“Give me a lowball offer.”

“What?” I was watching the team we were playing in a few days. I hit pause and leaned forward. “Say again?”

He sat down across from me, dropping into a chair and he scooted forward. Knees to his elbows and a look of determination on his face, mixed with fear.

I narrowed my eyes. Chad had been off, but he’d not been scared. What was going on?

“I want you to buy me out.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Of the house?”

A short clipped nod. He seemed even more determined. “You paid for most of it anyways, so give me a lowball offer. I’ll take it. Cheyenne is moving in and you’ll want some space, and to be honest; I need to get my shit together. I don’t like the guy I was when Cheyenne attacked me and I don’t like how she was with me at the police station.”

I frowned. “You know that her dad had just confessed to killing her mom, right?”

“I know. It’s not that. It’s not on her. It’s who I was for her to have that reaction to. I shouldn’t have been that asshole to her, and I was. I kept telling you I would try and I was trying, but old habits die hard. And I’ve been using your name for my promoting business and it’s not right. I gotta do things on my own. I need to be someone that I like and I hate who I am right now.”

“You think me buying you out will do that?”

“Yeah. I do. I gotta do things on my own for a while. I need to do some right, too. This is stage one.”

“Okay.”

So I bought him out, and he moved into a townhome.

He and I got together for a beer every now and then, but it was random. He seemed to have taken his mission to change to heart. Course, he’d been my best friend since we were little and there was a bond there that might’ve colored my lens, but he seemed like a better guy. Kind. Humble. Time would tell. He was supposed to be coming to the hockey game tonight, so I was hoping no confrontations happened when I was on the ice. Killer Mama Alice had been briefed on the situation and she was ready to activate her kill switch. If Chad came in and started acting a certain way toward Cheyenne, Chad would find himself on the receiving end of Killer Mama Alice and I knew Chad didn’t want that. He’d shared with me a few times he never wanted to piss off my mother.

I think the entire hockey nation felt the same.

“I want to hug her. I want to hold her. I want to never let her go.” Alice was tearing up, talking about Cheyenne.

They knew about her. There’d been too much news coverage over us, and over her to keep any of it in the dark. News broke about Deek, then he took a plea deal. He was in prison now, and he’d be there for ten years. All those events shone even more of a spotlight on Cheyenne, but she was handling it fine.

In her words, “The masses learned they love a little Cheyenne, so I’m out and about. I might as well be myself. They’ll love the wavy train just like you do.”

Sometimes Cheyenne said things that didn’t make sense to me, but it was her.

I was learning how to translate. I was also loving how much she accepted that I loved her, and if I loved her, then with her way of thinking, everyone else was going to come and love her, too. Which made sense to me because why wouldn’t they?

Maybe that’s what the ‘wavy train’ was. I didn’t know, but that was Cheyenne.

Sasha and Melanie had been at her side, almost every day. That meant they were over at the house, a lot.

Except today.

Cheyenne told them to hold off to meet ‘the fam’ until the hockey game. They were watching it in Margo’s box, who had fallen in adoration of Cheyenne as well. She was pushing for Cheyenne to do something official for the team, or even to write a book about her life.

The most Cheyenne had agreed to doing was starting a podcast with Sasha and Melanie.

It was called Decking with the Tomcats.

They tried for Dicking with the Tomcats, but there were issues with that name so they changed it. Reluctantly.

It was in the top five most popular podcast in the local area.

The girls were becoming celebrities in their own right.

“You gotta promise me that you won’t fuck up this relationship.”

We were back to my mom lecturing me about Cheyenne.

“What?”

“You. I know you. I know my son, and I know that you’ve not had a relationship except for a silly girl in college.”

This was uncomfortable.