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“I may have crossed the line with her after the Cougars game,” I told him. “I don’t know when it started, but I think I like her, Derek.”
Derek gave me a small smile; it was one of the sincerest smiles he’d ever given me. “I was wondering when you’d finally admit it. I thought it would have been sooner than this.”
“None of that matters right now,” I waved him off. “Right now, I need to figure out how to fix things with Lottie. I made her uncomfortable at the game. Now I’m too much of a coward to face her and it’s impacting the team.”
“How do you know you made her uncomfortable?” Derek asked me.
My brows pulled together as I looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “I invaded her space without asking her and I probably put her in an uncomfortable position when she realized a player had feelings for her.”
“How do you know that she cares about that? How do you know she doesn’t feel the same way?” Derek pressed on. “You chose to avoid her this past week instead of just asking her. You’re retiring after this season, Nolan. You’re not going to be a playerin four months, but you will have the rest of your life ahead of you.”
Derek stood up from his locker. “Go take a quick shower. We’ve got a plane to catch.” He paused in the doorway to the locker room. “Maybe you should think about what it is you want from life once this season is done outside of a career, Nolan. Then maybe you should give your window seat away again tonight.”
The door to the locker room swung closed and left me standing alone in the Orlando Dream’s visitor’s locker room.
Even though I was the last player out of the locker room, I wasn’t the last person on the plane. That title was still held by Lottie once she finished getting all the team’s medical supplies loaded. She scanned the plane like our first flight to New York and it felt like déjà vu when our eyes locked and the window seat next to me was open.
I watched her glance around the plane as she tried to spy another open seat before she realized she was out of luck. She sucked in a breath and let it out with a sigh before she started to heft her carry-on luggage into the storage compartment above us. I quickly reached out for her bag as she struggled to get it to slide into the open spot.
“Here, let me.”
Red flushed Lottie’s cheeks as she watched me pluck her bag from her hands and easily slide it into the overhead compartment. Her mouth screwed together as she eyed the window seat before she pulled her shoulders back like she was walking to her death instead of sliding into a seat next to me.
“Hi,” I told her once I was buckled back in.
“Hi.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper and her eyes were glued on the tarmac.
“It’s nice to see you.” I felt like I was walking on eggshells after not having spoken to her in so long.
Lottie scoffed next to me before slowly turning to spear me with a gaze that could have melted the faux leather of the chair I was sitting on. “Oh yes, Nolan. It’s so nicefinallyseeing you after you’ve avoided me. You act as if we’re just two ships passing in the night after you expertly took every possible avenue to not see me at all!”
Quiet rage was coming off Lottie in waves and heat simmered in her eyes. Any sane person would have feared whatever she was about to do, but I found myself trapped in her gaze as if it were a trance.
“I’m sorry for that,” I told her, somehow finding a way to get the words out.
“Sorry for what exactly, Nolan?” Now that Lottie had gotten started, it was clear she wasn’t stopping. “What happened for you to ignore me? I thought you cared more about your season than that. But here we are with a loss that was totally preventable. You looked lost out there today!”
Leave it to Lottie to not only be hurt by my actions but still not be afraid to call me out on it.
“I don’t know how to really say this,” I started as I tried to find the right path forward. The last thing I wanted to do was make Lottie even more uncomfortable if I had been right and Derek had been wrong. “I’m sorry for what I said and did after the Cougars game. That was crossing a line. We were just starting to get to a good place as working partners and I would like to get back to that. I was afraid I’d made you uncomfortable, so I just wanted to give you space.”
“Oh,” Lottie replied quietly.
Oh?
Was she not uncomfortable?
Did she not think anything of it and I just brought it up as if it had been some big deal?
Was I overanalyzing everything right now?
Before Lottie could say anything else to send me spiraling even further, I filled the silence that was stretching out between us.
“Like I said, I’m sorry. So can we just get back to how things were before?”
Lottie stayed silent for so long after my question that I began to panic. My eyes darted from her face to where Derek was trying to watch us inconspicuously. He flashed me a thumbs up when he noticed me looking, oblivious to the distress on my face.
“Just friends?” Lottie finally replied.
