Page 108 of Hitting the Goal Line
Every single partof me is fucking stiff.
The last time that my body screamed at me like this, I was slammed into the boards by a defenseman from Toronto. My whole right side of my body was bruised and I couldn’t skate properly for a whole two days.
I have a feeling that this stiffness is going to last longer than two days, especially after spending the last ten hours sitting on a damn bench made out of cement. Whoever designed jail cells really wanted the individuals occupying them to suffer because fuck. No matter what way you adjust, everything is always hard.
And smells like piss.
You would think that getting arrested in a city like San Francisco would have some benefits, like at the very least, nice smelling facilities, but that’s not the case whatsoever. The whole damn place smells as if a sewer and a dump came together in a damn port-a-potty.
I could go my rest of my life, never smelling this stench ever again and even then it won’t be soon enough.
I look over at the clock that is just outside of the jail cell I currently occupy, the one that has been taunting me since I got here and let out a sigh.
Ten hours and seventeen minutes. I’ve been in here for ten hours and seventeen minutes and I don’t see myself leaving anytime soon.
I was able to call someone around hour six, after I was all processed, and the first person I thought to call was Sophia. Given the circumstances, though, I didn’t think that was a good idea, so I ended up calling Christian. I knew he and Eliana were going to be in California for bye-week and even though he gives me shit every single day, I knew no matter what, that he would come and try to bail me out. We may not be bonded by blood but we are definitely bonded through something else.
My second call was to my lawyer, who told me that they would try to take care of this from Chicago. According to him, if he had to get on a plane to San Francisco, he would.
But that was four hours ago, and if Christian or my lawyer can’t bail me out, I doubt anyone can. I’ll probably have to stand in front of a judge or something before I can even go home.
Which means, that I’m probably getting charged. Which also means that if the Knights get wind of this, I’m probably going to be kissing my position on the team goodbye. That is if they don’t already know. I’m sure someone already leaked my arrest to all the news outlet that would listen.
Everyone I know is probably looking at my mugshot right about now, talking shit about how I beat up Elijah Swanson, a fucking golden boy. I wouldn’t pass it by the bastard himself to send a tip into a gossip site to spin the story and make him look like the innocent party.
If anyone is innocent here, it’s Sophia.
I knew I didn’t like the fucker, and now I know why.
He never fucking deserved her and I hope he rots in a hole full of fucking mice, for the shit that he put her through.
I may not know the whole extent of it, but I know what I saw in that room, and nobody should ever be that afraid of someone. Especially not someone that should be protecting them.
I never what to see that asshole ever again, but if I do, I’m going to finish the job. Consequences be fucking damned.
I look over at the clock again and see that the hands have barely moved.
Ten hours and twenty minutes.
Who would have thought that sitting in a cell would make time crawl at the pace of a snail.
Trying to distract myself, I lean back against the concrete wall and close my eyes, clearing my head of everything, to see if the time passes just a bit faster.
It works for all of thirty seconds before my mind starts replaying the morning all over again. As much as I tried to put what happened this morning at the back of my mind, everything and anything brings it to the forefront.
I replay every single moment. From the second that I answered Sophia’s call to when I was taken away by the police and landed myself in this damn concrete box. Every single moment continues to run through my mind as if it were live and I can’t escape it.
The thing that I see the most is Sophia and the way those brown eyes of hers looked at me as paramedics were taking care of Elijah. How they looked at me as the police slapped cuffs on my wrist and started to whisk me away.
I couldn’t get a good read of her, but I definitely felt a coldness coming from her. That’s never something that I’ve felt coming from her, especially not direct at me. I fucking hated it.
But what I hated the most was that when the cops whisked me away, she didn’t fight them on it. She didn’t say a single word. She just stood there not doing anything.
I’ve asked myself a lot of questions during these last ten hours, one of them being if this whole situation changes things between me and Sophia and the only answer that I can come up with is yes. This changes a lot of things.
Because of my actions, because I put someone she cares about in the hospital, I probably lost Sophia. As a friend, a roommate, as everything. This is something that is going to be hard to come back from.
If only I had thought about things for a little longer before entering that room, then maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation.
