buying it. What if I was traded? What if the real estate market tanked and I couldn’t unload the place? What if I’d made some mistake and hadn’t actually paid the whole thing off and the bank caught the error and foreclosed on me? I was pretty sure that was literally impossible, but it didn’t stop me from wondering if it could happen.
And that was to say nothing about how I’d lost my shit for a month after I’d bought the car. Or how I stressed so much over logistics when I went on vacation that it basically defeated the purpose a vacation. It was a damn good thing someone else handled all the travel details when the team was on the road; all I had to do was be where they told me to at the designated time, and even that was enough to make me jittery. God help me if I got stuck in traffic on the way to the airport.
Even when things went smoothly, half my energy on the road was spent keeping myself on an even keel so I didn’t have a breakdown. And sometimes I did anyway, which could seriously fuck me if I had a game that night. I’d only had to scratch because of it a handful of times in eight years as a pro, and there’d been a few times before that in college. But the nights when I didn’t scratch, hockey took ten times more effort than it did on a good day. I’d put that effort in—my team depended on me, after all—but it was hard as fuck. And ironically, sometimes the effort it took to keep one of those breakdowns away exhausted me enough that I may as well have just let it happen.
One of my coaches in college had said I was like an oyster. Get a grain of sand in me—an exam coming up that I worried about passing, a fight with a girlfriend, the unshakable fear that I’d oversleep and miss the bus to a game—and I’d obsess over it and put layer after layer of worry on it. Problem was, instead of getting a pearl out of the deal, I just got fucking tired.
It exhausted me. I was pretty sure it exhausted everyone around me.
So how much worse was it going to be now that I had something else to obsess over?
And, oh Christ. What if Devin saw me losing my mind over something? Some of my teammates had seen it, and Maddox and Kuznetsov were amazing at talking me down. No one gave me shit about it or acted like it was an inconvenience or whatever.
But they also knew I could play hockey. I might choke during interviews or be sweating bullets before warm-ups even started, but there was plenty of proof that once my skates met the ice, I could and did play hockey the way I was expected to. For the last three seasons running, I’d been one of the top five scorers in the league. My teammates could live with me being a train wreck in the locker room and occasionally on the plane as long as I had the stats to make it worth their while.
There was not, however, any proof that I could be a boyfriend or even a fuck buddy who was worth the effort it took to deal with my mental spirals.
Was it ironic that I was obsessing over whether my habit of obsessing over everything would ruin whatever this was I had with Devin? Probably. But what was I going to do? Just…stop obsessing over things? Magically have a normal mind that reacted normally to things that normal people could just roll with? Pretty sure that wasn’t how that worked.
Sighing, I rubbed my tired eyes.
A normal mind wasn’t in the cards for me. I’d just have to hope what I had wasn’t enough to scare Devin away. In fact, maybe it worked to my advantage that I was on the road more often than not for most of the year. The less he saw me, the less opportunity he’d have to see the real me.
And the less he sees me, the less likely I’ll be able to hold his interest.
Aw, fuck.
Something else to worry about all goddamned night…
I yawned all the way to the airport the next morning. I couldn’t even remember where we were going—we had a game tonight, right?—but at least I knew where to check in.