He Gave Me a Green Dress, So I Gave the Arena the Truth novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Green Dress
On their tenth anniversary Lars sends Jocelyn a green dress and toasts her half-sister's pregnancy at dinner; she walks out, and Nolan tells her to ask who signed Lars's results.
A courier put a long white box in my hands in the middle of the fertility clinic's waiting room.
Six women looked up from their phones.
"Jocelyn Rudd?" he asked. "Sign here, ma'am."
I signed with a pen that was still cold from the blood draw before.
The nurse at the desk leaned over her counter. "Is that from Lars?"
Everyone at the clinic knew my husband. His face hung on a hockey banner outside the parking garage.
I lifted the lid.
Under the tissue lay a silk dress, a deep emerald green.
A card sat on top in Lars's slanted handwriting.
"Happy ten years, Joss. Wear this tonight. Harlan's, eight o'clock. Everybody's coming."
"Oh, it's gorgeous," the nurse said. "He has such good taste."
I put the lid back on.
The week before our wedding, I told Lars what a green dress meant to me.
When I was eight, my father's mistress came to our house wearing one and sat at my mother's kitchen table while he explained that the affair was partly my mother's fault.
I told Lars it was the thing I feared most in the world, and he held both my hands and swore he would never be that man.
My phone buzzed with a text from my half-sister Belinda.
"Did it come?? He had me help pick it. Tell me you love it! I'm driving you to your shot tomorrow, okay? xx"
Belinda was twenty-six. She had driven me to every injection for two years.
I looked down at the folder on my lap, the one the clinic gave every couple.
My half was full of lab sheets. Lars's half was blank.
In two years he had never come to one appointment. He said he was in season, and that the team doctor had cleared him years ago.
Last week I told him the clinic wanted his own sample at last, or I would call the team doctor myself.
He kissed my forehead and said he'd handle it.
I took the box to Harlan's.
I did not wear the dress. I wore my black one.
The private room was full: teammates, their wives, the owner's family, Lars's agent.
Lars stood at the head of the long table in a navy suit. Brent Sorley, his best friend on the wing, stood at his shoulder.
Belinda sat on Lars's other side. She wore a loose cream dress and kept one hand on her stomach.
I set the white box on the empty chair beside mine.
"There she is," Lars said, and tapped his glass with a fork.
The room went quiet and turned to me, smiling.
"Ten years," he said. "I wanted everyone I love here when I said this."
He put his hand on Belinda's shoulder.
"Belinda is fourteen weeks pregnant. It's my baby."
Brent clapped first. Then some of the others did, slowly, and stopped.
I looked at my sister. She was crying, and she didn't look at me.
Lars came around the table and bent to my ear. He used the voice he used on the bench.
"You knew what the color meant when you opened the box, Joss. Your mother stayed in that kitchen. You'll be fine."
I understood then that he had picked the dress because I had told him.
He had listened to the worst story of my life and kept it for ten years until he needed it.
I stood up.
I lifted the dress out of the box and laid it across Belinda's lap.
"It's your mother's color," I said. "You keep it."
Belinda's face crumpled. She said nothing.
I turned to Lars.
"You don't get to decide how this ends."
I twisted my wedding ring off my finger and dropped it into his champagne.
"Joss," he said. "Sit down."
"No."
I took my coat from the chair and walked out of Harlan's while twenty people watched.
At the coat check, a tall man in a dark jacket was holding my scarf out to me.
It was Nolan Brumley, the team's head trainer. He hadn't clapped.
"Mrs. Rudd," he said quietly. "Ask the clinic who signed Lars's results."
I took the scarf. "What does that mean?"
He looked back toward the private room, and then at me.
"They never asked him for his own," he said, and left through the side door.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend