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1.
Ryan does what he can.
Ryker’s sick again and Andrea has that tight look to her face, lips pursed into something not unlike a frown, full of worry and stress, and Ryan has to go to practice. It’s mandatory. But Ryker is crying softly, confused with his body, and all he wants to do is cling to his father. Ryan hugs him tight, feeling guilt constrict his chest. He hums, trying to soothe his kid, and Andrea swoops in, taking Ryker out of his arms, juggling him and Kinsley, and brushes her lips against his forehead.
“It’s okay, baby. We’ll get some juice and play a game, right?”
Ryker, red-faced and miserable, looks up at his mom, and then at Ryan. His lower lip trembles and Andrea shoots him a look, half-pleading, and whispers, “You should leave now, before he really gets going.”
Ryan nods, hefts his bag over his shoulder and kisses his son quickly, and then lowers his head to press his lips against his wife’s mouth.
Lingering at the doorway, he listens to their voices and resists the urge to go back in and do something dad-like, remembering the way his father would stop by on his lunch breaks to make him soup and noodles when Ryan was sick. But he has practice, and and that comes first.
2.
It’s another dark hotel room and a face on the computer.
Andrea’s looking fresh from the shower, pajamas on and a cup of tea steaming on the night table. “I’m just so...” she starts, but doesn't know how to finish. Neither does he. She sounds small and he hates that. “Ryker was sick again today. I may be catching it. We stayed inside and watched all three Toy Story movies.”
He chuckles in the dark, “Remember how freaked out you were when I said I had never seen Back to the Future.”
“Yeah, that was a real deal breaker,” she replies, deadpan. Then she laughs, low and throaty, “Remember we went to watch the Matrix at that shitty drive-in?”
“Oh, yeah.” He smiles at the memories, of Andrea taking his hand and bringing it underneath her skirt, her face calm and nonchalant as she used him against her.
He lies back, listening to her talk about her day. It hadn’t been so good for him, losing to the ‘Hawks again. He had picked a fight, had got sent back to the locker room.
“Sit down, Kesler,” Toews had yelled, skating past him, and he hates that fucker.
Andrea hums. “Kinsley spent hours playing in that contraption you got her; she cried when I got her out for lunch.”
He chuckles, “We should get her one of those baby hockey sticks, like the one we got Ryker.”
“Nah, it’ll just make MaKayla jealous, even though she hates hockey.” Andrea exaggerates the word hate, smiling cause their daughter is all about girly things now, making up her mind to be a fashion designer two weeks ago.
Ryan wasn’t there for it, of course, but Makayla had told him the whole thing over Skype, showing off her doodles of dresses she would one day make, taking advantage of the drawing kit they had gotten her for a Birthday present.
“She could probably help style some of the rookies on this team. Those guys are hopeless.”
“Oh please,” Andrea smiles, warm and familiar. “You were just as bad--I had to drag you to Brooks Brothers for your pre-game suits. You would have been fine with something from J.C. Penny.”
Ryan wants to push through the screen, get to their bed and lay next to her, wants to hear the crackle of the baby monitor and feel Ryker nudging at his shin in the morning, demanding pancakes. But he’s thousands of miles away, and from the noise outside his door, the guys are back from the bar. So he says his goodbyes, watches as Andrea’s nose crinkles when she leans in to smooch dramatically at the camera, and lets himself sleep.
3.
“Some of my friends and I started a book club thing,” She tells him late one night. “I started reading The Goldfinch, you know, the one that everyone says is the best book ever?”
Ryan nods, resisting the urge to scarf down some more pasta. it’s a rare night where the kids are all asleep by nine and he doesn’t have practice the next morning. He ordered Italian, put it on their nice plates and surprised Andrea, who looked confused but happy.
“So I’m reading it, and it’s seriously really, really good,” she continues, mopping up some sauce with a piece of garlic bread, “and it’s all about art, and It got me thinking about those courses I took in college when I was a sophomore. Can you believe, I still had one of my survey textbooks--I have no idea how it ended up here.”
