Chapter Two
Logan
“Golf isn’t our most popular option,” Brady Thomas told me. He was the director of the sports camp on the edge of Corrigan Falls. I’d been in town for less than twenty-four hours, but I’d seen enough to not need him to explain the situation to me.
“It’s a hockey town,” I said, helping him out. “The kids might play a little golf because they know a lot of pros like it, but the big draw is your arena.” God knows how much they had to pay to keep the ice in good condition through the warm summer months, but obviously they knew what their clientele was looking for.
Brady nodded at me. “We call ourselves a sports camp, but really we’re a hockey camp, with some options to distract campers when they can’t be on the ice.” He paused for a second, then asked, “Is that going to be a problem?”
“Not as long as you’re okay with me staying away from it.”
“Most of our other counselors are as hockey-mad as the kids. There’ll be lots of people ready to help out on the ice. We’ve already hired our lifeguards, but it’s good to have someone with the certification on standby, and you’ll get an extra $4.65 an hour if you’re lifeguarding instead of golfing. So between those two options and general camp activities, we can keep you busy.”
And that was the goal, for sure. I wanted to be kept busy. I didn’t need the money, I just needed the distraction.
“And your knee?” he asked, his voice gentle in the way I’d come to hate in the last ten months. “Any restrictions related to that?”
Any restrictions? Yeah, one huge damn restriction. No more hockey.
I forced a smile, hoping it looked more or less genuine. None of this was Brady’s fault, and he’d done me—well, done my father—a favor by giving me this job. “I’m still doing exercises for it, and I’m not supposed to overwork it. No contact sports. Nothing too intense. But golf and swimming are fine, and if you need someone to ref other sports or something, I can do that as long as there’s not too much running.”
He nodded as if this was consistent with what my dad had told him. “Okay, then. We don’t have campers arriving until tomorrow night, so most of our counselors are—” He broke off, looked down at his watch, then grimaced as he looked back up at me. “Well, right now, most of them are probably in the dining hall, watching TV.”
Watching the later rounds of the NHL draft. Of course.
“I don’t think I need to see that,” I said, my voice tighter than I wanted it to be. “Is there anything else I could be doing?”
“There’s always stuff to do. It might be a good idea to drive over to the golf course—they’ve got a shack over there where we store our loaner clubs, and I don’t think the door’s been cracked open since last fall. You could go through it all, make sure it’s in good order, pull out anything that needs to be repaired—that sort of thing. Hell, you should probably play a round or two, get to know the course.”
“Okay,” I agreed. The course was next to the camp and he gave me directions to find a path through the woods the campers used when they were walking over, and that was that. I was on my own, alone with my thoughts, doing everything I could to keep my attention where it belonged. I wished I could run instead of walk, just for the cardio and the distraction, but my physiotherapist had been pretty damn clear about taking things slow. She would have kicked my ass if she’d thought of me running along the rough path with all its twisted roots and other tripping hazards. It was important to her, and to my mom and dad, too, that I rehab properly in order to be sure I’d still have good use of my knee for the rest of my life. I knew they were right, when I was thinking straight. A lot of the time, though? If I couldn’t use the knee to play hockey, I wasn’t sure I wanted to use it for anything else.
But there was no point bitching about unchangeable things. That was what the therapist my dad sent me to said, though not exactly in those words, and he wasn’t wrong. So I tried not to think about it.
As Brady had instructed, I checked in at the clubhouse before going to the shed, but the place was deserted. I couldn’t imagine that the summer people cared all that much about the draft, but maybe they hadn’t really arrived yet. And clearly the locals cared a lot.
“You looking for someone?” a female voice asked me, and I turned to see— Oh shit. Dark hair, one side curling around her chin while the other side tickled her shoulder, with a wash of bright blue showing through from the under-layers. Tall and lean, with narrow hips and a natural, graceful way of moving. I’d seen this girl before. I’d seen a lot of this girl before, even if it had been at a distance. But judging from her neutral expression, she didn’t recognize me, which was just as well.
“I’m Logan,” I said. “Brady sent me over from the sports camp.”
She nodded. “You need to look at their stuff? You know where it is?”
That was when I noticed she was wearing a white golf shirt with the course’s logo on it. And of course that made me think of what was lying just under the logo, under the fabric—the skin I’d seen so much of the night before. Damn. She looked good with clothes on, but she’d looked even better with them off. And there’d been something intriguing about the way she’d tossed them aside, like she was shedding a skin that didn’t fit her anymore.
