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Astrid froze, her whole body turning as cold as the disaster vodka in her freezer.
Chapter Forty-Four
Cal’s chest tightened to the point where he could have sworn his ribs were poking into his lungs as all of the expression slid off her face. It was like someone had taken an eraser and smoothed away all of the Astrid from her.
“I’m sorry,” he said, the words coming out in starts and fits, like a drunk stumbling out of a bar after last call. “I agreed to do an article, a profile that would get the league to maybe stop seeing me as that guy who had his leg sliced almost in half. Part of the deal, though, was that the reporter wanted to talk to people who knew me and—” He stopped himself before all the words rushed into one in his panic to get it out before she shut the door on him. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, but it doesn’t excuse it. I’m sorry.”
She seemed to collapse in on herself, her shoulders sinking, her spine rounding, and her arms wrapping around her middle as if she had to protect her most vulnerable parts from him. “You told a reporter about us? So they would change the way they looked at you?”
His gut dropped. That she even had to ask meant he’d already fucked this. “No.”
She raised her eyebrows and tilted her head in the universal sign of yeah-sure-like-I’m-supposed-to-believe-that.
“It was my sister, but she didn’t realize who she was talking to.” He shoved his hands through his hair, needing to do something with his hands as anxiety rode shotgun on this little drive through hell. “Can I come in and explain?”
Astrid’s jaw tightened, and she straightened up to her full height. She had every right to slam the door in his face, and her friends standing in we-will-fuck-you-up formation behind her definitely gave off the vibe that she should, but she didn’t. Instead, she took a step back so he could walk inside.
Nola and Thea gave him curt nods when he said hello and then moved in unison to stand on either side of Astrid. It was a good show, and he was glad she had friends who were there for her like that, but he was only here for one person.
The apartment looked almost the same as when he’d left only a few hours ago, before his whole world had blown up. Astrid had yanked the comforter up, but the sheets were still a lumpy mound underneath it. There was a torn-open bag of seasoned fries on the island along with three shot glasses that hadn’t been there before, but her shirt was still laying on the back of a chair where she’d tossed it last night. Looking around was kind of like the first time he’d gone back to the ice rink after his injury. His thigh had hurt like a pack of beavers were gnawing away at him so they could chew his shit leg off and throw it onto one of the other logs in their dam, and his doctor had threatened to use a tranquilizer gun if he even thought about going out on the ice, but Cal had to go. He had to try even though he knew it wasn’t a place for him anymore.
He’d ended up on his ass and added another month onto his physical therapy, but for three glorious seconds before gravity and the fucking beavers won, he was where he belonged again.
There weren’t any beavers this time, but somehow the pain was worse.
“Look, Blackburn’s wife called in a favor from her friend Lucy, who is a PR badass and occasionally works with the Ice Knights when shit goes sideways,” Cal said. “I had no idea he’d asked her, I swear. No doubt she did it because Blackburn wrongly feels like he owes me.”
Astrid crossed her arms and shot him a skeptical look. “Why does that matter? Why would he owe you?”
“He was the other player.”
Astrid flinched. “I wasn’t watching the other player in the videos. I only saw you.”
“Yeah, usually the videos just focus on the blood,” Cal said with a weary sigh as he tried to ignore the ache building to a throb in his thigh. “Blackburn was an asshole player, but he wasn’t dirty. No one who knew anything about the game would have ever seen what happened and thought he did it on purpose, including me, after he’d gotten hit from behind and pushed into the crease. But he showed up at my hospital a few days after my first surgery and appointed himself my fairy-fucking-godfather.”
Cal had just woken up one day, groggy from all the meds, to see Blackburn holding a hospital gift shop stuffed bear. He’d snarled at him and told him he’d better hurry up and get better because they weren’t done playing against each other and Blackburn only had so much time before retirement. He’d left soon after, but he’d kept coming back day after day after day until it just seemed normal, and Cal started looking forward to seeing the big jerk. After he’d left the hospital and went home, those drop-in visits had turned into texts and video calls and the occasional I-was-in-the-neighborhood-of-this-small-town-near-absolutely-nothing-and-thought-I’d-say-hi visits.
“He’s the one who brought up my name to Coach for this job, and I’m guessing he took care of the hotel bill when my family came up and stayed with me until I could get out of the hospital,” Cal continued. “Blackburn denies it, but putting distance between himself and any good deed is pretty much his M.O. His wife Fallon reached out to Lucy to do something that would show people that I was more than a has-been and that there was still a place for me in the league.”
Astrid pursed her lips together and dropped her gaze to the floor, the only sound in the room the rat-a-tat splatter of slushy rain hitting her windows as she processed what he’d said. That had to be a good sign. If she had just invited him inside so she could tell him to fuck off in the privacy of her apartment and out of Mrs. Duffy’s hearing, she would have done it by now. Against the odds and any kind of common sense, Cal started to hope.
But then she looked up at him, and his leg started pounding.
“I thought this was just one year for you,” she said, her voice quiet. “That the job with the Ice Knights was temporary, like mine.”
“My deal with the Ice Knights is only for the season.” Something that had seemed like a gift from the hockey gods a few months ago and now seemed more like a curse. “But hockey is pretty much all I know. It’s who I am.”
Astrid chuckled without even an ounce of amusement as she shook her head. “So what, you thought that the way to really sell the story—and therefore yourself—was to add in a little drama by having your sister tell them we were dating?”
“It wasn’t like that.” He unlocked his phone and handed it to her. “Really.”
He watched as she read through Brit’s texts apologizing for her mistake. They were a mix of exclamation points, emojis, all-caps emphasis, and paragraph-length text and screenshots that all boiled down to a reporter who had called her and insinuated that she was the one doing the profile on Cal, which she was not. She asked Brit to confirm the rumors about Cal and Astrid, and Brit said yes before she said no before she said she wasn’t going to talk about that before she ditched the conversation completely saying she had to talk to Cal first. It hadn’t been much, but it was enough.
Astrid’s expression didn’t change at all as she read the messages, but as they read over her shoulder, Nola’s and Thea’s faces went from get-the-torches to something a lot closer to sympathy. Whether they felt bad for Brit or Astrid, he couldn’t tell, but it didn’t matter. He only cared about what Astrid thought.
Astrid handed back his phone, and he braced himself for whatever was coming next, putting most of his weight on his left leg because the scar on his thigh wasn’t just aching, it was radiating pain down his leg. Yeah, it was thundering outside, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the storm pelting the windows with rain wasn’t the only reason why it hurt like hell.
“That reporter is such a fucking bitch,” Astrid said. “Tell your sister it’s not her fault. I’d love to get my hands on whoever tipped off the reporter, though.”
