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I’d tried to wrap my head around this grown-up version of Clara while Katie had continued trying to get my goat. Which she totally did, by the way. Hell, she got the entire herd.
Crap, now I was thinking in farmyard analogies. I was fucked.
I needed to get back to Wilcox quick, fast, and in a hurry, and ground myself in what I was good at. Hockey. Maybe the only thing I was good at.
But I wondered if even two hours of winding highway was enough to erase from my brain the knowledge that Clara Connor was single again. And so fucking pretty and smart that sitting next to her made me feel completely inadequate in the most horribly familiar way.
I blew out a slow breath, doing my best to get a grip on the raging emotions engaged in a cage fight inside my chest. What the hell was wrong with me?
I picked up my phone and dialed, relieved when the call was answered on the first ring.
“Sly.”
“Rock.”
“It’s fairly late.”
“But you answered the phone.”
“Sly, this is why we have a team shrink. Or psychologist, or whatever.”
“Don’t need her. Just a new point of view. From a friend.” Rock and I had been friends for years, though since he’d hooked up with Drea, our friendship had felt a bit more like me calling him and him sometimes answering.
“What’s up, man?” he sighed, and I thought I heard him sit down to listen.
I called Rock when I had decisions to make, or when there were things going on inside me that I couldn’t piece through. Like now. Rock wasn’t as good as the team psych, but he also didn’t make me feel like an idiot.
I explained everything that had happened from the moment I’d walked through the front door this afternoon.
“Let me see,” Rock said, his carrying a hint of amusement that made me wonder the wisdom of calling him. “You’re back in your childhood home. And you ran into and then had dinner at your mom’s with the chick who broke your heart in high school.”
“I mean, that’s a bit of a stretch, the heart-breaking part.”
“Is it?”
I frowned, but Rock couldn’t see me. Not that my mad face would intimidate him in the least. “Maybe not.”
“Put it in context, though. We all remember the girl we had it bad for in high school. I think it’s some hormonal shit you don’t get over.”
“And what do I do?”
“Going home has got to bring back some other kinds of nostalgia too, right? Maybe you’re just kind of wrapped up in all of that.”
That made sense. “Okay.” Maybe she didn’t affect me that much. Maybe it was just being home and stuff.
“So you were already off balance. And then you saw her, and it was like total deja vu.”
“Yes. That sounds right. So why was I such a dick?”
“You reverted. Makes sense.”
“It does? So it’s okay that I was a dick?”
“It’s never okay to be a dick.” Shit. He was right.
“So what do I do now?”
“You seeing her again?” Rock asked.
