The Wall of Winnipeg and Me - Mariana Zapata Page 0,138
legs. Those long, size-thirteen feet peeked out from beneath the baggy hems of his pants. And that upper body…
It hadn’t gotten old, and I hadn’t become desensitized to those hard, square pecs covered with a sprinkling of dark chest hair. Or those hard slabs of stacked abdominal muscles. Those wide shoulders, trim waist, and bulging biceps only made him look that much more spectacular. He’d turned down a magazine cover photo shoot for some stupid reason the year before, and I hadn’t understood why. Even when he was at a higher weight, he still looked amazing. If he sold a calendar filled with pictures of himself in it, he could make so much money.
That was something to think about later when Aiden wasn’t busy telling me I was stereotyping the rest of his countrymen. “Not every Canadian is good at hockey,” he explained, tying the cord of his pajama pants.
I glanced at his calm face and raised my eyebrows. “Are you saying you sucked at it?”
He gave me that smug look I usually hated as he planted his hands at his waist. “I didn’t ‘suck at it.’ I’m good at most sports. I didn’t enjoy playing it, is all.”
Arrogant much?
“You’ve sat through all those interviews with me. You know everything,” he added in a way that struck a chord with me, like he was trying to tell me something I couldn’t piece together.
“You’ve always just talked about how you liked playing lacrosse, but that’s it.” For some reason, no one had ever outright asked him why he didn’t play the more popular Canadian sport than one that was predominantly American, at least as far as I could remember.
The big guy leaned his bottom against the dresser. “My grandfather enrolled me in it for a few seasons when I was younger, but it didn’t click for me, you didn’t know that?” I shook my head. “My high school’s hockey coach tried recruiting me to play for him in grade 10. I was already six feet tall. I weighed two hundred pounds, but I told him I wasn’t interested.”
While I recognized the differences between football and hockey were vast, I still couldn’t comprehend what he was trying to hint at. “What didn’t you like about it?”
“I didn’t like it. It’s that simple.” His tongue poked at the inside of his cheek and the big guy didn’t make any theatrics about what he said. “My dad used to beat the shit out of me because he could, once a week at least until I hit puberty. I’ve gotten into enough fights in my life; I’ll fight somebody if there’s a good reason, but not for a game.”
I never tried to throw myself too much of a pity party over what I’d grown up with. Over not being loved enough by my mom. Over not being important enough for whoever my dad was to stick around or at least attempt to meet me. While I definitely wasn’t as messed up as my sisters, I had a temper. I got angry easily. But I had made myself learn how to control it. I had decided early on that I wasn’t going to let that emotion define me.
I wanted to be better. I wanted to be a good person. I wanted to be someone—not necessarily someone great or someone important—but someone I could live with.
My little brother didn’t drink at all, and I knew it was because of our mom’s drinking problem. While he was four years younger than me and had spent less time in that household than I had, he remembered enough. How could he not? But I didn’t want to avoid alcohol because I was scared of what it could do to me. I didn’t want to demonize it. I wanted to prove to myself that it wasn’t a monster that destroyed lives unless you let it.
Life was all about choices. You chose what to make out of what you had. And I wasn’t going to let it make me its bitch. I could be a mature adult who knew her limits. I could be a good person. Maybe not all the time, but enough.
So Aiden’s explanation, and the fact that his motherfucking asshole dad used to pick on him, pricked at the soft, tender pieces of this place that went deeper than my heart. I knew what it was like to not want to fall into a hole that had been dug for you before you even had a chance to fill