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I nodded, dropping my eyes to my lap. “Yeah.”
“That was my first hockey game,” Zara said, clearly trying to break the tension sizzling around the table.
“Looked like it was Sly’s too,” Beck quipped.
“Shut it, saucemonkey.”
“Sauce monkey!” Katie laughed.
I couldn’t use any of the words I’d wanted to, given her presence.
“It was my first hockey game too,” Katie told Zara. “I was going to be a hockey player like Silly, but now I think I will just be a tow truck driver. I don’t want to have to beat people up.”
“Oh yeah?” Zara asked, clearly charmed.
The conversation went on around me, and I did my best to be present, but my mind was twisting in circles around things I couldn’t control, things I’d already screwed up. And Clara’s hand had found my thigh and was resting there, in a reassuring touch I didn’t deserve.
Finally, the meal ended, and we all went our separate ways. I wanted to linger here in Wilcox, to stew in my own misery, in my own apartment. But as she’d hugged me after I’d walked her and Katie to their car, Clara had said, “come over later maybe?”
And though I knew I didn’t deserve her, though I knew I should just say no and tell her we couldn’t go on like this, I heard myself say, “okay.”
I would see her, tell her in person that I wasn’t in a good place, that I needed to get back to focusing on hockey, on the one thing that I knew was there for me. And maybe see if I could pull my studies back together. There was no room in my life for Clara and Katie, for these enormous and confusing emotions I had now.
But all I wanted was to lose myself in her soft body, her warm bed, just one more time.
CHAPTER21
CLARA
STUPID LOVE
Something was wrong.
Sly arrived an hour after I got home. Katie was exhausted, partially from her concern over Sly and everything that had happened after the game. Which was mostly that he’d been a completely different person.
Gone was the engaged, silly, funny guy who’d pulled Katie (and me) into his orbit and charmed us until neither of us had any choice but to fall in love with him. In his place was a guy that emanated darkness and some kind of deep disappointment.
Was it just about the game? In the end, his team won. I would think that would serve to make him happy in some way, though his own performance was probably something he wasn’t proud about. I wondered what the guy had said to him to make Sly lose control like that. It was a little scary to see him lose control like that.
“Hey,” said the hulking and handsome man on my doorstep. He didn’t meet my eye.
“Hey,” I said, trying to make my voice soft, reassuring. I realized it was the voice I used with drugged-up mama bears when I helped collar and tag them for tracking. But that was how Sly seemed now, hurt. Vulnerable. Needing me to assure him that I wasn’t going to hurt him while he was down. “Come in.”
He stepped inside and looked around, as if he was seeing my house for the first time. The old couch, the worn table where I’d eaten all my childhood dinners. I hadn’t changed anything. My parents had died and I’d stepped right back into my childhood home. Not that Sly spent much time here when we were young.
“Beer?” he asked hopefully.
I offered him a smile, willing to do just about anything to make things the way they’d been before between us. “Sure. Let’s go out back.”
We headed through the kitchen to the back patio, each of us holding a bottle of beer. I’d pulled up the screens, since the mosquitos had come out in full force lately, and though the night air was warm, it wasn’t the sweltering oppression we got during the day.
We sank into my deck chairs, side by side.
“So,” I said, hoping he’d pick up on the question.
“Shitty day,” he said, as if we’d just come to some kind of agreement.
“Tell me why.”
