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I didn’t want to say I was jealous, but at twenty-nine, I was starting to realize I might be ready for something like what my former teammate had found.
Maybe not kids yet, but someone I could look at the way Cortney looked at his fiancée.
“You okay?” he asked as his daughter yanked on his blond man bun.
“Yeah,” I muttered, even as I rested my head back on the sofa and closed my eyes. The conversation alone had left me exhausted.
It didn’t compare to the level of exhaustion that overtook me twenty minutes later as I rode to the stadium with Dylan. The sling was uncomfortable, especially once I was strapped into the seat belt. The sunglasses were pointless, even inside the SUV with tinted windows. Currently, the light wasn’t what was causing my head to pound. No, it was the two women up front and five loud-as-shit little people in the back seat. The baby girl had been crying on and off since Cortney had clicked her car seat in, and two of the other kids were fighting about who could spy more red things.
“You shouldn’t sleep, Mr.…” a girl’s voice called out, although I had no idea how she thought I could sleep.
“Mr. Dumpty, Collette,” Liv Langfield, Beckett’s wife, answered.
“Huh. Statistically, what are the chances that a man named Dumpty fell off a wall and broke his head?” another girl asked.
“Probably a lot, because he does the tricks,” a young boy answered.
A Nerf bullet bounced off my ear.
“Fuck’s sake,” I muttered.
“Umm, excuse me?—”
“No, Phoebe.” Dylan cut her off. “Bill Uncle Cortney.”
“Yeah, or Uncle Beckett. We won’t charge the invalid,” Liv added.
Charge? What the hell? I rubbed my head.
If Cortney and Beckett had also headed to the stadium, then why was I in the circus car with five kids?
“Finn, Addy, Collette, Phoebe, remember: we need to use quiet voices because Mason has a concussion,” Dylan said, her voice tranquil yet cheery.
“Why didn’t Cortney and Beckett take him along with them?” Liv voiced what I had been asking myself since we left.
“Oh, you know Beckett. He doesn’t leave until eight thirty, and if Mason had waited around for them, then he wouldn’t have made it in time.”
The crying baby finally quieted, easing the pounding in my head a fraction. I let out a long breath and shut my eyes. I wished they would stop talking too, but telling the wives of the owner and the GM to shut up would not make me any friends in the office.
“I could have convinced Beckett to leave earlier.”
“Then that blackness that sometimes tinges his aura would have settled over him, and that would have stressed Cort out. If that happened, then all that negative energy would have been bad for Mason’s brain bleed.”
Before I could even fully understand what Dylan had just said, another Nerf bullet ricocheted off my head.
What the hell?
“Finn, he has a head injury. Let’s not shoot the guy with the bleeding brain,” Liv scolded her son.
Hold up. Maybe I needed to pay more attention to my head injury.
“Do I really have a brain bleed?”
“It’s just a moderate concussion,” the driver answered. “You’ll be out for about ten days. At least that’s the rumor.”
My head throbbed, partially because I’d be out for ten days, but also because the baby was crying again.
It seemed strange that no one had filled me in on what was wrong with my head. Or maybe they had, and I couldn’t remember. Cortney had mentioned a few things this morning, but when I reached for those memories, my brain was fuzzy. The last thing I remembered before I woke up on his couch was sitting on the bench and fucking around with the guys. Maybe I did have a brain bleed. But if that were the case, wouldn’t they keep me in the hospital? I told myself I’d ask the team doc this morning.
