Page 26 of The Spice Play

Me:Out for a drink with the team. You okay with looking after Matty a bit longer?

Nelly:It’s my entire job, Sebastian. It’s fine.

I stared at her text for a little too long, a little too closely, a little too intensely. There were no emojis where there normally would be, and the periods made the message direct. Almost every interaction I’d had with her since she’d questioned me about having a problem with her on Saturday morning had been like this — short, precise, clipped. Even when she’d come to the game on Sunday night with Matty for an hour before he fell asleep in his seat, she’d been like this.

It was eating away at me. It made home life hard. It made focusing on the game hard. It made practice hard, and I was still fucking up my basic forward cross-overs.

It didn’t help that Bryan Addaway was here.

He was someone I avoided fairly frequently at practice. We played the same position—both centers—and we were often subbed out for each other, so we didn’t necessarily need to be at the rink at the same time. When I’d first joinedthe Atlanta Fire, we’d butted heads far too many times to count, and he’d pushed for me to be dropped from the team. Coach had tried to keep us apart as much as possible. But it was always around this time, always when we got close to playoffs and had to knuckle down, that we saw a lot more of each other.

And, of course, that meant he tagged along when we all ended up at Smokey’s after one of the hardest practices of the season so far. It didn’t matter that he’d slammed me into the boards earlier and nearly dislocated my still-aching shoulder.

“Coach,” Luke said, reaching out and grabbing Coach’s arm as he passed by our stools at the bartop. “You’ve got to speak to Addaway, man.”

For fucks sake.I didn’t need Luke fighting my battles for me.

“Why?” Coach questioned, raising one grey, fluffy eyebrow in Luke’s direction as he came to a halt in front of him.

“Don’t act like you didn’t see it at practice,” Luke deadpanned. “He’s getting uppity again with Seb.”

“You don’t need to do that,” I insisted, inserting myself before Luke could dig a bigger hole for me to jump into. Coach was already having enough problems with me not performing at the top of my game. He didn’t need another reason to consider me a problem. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine, man,” Luke insisted, narrowing his eyes at me before turning back to Coach Casey. “He’s targeting him again.”

Coach sighed exasperatedly, his eyes scanning the crowd of jerseys and women and landing on who I could only assume was Bryan. “I’ll talk to him.”

Luke finally released his arm, and Coach wasoff, moving through the sea of people as if it were nothing to him. Nico was likely around here somewhere, probably tucked up in a booth with a woman who was willing to listen to him rattle on about how opera is going downhill these days, and considering I wasn’t feeling wildly talkative, Luke was the easiest teammate for me to slot in with.

“That’s not the only thing that’s bothering you, is it?” he asked, glancing at my face-down phone before taking a knowing sip of his beer.

Well, I guess relative silence wasn’t exactly an option here.

“Don’t want to talk about it?”

I pursed my lips, mulling over whether it was a good idea or a terrible one to say anything at all. Lines could be drawn even if I didn’t say her name. “It’s not that,” I insisted. “I just… I don’t know. I’m having problems with a… woman.”

“Awoman?” Luke chuckled. “Care to tell me who?”

“Maybe when hell freezes over. Or when pigs fly. Check back then.”

He rolled his eyes as he took another gulp of his beer, his fingertips tapping in time to the music against the countertop. “What exactly is the issue? You realize you’re surrounded by flames right now, right? You could pick up any one of them you want.”

He was right. I could, easily, and I’d practically been fighting them off from the moment I’d stepped out of my car. “That’s not the point,” I huffed. “Look, I’ve just… I’ve upset her, and I don’t really know what to do about it. Which sounds insane, because I was fucking married and should be able to handle an angry woman, but I feel like I’ve hit a brick wall.”

“Or the boards again?” Luke snickered.

I sighed. “Sure. Or the boards again.”

Luke knocked back the rest of his beer, swallowing it mouthful by mouthful, before setting it down on the counter with enough force that I was worried the class would shatter. “We should drink about it, then,” he said. “Shots?”

I dragged my tongue along my upper teeth. It wasn’t a good idea — not really, not when I needed to get home and let Nelly take a break. But I also needed to blow off some steam, and I certainly wasn’t able to do that with her around.

Not in the ways I wanted, anyway.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Shots.”

————

---