But I needed to stop thinking about any of that if I was going to have a prayer of holding a normal conversation with her. “Brady gave me directions. I think I’m okay.” Which meant I should stop chatting and start working. But I didn’t want to walk away, not quite yet. So I said, “I’m working at the camp for the next two months. Helping with the golf program.”
“Golf, huh?” She gave me an assessing look. “I’m Dawn. Where are you from?”
“We move a lot. I was in Montreal last year, though.”
“Montreal?” And just like that, her expression went from being a sort of polite neutral to totally animated and friendly. “I’m moving there at the end of the summer! For school—McGill—but mostly for the city. It’s excellent, right?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess.” I didn’t want to say that I’d spent most of my time in various medical buildings—too many questions into too many topics I really didn’t want to explore. “It’s got a lot of energy. But Corrigan Falls seems nice, too. Lots of…nature?”
She snorted. “Yeah. Lots of nature. That’s the big selling point.”
“You don’t like nature?”
“It’s not, like, real nature. You know? We’re not in Banff or the Arctic Circle or even Algonquin. It’s farms and cottages and little villages that aren’t even old enough to be quaint.” She shook her head. “City is good. Nature is good. But this weird hybrid? No. It’s not good.” She looked around her, then said, “Oh my God, it’s like a golf course! Fake nature! Nature restrained and contained into tiny little acceptable units that don’t interfere with the greens. That’s what nature in Corrigan Falls is like.”
She seemed pretty satisfied with her analogy.
“You prefer your nature unrestrained?” I asked her. I was really, really tempted to say something about the night before, maybe ask whether she experienced nature better when she took all her clothes off, but I kept my mouth shut. I hadn’t meant to spy on her; I’d just been sitting there, looking at the water, and before I knew what was happening she’d showed up and started stripping. By the time I realized what was going on, she was naked and half-submerged. So I was confident I hadn’t done anything too dickish then, but I wanted to be sure I didn’t ruin my good record by using it against her now.
“Either unrestrained or at least honest about being restrained,” she said. “It’s the faking I don’t like. Corrigan Falls does not have lots of nature, so it should stop pretending it does.”
You know those conversations that start off kind of serious and then turn into jokes? I was starting to think we were having one of those, but I wasn’t sure we were. I didn’t know her well enough to tell if she was deadpan-serious or deadpan-joking. It was unsettling, but I kind of liked it. “So your town is a liar is what you’re telling me.”
“Is it still a lie if you’re lying to yourself?”
“Maybe that’s the worst kind of lie.”
She nodded sagely. “It’s tragic, when you think about it. Corrigan Falls is caught in its own web of deception. It can’t even see reality anymore.”
“Maybe that’s not a bad thing.” And just like that, the fun of the conversation was kind of gone for me, because I was thinking about the therapist, about his attitude toward bad news. “If you can’t change something anyway, maybe it’s best to let it go and move on.”
“Or move out,” Dawn said, and she seemed to be following me back along the path to being more serious. “Maybe all the way to Montreal.”
“It is a great city,” I said. A great hockey city. But I wasn’t going to think about that. And there was a lot of other stuff going on in Montreal, too. “I hope you like it there.”
“Thanks.”
And then there wasn’t too much more to say, so I found my way out to the storage shed and started working through the equipment. None of it was top quality, but it was pretty well maintained. I pulled a few clubs out and put them in a pile to get new grips, and that was about it. Nothing mentally demanding, which was too bad, because I was still looking for a distraction. But for the first time in months, when my mind wandered that morning, it didn’t take me back to hockey, didn’t torture me with visions of goals I’d never score and trophies I’d never win.
Instead, I found myself picturing honey-brown skin warmed by the setting sun and graceful hips disappearing into cool, dark water. Maybe that was what would make me a dick; maybe it hadn’t been my fault I’d seen it in the first place, but I shouldn’t be mentioning it or letting myself think about it.
But I guess I didn’t care too much about being a dick, because I let myself run over those images again and again, and I added in a few more, like the sly half grin that had told me Dawn was probably joking about Corrigan Falls’ tragic self-deception and the enthusiastic energy when she talked about Montreal. Yeah, it was stupid. I was building up a girl I hardly knew at all into some sort of perfect fantasy creature. Not realistic and probably not even fair.
But at least I wasn’t thinking about hockey.