Ryan listens to her speak, content with the animated quality of her voice. He doesn’t remember the last book he read. But Andrea always enjoyed reading. In the early days, when they just first started dating, he had tried to impress her by wikipedia-ing the plots of famous books and trying to talk to her about it. She had laughed but played along, and they had ended up constructing elaborate and ridiculous plots to try and trip each other up.
“I think I’m gonna take Makayla up to VAM sometime next week. I’ll leave Ryder and Kinsey with the sitter and we’ll do a mother-daughter thing,” she tells him, sounding excited. “Seriously, it’s been forever since I’ve been to an art museum. But I chaperoned last week with Makayla’s class to the Science Museum and she had a blast, so I think she’ll enjoy this.”
Ryan looks up in confusion “Wait, what? I didn’t know you guys went.”
Andrea looks a little stricken, “Oh, jeez, I totally forgot to tell you. I got roped into some chaperone gigs, me and Madison’s dad, Mark.”
“Who’s Madison?”
Andrea looks at him for a long moment, brows scrunched, before replying, “Mackayla’s best friend?”
Ryan feels something thick and cold in his stomach because he doesn’t know his own daughter’s best fucking friend’s name. “Oh,” is the only thing he can think of.
Andrea busies herself taking a huge swallow of wine, looking down and around at their house. Ryan follows her gaze, seeing toys scattered about, a piece of clothing here and there because his kids never can make up their minds about whether they’re too warm or too cold. It’s a well-lived in house. Much nicer than the one he grew up in, of course, but homey all the same. He wonders what Andrea thinks when she looks at it.
He looks at his wife across the table. Her hair is up, her face bare of makeup and her cute little square-lens glasses perches across her nose. She looks a little tired, but he still thinks she’s beautiful. He sees beautiful women everyday. The ones who know they’re beautiful, who have been told so every day of their lives, they come up to their table every so often when the team’s at a bar during a road trip. Half the time they have no idea that they're hockey players; they just see cute guys and want to flirt.The Sedins, weirdos that they are, don’t often get propositioned, but he and Kevin do, a lot.
Ryan’s been a good husband. He knows guys on his team who haven’t been. And it’s been this dividing line between him and these girls, who smile and wear dark eyeshadow and don’t have that extra inch of skin around their waist from having three children: that he’s a good husband.
He’s a good husband later that night, dimming the lights in their bedroom and stripping down for her. Andrea makes no bones about the fact that she thinks his body is fine, her eyes sweeping appreciatively down the flat planes of his stomach. She had whistled low when that stupid nude calendar photo had come out, and had dragged him into their bed.
After ten years of marriage, he knows what she likes. She likes him to use his strength, likes to feel it a bit rough. He holds her arms above her head so he can kiss her breasts without her squirming too much. She sighs, wraps her legs around his hips and thrusts up, rocking his cock against her. The meal, the wine, being home finally and seeing her smile is almost too much for him. He reaches down, fumbling a bit in his eagerness, touching the edge of her opening and thumbing her clit.
She’s wet, and she says his name when he pushes inside, and it’s still home, still the best place on earth. He’s come far from the selfish eighteen year old who lasted ten seconds and didn’t check to see if she had come for like the first ten times they had done it. She had come along way too, growing assertive and in command of her enjoyment. She’s not afraid to tell him, harder, faster, urges him with her hands on his ass. He nips at her neck when she bares it, her body arching back.
He remembers bumping into her on the campus of OSU. She was rushing to get to her economics class. “I want to work with non-profits” She had explained over coffee in the Student Union. Andrea headed five clubs on campus, had a 3.8 GPA and had an internship lined up in Columbus that summer. Ryan was going to play in World Juniors then, and had mentioned it to her like it was no big deal. She nodded, eyes wide, said, “Wow,” and invited him to a Buckeyes game later that week.
She grew into liking hockey slowly, would always be more of a football fan. He kept wondering when she would end it, but she never did. When he got drafted, 23rd overall, she cried, kissed him and watched him get his jersey.
