Page 58 of Slew Foot
“I know you didn’t,” Mickey assured him. “I didn’t think it was intentional.”
“You seemed kinda pissed,” Rafe pointed out. Because he was sure he hadn’t read that part wrong.
Mickey sighed. “I’m not mad atyou. Crawford’s just …”
“Yeah,” Rafe agreed. Crawford was definitely something.
“Honestly, I’m the one who should be apologizing to you. I shouldn’t have told you what to do with your phone,” Mickey said. He shifted, dipping his into the pocket of the sweats he’d put on over his shorts, then pulling the phone out. “Here.”
He handed it over to Rafe.
The case was warm from Mickey’s body and Rafe took it, staring down at the screen and thinking about what Mickey had said earlier.
“No,” he said slowly. “You were right. I was letting what they said get to me. I’m glad you said something or I would’ve started feeling shitty about the way I was playing.”
“I—I know how much itsucks,” Mickey said. His hands tightened on the leather steering wheel. “I was supposed to beso good, sopromising, and then I got here and nothing was clicking.”
He sounded unusually frustrated, and Rafe wanted to reach out and like … squeeze him, to tell him it would be okay. But he had a lapful of food and Mickey might actually kill him if he spilled their lunches all over his nice leather interior.
“Do youknowhow many guys they tried pairing with me?” Mickey asked, glancing over at him. “How terrible I felt when they brought guy after guy up from Concord in the hopes they’d fit with me? And none of them worked! I was inweeklymeetings with Hoyt about it for a while. And he was so nice about it. He kept telling me it happened, sometimes it took a while to find the right chemistry. But after a while all I could think was that I was the problem.”
Rafe gaped at him. He was so wrong. “Mickey?—”
“No, let me finish. Please.”
Rafe snapped his mouth shut.
“I told myself I was wrong. I told myself I shouldn’t get up in my head about it. I told myself I had to stop reading the articles and letting them get to me. And eventually, I believed it. But I wished I’d never let that happen. Never let them in my head. Not even for a minute.” He took a deep breath. “And that’s all I was trying to do for you.”
Behind them, someone honked, and Mickey swore—in German, which honestly kinda sounded like swearing no matter what he was saying—checked for traffic, then turned out of the parking garage onto the street.
When they were stopped at the next light, Rafe spoke, sure he was right. “I know that’s what you were doing. You were looking out for me.”
He might not have known about how hard it had been for Mickey to deal with not having the right D-partner, but he’d known from the first night they met that he only wanted the best for him.
“I was,” Mickey agreed. “And I know you’re okay with me doing that when we’re on the ice. But I still feel like maybe I’ve gone too far with it off the ice. Looking out for you and telling you what to do, I mean.”
“What if I told you I liked it?” Rafe asked.
The light turned green, so Rafe wasn’t surprised when Mickey didn’t answer him right away.
“Okay,” Mickey finally said slowly, like he was still thinking about it. “If you’re sure.”
“I wouldn’t tell you I was okay with it if I wasn’t,” Rafe reminded him.
Because yeah, he knew guys—especially on previous teams—sometimes joked that he was so dumb it was a good thing he was pretty. And if hockey hadn’t worked out, he would’ve had to become a model because he wasn’t smart enough for a real job.
Which, honestly, Rafe thought was both pretty rude to him and to those models or whatever, but that wasn’t the point. He knew what he was good at and what he wasn’t. But that didn’t mean that he didn’t know what he liked and what he didn’t.
And he liked the way Mickey looked out for him.
And maybethatwas what it was about Mickey that reminded him of Logan. Because Logan had worried about him, looked after him too. But somehow, it feltdifferentwhen Mickey did it. Logan had never tried to be a dick to him or anything, except for the whole breakup, but Mickey was so …carefulabout it.
And maybe … Rafe blinked, a random piece slotting into place and making the whole puzzle in his head suddenly make sense.
When he and Mickey had been talking in the hotel room in Dallas, when he’d asked if their friendship felt like before when he was with Logan, Rafe had automatically said no.
Because he hadn’t meant it that way at all. Because he hadn’t thought about Mickey as anything but a friend.
