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I laughed. “‘Don’t be stubborn,’ he says.” I shook my head. He could hardly look me in the eye. “Go home, Liam.”
I’d be damned if I stood there again and watched him storm out.
I brushed past him, and when my shoulder bumped against his, he rocked back on his heels, emitting a harsh puff of air.
“Lock up before you leave,” I told him. “And leave the key on the counter. This house is for family.”
Chapter Seven
LIAM
To be perfectly clear, I did not believe in ghosts.
Even when I was young, I thought Casper was a wanker who needed to get a life. Haunted houses were a giant racket. And the idea that no one else figured out that the little kid in that stupid movie could see dead people was completely idiotic.
However ... none of that explained the dream. The one that left me staring at my ceiling for hours, my hand over my wildly racing heart.
The night I came home from Chris’s house—where I’d left that bloody box sitting in the middle of the island, and a hole in the wall from the bat Zoe had swung at my head—he appeared in a dream.
Wasn’t really a dream, I suppose. More like a cloudy memory that came to me in my sleep. Something I’d forgotten.
Early in our Denver years—Chris already settled with Amie and me happily not settled with anyone—we’d talked about what the rest of our careers might look like.
“I’ll play ’til they drag me off the field,” I told him.
We were sitting in the front row on the fifty-yard line, drinking beers in the dark stadium.
“No, you won’t,” he said.
He was so fucking smug, always thinking he knew me best.
I gave him a look. “What makes you say that?”
“Because I know you.”
“Fuck off.”
He laughed. The absolute git. He had a big smile, wide and happy, that showed all his straight, white, perfectly American teeth. “Mark my words, Liam. You play because it’s your favorite outlet, and I get that. I get all the reasons you chose this game over that other one,” he drawled.
I rolled my eyes and took a drag of my beer.
“You play because of the brotherhood,” he continued. “You take care of your teammates like they’re your family.”
My only response was to shift in my seat. I didn’t remember doing that in real life, but in my dream, his words were starting to make me uncomfortable.
“You say you don’t want a family—”
“Idon’t,” I interrupted.
Chris ignored me. “You’ll want to take care of them too. Once you find the right one.”
This, unfortunately, is where the memory changed into something else.
I tried to get out of the seat, tried to walk away. But my legs were useless. I couldn’t move, no matter how hard I tried.
“You’ll take care of mine, won’t you?” he asked.
Then his hand, big and strong and relentless, gripped my arm. His eyes seared straight into my bleeding soul.
