and times we’d already been through.
Avery seemed to bounce back to her normal self, but she had CJ to lean on. And she did.
She leaned on him, just like Asher should have fucking been leaning on me.
I should have just held her that afternoon. I shouldn’t have given in to her words and taken what she offered. I should have held her until she fell asleep. I should have allowed her to break and I should have been there to help put the pieces back together.
But her eyes.
Her words.
I was so fucking helpless to her.
Fucking powerless.
And look where that got me.
Living in our house, just me and our dog, with visual reminders of her all around me.
I carried her ring with me everywhere, even when I was in South Carolina, and the likelihood of me seeing her was so far past nil, it was pointless to wonder, but I had it on me.
I refused to believe she was calling off our wedding for good. I’d give her the time she sought, the time she needed, but some way or another, I was marrying Asher.
I knew she was going to therapy with Avery—it was one of the only things Ace told me about her.
Was it helping her? Talking to someone, with Avery at her side?
God, I fucking hoped so.
I was in the middle of one of these thoughts, sitting at my parents’ kitchen table and staring at an untouched cup of coffee, when Avery took a seat across from me.
“How is she?” I asked, my eyes not leaving the cup.
“She’s doing okay.”
Avery didn’t offer me anything else, but I was getting used to that.
Getting used to knowing Avery knew things that I didn’t, and that she wouldn’t tell me.
On the one hand, I was glad Asher had that type of friendship with Ace but fuck, Avery was my sister! Surely, she could tell me something.
I could feel Avery staring at me and I glanced up, catching her nibbling on her lip in a way that reminded me of Asher.
“What?” I snapped at her, not intending for it to come out as rough as it did.
Rather than be put off by my raised voice, she continued to stare at me.
“Don’t you have clients to look after?” I grunted, looking back to the coffee cup.
“I’m looking at one now.”
“Go bother Caleb or Jonny.”
“They’re in San Diego. You should be in South Carolina, but here you are… So, I’m looking at you.”
I crossed my arms and slipped into a slouch in my chair.
“Asher…” she started, and I snapped to attention, all while trying to hold my relaxed, albeit annoyed, pose in my chair.
Avery sighed before continuing. “Do you know everything that she went through as a teenager?”
I stared across the table at my sister, challenging her. “Yes.” A simple answer for a complex time in Asher’s life. But in case Avery didn’t know everything, didn’t know that she’d been raped, in addition to being in that hellhole of a house, it wasn’t my place to blurt it all out. Asher trusted me with those pieces of her past.
“Everything?” she asked again, a brow lifted in question.
“Yes!” I couldn’t stop myself from raising my voice.
Avery opened her mouth to say something, only to close it again. Finally, she said, “Did she tell you who raped her?”
My blood ran cold. Avery did know Asher had been raped.
When I didn’t answer, my sister squeezed the bridge of her nose. “She’s going to kill me. I shouldn’t tell you.” She dropped her hand and her sad blue eyes met my green ones across the table. Therapy was supposed to be sacred, I got that, but if she had something that would shed light on why Asher was pushing me away? I wanted the information.
“What happened, Ace?” My gut was dropping with every moment Avery didn’t give me the answer. Avery knew something about my fiancée that I didn’t.
Immediately, my mind began to try and find the missing puzzle piece, trying to figure out when everything started going to hell.
Asher was upset when Ryan came.
Avery and Ash were taken, where, from my understanding, Asher took the brunt of everything her former foster father had to give.
And Asher didn’t leave that hotel room as whole as she’d been before she’d been in.
She took the brunt of it.
She’s been raped as a teenager.
Her last foster family had been ‘bad.’
The bastard touched her now.
I swore when the dots connected. Fuck no.
“No,” I sneered, shaking my head.
No.
No fucking way.
She took the fucking brunt of it all, because it wouldn’t have been the first time.
She knew what the man was capable of.
He was the reason she wanted to be so far removed from her foster care days. He was the reason why she was upset when Ryan showed up.
“She has things she needs to work through, Porter,” Avery tried saying, her voice low. My mind was racing in overdrive, everything Asher had been through, sinking in, and sinking deep—a heavy rock tied to it and bringing it to the bottom of the ocean.
The bottom of my gut.
She went through all of that, and she didn’t want to lean on me.
She went through it, and she was fucking pushing me away.
“She needs time.”
I pushed away from the table, the force knocking the chair over as I slammed my hands down. “Fuck that! She needs me! She needs someone to hold her through the fucking dark times. I’m her goddamn fiancé! Why the hell is she pushing me away?”
Every time a shoe fucking dropped where Asher and I were concerned, it shattered the illusion that what we had was solid.
“You’re making it about you,” Avery said, her tone placid, but I could see that her temper was rising and would easily match mine shortly. And sure enough, “This isn’t about you, Porter!”
“I show up!” I jabbed a finger into my chest. “I’m here for her at every fucking turn and she won’t bend enough to let me in all the fucking way! Just when I think I’m there, something else fucking happens. She was supposed to marry me, Avery, not even three weeks ago, Avery. So, yes! Yes, I’m making this about me. Why the hell can’t she lean on me? Why does she have to go through this on her own?”
My sister clenched her jaw and looked away, shaking her head before looking back at me. “You need to give her the time and space she needs.”
With that, she left the kitchen, left the house, leaving me there to stew on her words in silence.
***
Not long after Avery left, I made my way to General Mitchell, getting on a stand-by flight with relative ease. I made it to evening practice, then the next day, to morning practice, the entire time Nico not saying a word to me.
Probably my rosy disposition.
After years of rooming together, my teammate and friend knew my moods.
He also knew Asher. He knew everything I went through, from the moment I got the phone call to go home, to the first moment I stepped foot in South Carolina without Asher at my side.
Right now, though, another day of being in this house that was much too big for just me and the damn dog—big as he was—I was lying in bed, trying to get my body to relax enough to fall into a pre-game nap, when he came walking through my bedroom door. I glanced at Caine laying in bed beside me.
“Your guard dog duties are shit, Caine,” I mumbled to him. He merely lifted his eyes, his face still resting on his paws as he laid on Asher’s side of the bed.
“Still no wife?” Nico asked, and I refrained from giving him my middle finger. Instead, I just watched him as I lay unmoving on my bed.
Nico leaned against the wall, his ankles crossed and his arms over his chest. “Have you talked to her?”
“Nope.” I looked back up at the ceiling.
“Avery tell you anything?”
I ground my molars. My heart clenched in my chest at the knowledge of what Asher had been through, the secrets she had kept, the ones she still hadn’t had the fucking nerve to tell me.
Nico sighed heavily before saying, “Knowing Asher…Do you think she’s trying to shield you from something?”
“Shield me from what, pray tell?” I cocked my jaw to the side, still not looking over at my friend. “I fucking love her, want to marry her, but apparently, she wants nothing to do with me anymore.” I couldn’t believe that was true, but the longer I went without talking to her, seeing her, it was sinking in that when she told me to leave, she likely truly meant the words.
She couldn’t.
Couldn’t mean them.
She knew I loved her. She had to know that nothing she went through, would pull me away from her, from loving her.
“Want me to make a pre-game meal?” Nico finally said, changing the subject.
This time he wasn’t being an ass.
“If you broke into my house, then yes, fucker. You can,” I mumbled, closing my eyes.
I heard as he stepped out of the room, closing the door behind him.