Kinsley fell in love with Phoenix Maverick, an NHL player for a team she never imagined supporting. But when Kinsley suffers from a head injury and forgets the last six years of her life, she struggles balancing being the person Phoenix fell in love...
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Late September 2016
I stared at the red jersey, the fabric soft between my fingers, the smell was so familiar, like musk and sweat had been through the wash but the fabric softener could never quite erase the history in its fibres.
The smell was knocking on memories door. It was firing off sensors and begging to be let in. How I came into possession of this clothing though, was a total mystery.
"Maverick," I whispered the name across the back, the letters and number seven in big white block font. "Who the—"
"I know," Sadie said, walking into the room in a matching jersey and loose jeans with the ankles rolled. "It took me a while to come around too."
"Why did we switch up?"
She sighed, looking out of the window, dusk was settling. "That's something you'll have to rediscover, Kins."
My arms dropped, holding the jersey at my side.
"No, I'm serious," Sadie said. "Remember when you said that's too much, too soon. Information over load sort of thing."
Nodding reluctantly, I tried to relax the accusing stare.
"It'd be too much, too soon," she said. "You need to go through the motions with this one. Trust me."
She hadn't let me down so far. She'd figured out when to back off and when to fill in the blanks. If she thought I needed to rediscover this one on my own, I believed her. That didn't ease the anxiety I felt over it though.
"What the hell are those jeans by the way?" I slumped onto the end of her bed and watched her sift through the pile of shoes on the bottom of her closet floor. My fingers twisted the ring in my nose, something I didn't remember getting but I kind of liked it.
"These are mom jeans," she said. "We don't wear skinnies anymore."
Since I'd come home from the hospital, all I'd seen her in was pyjama pants or active wear. Which she wore a lot of for someone who didn't work out more than once a month.
"We don't?" I winced, feeling the uncomfortable dread of uncertainty climbing up my chest. It pushed the air out of my lungs and became a pressure that made me feel winded.
"No, thank goodness. I never suited those jeans. I never felt like I had the ass for them."
"Bullshit," I said. "You loved getting your ass into a size two before we went to that traffic light night in Ottawa."
She sat on the floor and started pulling on a pair of white adidas sneakers. "I don't remember that."
Sadie always had one complaint or another about her body but she'd been skinnier than me our entire lives. She used to tease me about the size of my ass and now she complimented it all the time.
