Page 56 of Playmaker

He let out a humorless laugh. “I don’t want to, but it’s not fair to you to go in blind.”

I set down the sandwich. “Okay, then.”

He leaned back on his hands, watching the shadows stretching farther across the pavement.

“I was sixteen. At that point, my brother Pierce and I had the normal older brother/younger brother relationship people had, as far as I knew. I secretly admired him, and he gave me a hard time. I didn’t see him that often. He was at Harvard and had his own friends he kept busy with. I was going to a private boys’ school, but I also played on a local hockey team. It was a lot of fun, and I was good. I’d started going out with one of the girls who came to the games and hung around with us. She was…gorgeous.”

Like that was a surprise. The mediocre sandwich didn’t rest well in my stomach.

“I was home for reading week. Pierce and his girlfriend were there too. I didn’t think much of it, was mostly counting down till I could see Vicky and get back on the ice.”

He crunched up the can of sparkling water he’d emptied.

“Pierce’s girlfriend made a pass at me. I turned her down, obviously, but somehow Pierce found out. I went back to school, back to Vicky, and began planning, god help me, a promposal.”

I pictured a young Cooper, perhaps a little awkward and gawky, but undoubtedly attractive. More so than his brother, I expected. But I braced myself, because this story was going somewhere bad.

“We went to a hockey tournament, were gone for most of a week. I’d taken a couple of days off school because there were some hockey scouts there and I’d hoped they might notice me. Maybe I’d make the team at Harvard—because obviously, as a Cooper, that’s where I was going.”

He’d also said he’d gone to college in Vermont, so…

“Pierce sent me a picture. Sent me a few of them. He was in a hotel room with Vicky.”

My fingers twisted into claws on the picnic table.

“He messaged something about making us even, so I knew it was about his girlfriend. I told him I’d turned her down, but he didn’t care. When I got back to school, Vicky came to our next hockey game, crying, begging me to forgive her. She told me a story about him seducing her and I wanted to believe her. So I took her back.”

I wouldn’t have.

“I didn’t realize, back then, that she wasn’t interested in me. I was the rich kid on the hockey team. She wanted someone to provide the kind of life she dreamed of. That became obvious a couple of weeks later, again when we had an away game and Pierce sent me a photo of Vicky with his best friend, Remmy.”

The fuckers.

“I told my family. My dad said ‘boys will be boys.’ Vicky wasn’t the right kind of girl, and I needed to focus on my future and give up hockey. But my teammates? They had my back. Pierce and Remmy found their cars vandalized while I was at a family dinner and had an alibi.”

No wonder he chose hockey.

“I stuck with the people who supported me. My maternal grandmother had set up a trust fund for each of us, and she let me use it to go to a hockey college. My family was offended but I wanted to be with people who had my back.”

His family obviously didn’t. Benson could only aspire to that level of spite. And the girl? I saw myself in Vicky—growing up poor and wanting to be financially secure. But I didn’t lie and manipulate and use people. I made my own security. “I hope she sees your underwear billboards every time she leaves her fucking home and regrets her choices,” I growled.

Cooper shrugged. “I learned an important lesson. Not everyone is trustworthy. It was brutal, but it was better to learn that when I did.”

This was something real about Cooper. I wondered if anyone else outside of his family knew about this. Seb Hunter? Was he a teammate back them?

“I got that lesson in foster care. But what a bitch.” But there’d been a deeper betrayal. “And your brother deserves an STD. A really disgusting and painful one. What—who would do that?”

“Pierce. And Remington fucking Winthrop.”

“Fucking Pierce as well. He was jealous.” I understood Cooper better now. “They hate the underwear billboards, right?”

“Immensely.”

I frowned. “Was that why you did them?”

He shrugged. “They pay me a shit ton of money.” I was about to argue that couldn’t be the only reason when he continued. “But yeah, knowing how they feel about it makes it even better.”

Families were mostly screwed-up entities determined to fuck up their kids for the future. Even wealthy ones like Cooper’s. “I wish I’d known this before I met the fucker. I’d have taken my driver to his balls.”

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