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Astrid didn’t think about the odds of her getting to Cal before he left the arena—there wasn’t time. She just ran, hustling down the stairs and out of the building, flagging down the first cab she saw.
She yanked open the door and slid inside in one hurried motion. “I need to get to the Ice Knights arena as fast as you can.”
“At almost rush hour?” The old guy in the driver’s seat in a Yeti’s hat used the rearview mirror to make eye contact. “This ain’t the movies, lady. I’m not driving on any sidewalks.”
“Please, I need your help.” Desperation made her throat tight, and she fought to get the words out. “If I don’t get there before he leaves, it’ll be too late.”
“Ah hell,” the driver grumbled as he pulled away from the curb. “We’ll take Fortieth. It’s faster.”
Astrid spent the three blocks going down State Street quietly panicking as she tried to figure out what she was going to say. When it started to rain and the cabbie sped up to make the yellow light at the left turn onto Burrows, she still had nothing but white noise in her head. She finally came up with the brilliant plan of telling him she liked him—really groundbreaking stuff—right as the taxi merged onto Fortieth. After that, it was a whole lotta nothing rattling around between her ears until she realized they weren’t moving anymore.
But not today. They got half a mile away from the arena when traffic came to a standstill—and stayed that way.
“Can you tell what it is?” Astrid asked, straining to sit up higher in the backseat to get a look out the front window, her heart slamming against her ribs as her anxiety went from twelve to sixty on a ten-point scale.
“Lady, you can see what I can see,” her driver said before laying on the horn, which was answered by the driver in the stopped car in front of them sticking his arm out his window and flipping them off. “He hugs his mother with those hands?”
Stomach doing the thing and sinking on down below the asphalt under the tires, she brought up her traffic app and traced the line of red from the Parkway way past the arena a few blocks away. Her chances of finding Cal had gone from slim to a sliver, but she wasn’t giving up. She couldn’t.
She swiped her card through the payment machine fastened to the back of the driver’s seat. “I’ll get out here.”
“You can’t,” the cabbie said. “It’s Fortieth! There’s four lanes of traffic going each direction.”
“Yeah, well, no one’s going anywhere on either side.” She pushed open the door. “I’ll cut through the park.”
“It’s that important?” the cabbie asked.
“Yeah,” she said and got out of the cab, weaved her way through the stalled cars to the median, crossed over to the other side, and was half soaked by the time she made it to the park.
The second her feet touched grass, the sound of a horn blasted, followed by the cabbie hollering, “Good luck, lady!”
Astrid lifted her arm in the air and gave him a thumbs-up before breaking into a sprint along the park’s puddle-dotted path, swerving around slow-walking tourists with their oversize umbrellas and hurdling over the squirrels that knew no fear and moved for no one. By the time she burst into the assistant coaches’ office at the arena, her hair was soaked and she was wild-eyed and breathing heavy.
“You okay, Pipsqueak?” Parvo asked.
“Have you seen—” she started, but the question died on her lips when her gaze landed on Cal’s empty desk, and the heart that had been pounding in her chest up until that second broke apart. “He’s gone.”
“Yep,” Bear said, his voice soft with sympathy. “Moving on to better pastures.”
Parvo shook his head at the other assistant coach. “That’s greener pastures.”
“It’s whatever I say it is,” Bear shot back.
The urge to sink down into her chair and cry hit her like a freight train, but hope could be a real bastard to stomp out, so instead she pulled her phone out of her back pocket and texted Jada.
ASTRID: Any sight of him?
JADA: N
Astrid took that as a no and let out a sigh that came from the very bottom of her weary soul. Blinking away the tears that flooded her eyes, she swallowed past the lump of agony in her throat. She’d thought the wedding that wasn’t would be the worst day of her life. Then she’d figured it was the moment she went viral in the worst way over social media again. But now she knew it was this moment. This was as bad as it got.
“You want me to text if I hear from him?” Bear asked, sympathy thick in his voice.
Her chest hurt too much to play dumb about why he was asking. “How did you know?”
Bear lifted his hand in front of his face and pointed to his ring finger. “Four times. I can spot a love fuck-up in real time.”
“Zero times,” Parvo said, waving his left hand in the air. “And even I could see it. I think you two were the only puck heads thinking you were fooling anyone.”
