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
Phoenix told me to hang on when he turned off his truck and slid out of the drivers side. He ran around, opened the door for me and held my hand as I slid out and landed on the ground bedside him.
The gesture was sweet, something I hadn't experienced before, not in a relationship. Not a relationship I remembered.
It was incredible how much something as simple as opening the car door could mean in the moment.
Back in high school, if you were lucky enough to go on a date with a boy who drove a car, he was usually picking you up from the sidewalk at least ten houses down. Perhaps that was just me, but dad would never have let me leave the house in a car with a teenage boy behind the wheel.
In college, it became the 'you up?' era of late night dorm drop ins that sometimes turned into a relationship and sometimes did not. Again, perhaps that was just the ones I chose to date. It was nice to know my taste in men developed.
Opening the car door was bare minimum but it was definitely a green flag.
The parking lot gravel crunched beneath my feet. Phoenix had brought us to a scenic walk on the outside of town. Surrounded by tall, thick trees and the sound of leaves bristling in a light breeze, we stood beside the truck.
The stranger danger bells went off, involuntarily. It was hard wired into Sadie and I that we must never, under any circumstances, go on a bush walk for a first date.
That wasn't quite what this was, but I still felt the impact of Phoenix, being a total stranger, bringing me out to a forest. I shrugged that thought off, in this particular case, there was nothing to be worried about.
"Alright," he said, keeping hold of my hand. "One thing I will share about us, is that we weren't public."
"What do you mean?"
"Our relationship was private. We hadn't disclosed it to anyone but our close friends and family and that worked for us."
"How long have we been together?"
"About seven months. If you count the night we first met. Which, I do."
"Oh," I said, smiling at his admission. "I guess that's not a super long time. But, how come we didn't go public?"
For a brief moment, his expression grew distant, his brows pinching. He quickly smoothed his features and smiled. "You didn't want the attention it would bring and I understood that. It was always up to you."
The way his sentence fell off made it sound like there was more he wanted to add. His lips parted and he hesitated. Finally, after deciding what he'd tell me, he said, "I would've gone public, proudly. But it was nice not being followed or talked about in the media. It was just us and we liked that."