She didn’t end it when he moved to Vancouver. In those days, long before skype, he would call her nearly every day. When he got cut, and went down to the AHL, she was still there. When she graduated with honors, he flew down to propose. When she said yes, he flew her to Vancouver and signed an extension.
He had her to himself for five years, watching her work and get involved with Canucks charities, expertly taking lead in the WAG programs. She found her calling in that, orchestrating events and chatting up donors and playing up Ryan as the trophy husband.
Makayla was planned, and she had sat Ryan down to talk about what that would mean.
“You’re going to be gone a lot.” She had told him. “So when you’re here, I need you to be here.”
And Ryan tries. He misses things, sometimes big things, but tries to be there for every birthday, every recital and every peewee sports match. Sometimes he’s tired, sometimes they’re on a five-game losing streak and the last thing he wants to do is spend a day in the park cooing at pigeons and running after hyperactive toddlers.
But he tries.
4.
The guilt gets to him, sometimes. Andrea takes care of three kids on her own, most days, and Ryan hates communicating with them through skype. Hates it when his kids are too distracted to sit down and talk to him for ten minutes. They’re young, and he gets it. They don’t understand that Ryan looks forward to these ten minutes more than any game, thrilled with whatever he can get.
The worst part is, it’s starting to click for them that he’s not just Daddy. That he’s other things to other people, and that his job is something that will take him away from them more often than not. Makayla, thankfully, has enough going on in her life and is old enough to understand somewhat. So she’ll tell him about her day, but then say, “You need to go to bed now, right, Daddy?”
It’s starting to click too for Ryker, who cries when he leaves but is starting to become aware that his dad is a big deal. Andrea tells him that sometimes his kid likes to brag, that it makes things tough at peewee hockey, between his friends.
It’ll happen for Kinsley too, eventually.
Andrea lets them have their time together, but when the kids are clearly not engaged anymore, she lets them say their goodbyes and moves the laptop to face Ryan.
He wants to ask her, was it worth it? Was I worth it?
He did, once and she had looked tired and frustrated and angry.
“I knew what I was signing up for,” she had told him and he wanted to say, don’t describe it like it’s a job. Like you wrote up an application to be a hockey WAG. “I’m not saying that it’s a trade-off, you know. That I get the house, and the money and the lifestyle but I also get the kids and the dirty diapers and the carpools. My life didn’t end when you put that ring on my finger. I work hard, everyday, to make this a home you can come back to, where your family is safe and healthy and happy.” She had paused, scrubbing her hands over her face, diamond ring flashing. “But I’m good at other things. The Canucks, they want me to do more work on community outreach. They wanted to make it as close to an official job as they can; I mean, they asked for my resume.”
Ryan nods, because it’s great. And Andrea excels at what she does. But it doesn’t mean that sometimes he doesn’t wish she would get a bit more angry, a bit more accusatory. She doesn't want his guilt, would rather have his participation. But it’s still there, festering, and he wonders what his kids will think of him when they’re grown, whether they’ll be resentful or, worse, indifferent. Sometimes Ryan thinks he’d rather have his whole family angry with him, then have them not feel anything at all.
5.
They’ve been talking about having a forth. They discuss it in short, sporadic bursts, and Ryan’s looking forward to it. He thinks maybe four will be enough, a big family full of smiles and laughter.
Andrea leans over one night, after they have sex and they’re at the twilight edge of sleep, and whispers into his neck, “I can’t. Not another one. I’m sorry”
Ryan swallows. Whispers, “Okay,” back into the darkness of their bedroom. He feels her hand slip into his, somehow more intimate than the actions of mere moments before.
“Thank you.”
The next morning, he schedules a vasectomy. He has three children and a wife who loves him. He’ll be on the road for the next week, and then again two weeks after that.
Ryan tries. It’s enough, for now.
6.
Lack tells him, after practice, “I want so many kids, man.” He looks longingly at Ryker, who waddles around the locker room, eyes wide. They’re his eyes, eyes he gave to his son, who shares his mother’s face.
Ryan doesn’t tell him, they’ll break your heart. And you’ll break theirs.