Page 51 of The Wildest One
“My head is at …” My voice trailed off while I squeezed the sides of my temples. “I don’t know.”
“Can I ask you something? And you promise not to chew into me?”
The air was vibrating off the roof of my mouth every time I exhaled. “What?”
“Is it her? Is that what you’re thinking about? Is that why you were off your game tonight?”
My hands dropped, and I glanced toward him. “Who?” My brows furrowed. “Jolie?”
Of course he was talking about her.
We were in Boston. There was no one else he could be speaking about.
“Yes,” he replied.
I sat up straight, gazing at the faces of my teammates with expressions that were as miserable as mine.
I owed them an apology.
The coaching staff too.
Fuck.
FUCK.
A loss as devastating as this one, all because I couldn’t get my goddamn thoughts together.
And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
“While we were on the plane, you told me you weren’t seeing her tonight, but you didn’t have time to elaborate with all the cameras that were in our faces. Is it because she’s out of town? I know she was the last time we were here.”
Two years had passed since I’d seen Jolie and over six months since we’d last texted.
The time between our texting had been growing, going from monthly to every few and even longer. That didn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about her. Wanting her. Dreaming about tasting her again. The opportunities that presented themselves had just never worked in our favor.
“I don’t know if she’s out of town or if she came to the game,” I said to him. “We don’t talk anymore.”
“You never told me that.”
I took off my jersey and got to work on releasing the clasps on my shoulder pads. “There was nothing to say. I invited her on my trip to Africa. She blew me off. We didn’t speak again.” I handed the shoulder pads to the team’s equipment manager. “She could have declined my offer, and when she didn’t even do that, when she said absolutely nothing, I took that as a sign that she was done.”
“Check your phone. See if she reached out. Whether she’s here or not, being how big of a fan she is, by now, she knows Boston won. She would probably text you for that reason alone.”
I shook my head, the sweat drips falling to my bare shoulders. “Nah, man.”
“Just do me a favor and look.”
There was no reason to even waste the effort of pulling out my phone. Plus, I was sure there were texts in our family group chat, attempting to make me feel better about the loss, and I didn’t want to read them. It was too early, the loss still too fresh.
But to appease Landon, since I knew he wouldn’t stop nagging me, I reached into the bag behind me and got my phone, watching the screen light up with more notifications than I wanted to deal with.
I went straight to the texts, and aside from the ones from my parents and siblings, there was nothing from Jolie.
“Nope. I was right.” I shut the screen off, too angry to look at it.
With his skates removed, he turned toward me. “I’m not going to lie … I’m finding this strange as hell.”
“Why?”
