Page 58 of The Ex Puck Bunny
Grady nods. “No surprise. She was awful.” He tells me a little bit about his ex.
“Sounds like a toxic relationship.”
“The writing was on the wall, but I didn’t know how to get out of it.”
“You could’ve done like Trey and walked away.”
“I would never. I wanted to make it work. Give her another chance.”
He doesn’t even need to say this for me to know it’s true.
“I wanted to fix things. But how they turned out was a way for me to take a break from my life.”
“By literally breaking it?”
He waggles his eyebrows but looks as tired as I sometimes feel. Now, I get his urging for me to have more fun. “But I’m back.”
“That’s because Badaszek is bonkers.”
His expression falls.
“I wasn’t done. In a good way. He knows talent when he sees it. But can he tame the talent?”
“Does he need to?”
I poke Grady in his very firm chest. “Promise me you won’t do something so stupid again.”
“Like what? Forget to keep track of my blood sugar levels?”
“That and keeping it a secret. In case you have a stupid voice in your head telling you that makes you weak—” I lean in and whisper, “It doesn’t.”
“I’m at risk of going blind someday.”
“We can cross that bridge when we come to it. Also, don’t you think that showing people that you’re a top hockey player and have diabetes would inspire fans? Show them that they can still pursue their dreams?”
A slow smile appears on his lips as we both realize what I said about the two of us crossing a bridge in the future.
Plowing past that because I’m a teeny bit afraid of what it means, I add, “If I didn’t have the faintest memory of my mother once mentioning your insulin when we took you on a family trip, I wouldn’t have known what to do.”
“Thanks for calling Derek.”
I gaze at my hands and then meet his eyes and say, “He saw the way I looked at you.”
Grady’s head turns sharply toward me. “And how was that?”
“The same way you looked at me while we were singing karaoke.”
“So you admit it?”
I give a small nod.
“I was hoping so. But what about your brother?” Before letting me answer, he gets to his feet and says, “I’m going to talk to him.”
“Now?” I tug his shirt sleeve so he drops back on the couch. “If you do, there is no turning back unless you want your throat slit. After everything with Trey, he’ll be even less forgiving if?—”
There’s so much unspoken between us, so much bottled up, bursting to get out.
Even though my brother isn’t my keeper, he and Grady were friends first and whatever might happen follows that. I respect Derek. He’s a good man and treasures his family and friends. He gave Trey a chance to make things right. I don’t want anything to come between him and Grady too.
