Page 40 of Just Friends
Jax sighed. “Yeah. I did.”
“Who?” I demanded to know.
He wouldn’t say.
“Um.” Reavo raised a hand into the air. “It was me.”
Katerina and I gasped a second time.
“Derek! You did this?!” she asked, appalled.
“It’s not like Iwantedto …” Reavo shrugged. “Big Rig wouldn’t go down.”
“What doyoumean,he wouldn’t go down?” Katerina asked, stamping her foot.
I badgered Jax. “Why were you fighting Reavo?”
He sighed. “It wasn’t a real fight, okay.”
I touched the dried blood on his puffy, sewn-up lip and he recoiled with anow. “Looks pretty real to me, tough guy,” I said.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “The punches were real but the fight wasn’t.”
Katerina and I traded glances.
“Well, that makes perfect sense,” I said sarcastically.
“Look, we justhadto do it, okay—not because wewantedto, but because the situation called for it.”
“That’s right,” Reavo agreed.
“Okay, and what was the situation that called for a fight?” I asked.
“Well, uh,” Jax murmured, “I smashed Dane face-first into the boards.”
Katerina and I gasped a third time.
“Why would you hit your captain like that?” I asked.
“I didn’t mean to. The same time I tried to hit him, he turned his back to me. I couldn’t stop.”
“Is he okay?”
Reavo said, “Yeah. He was a little loopy at first, but he’ll be fine.”
Katerina put her hand on her hip. “I don’t understand why you two had to fight, though.”
“Because Dane’s our captain,” Jax said. “You can’t hit him like that.”
My eyes narrowed. “Even though you just said you didn’t mean to? Even though that hit was a freak accident?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I had to answer the bell. There’s a code in hockey. We’ve gotta keep each other accountable.”
“Uh …huh,” I said, and Katerina had a similarly skeptical reaction.
“What you girls don’t understand,” Reavo began to explain, “is Big Rig just earned afuckload of respect in that locker room by proving he’ll take a beating for the captain. This was the best possible outcome, really.”
Katerina and I locked eyes, silently acknowledging that we were the only two sane people in this room.
