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“Oh shit, she’s going to marry him isn’t she?” Tessa asks.
Autumn giggles as they share a look.
“Well, thanks for the pep talk, ladies. I’m glad someone enjoys my misfortune,” I say.
“Sorry, girl… we’re just teasing you. I’m sorry he was such a dick to you in college. Maybe he’s matured now and won’t do anything else stupid?” Autumn says, hope sparkling in her eyes.
“Yeah, we’re just playing around. Trust me, Slade Matthews is on our shit list for what he did to you,” Tessa nods. “We hate him. Right, Autumn?”
There’s the Tessa I know.
Tessa shoots a look at Autumn with a frown and her eyebrows drawn together.
Autumn takes Tessa’s lead and nods.
“Right… yeah… we hate that guy.”
I shake my head and can’t help but smile. Slade might be my very own version of kryptonite, but I know they’re just trying to lighten the mood. And maybe that’s what I need.
Who knows… Autumn could be right about Slade. Maybe he has matured since college. I can only hope that’s true.
“But out of curiosity… so that we know why we really hate his guts properly, how exactly did he single-handedly ruin your chances at trying out for the Olympics?” Autumn asks.
Autumn pulls her glass of ice water to her lips.
“Good question,” Tessa says, chewing a bite of sandwich and leans in towards me to hear my answer.
“He threatened Sean Klein, the captain of the soccer team and a guy I was supposed to go on a date with. Sean canceled our date with a text, and when my college roommate cornered him at a party she was at that same night, he said that Slade Matthews threatened to break his kneecaps if any athlete at WU touched me.”
Autumn's eyebrows stitch together in confusion, and Tessa looks downright pissed off.
“Did you confront Slade about it?” Tessa asks.
Her irritation finally resembles how I would expect a friend to react to what Slade did… instead of proclaiming that we’re going to sleep together. Slade and I are nothing like Lake and Tessa. There is no underlying sexual tension there like they had for years prior, and Lake had fallen for Tessa even years before that.
My history with Slade is not even close.
“I couldn’t. They were at an away game by the time I found out. The partner I had been skating with for six years got in a skiing accident the week before and was going to be in a full-leg cast and would be out for a year, so my coach put together tryouts with a couple of new potential skating partners for me to skate with… but Slade’s threat got around campus so no skaters showed up. None of them wanted to take the chance that Slade would make good on his threat to end any athlete's career who came near me.”
“Are you serious? He did that?” Autumn asks, her jaw practically hitting the floor at my explanation.
Tessa sits there with her arms crossed and a scowl on her face toward the man who killed my dreams.
“Please tell me that the minute he came home, you kneed him in the nuts so hard, he’ll never be able to conceive children,” Tessa says. “Or, at the very least, tell me that you spread a rumor around campus that he has crabs.”
Autumn lets out a snicker, and I grin to myself, thinking about how Tessa would have handled Slade if he had done it to her instead of me.
“No, I didn’t. But my dad got the last word. He’s the reason Slade spent four years on a farm team instead of playing in the NHL,” I tell them.
It’s not like I didn’t think about taking out my own revenge, but I know why Slade did it. I didn’t need to ask him.
It’s not news to me that my father is overly protective. I had heard about my father's hour-long lecture in the hockey locker room the day before I transferred to WU from Michigan, where I used to live with my mother.
“No one dates my daughter, or you’ll be benched for the rest of the season.”
I had a reputation before I even stepped foot on campus soil.
But it didn’t bother me at the time. I knew that dating one of my father’s players would put my dad in a weird position. I know enough about dirty locker room talk to know that the last thing my father wanted to hear was stories about me with one of his players behind closed doors.
