Page 11

Groaning, he flopped back onto the floor and wished he could go back to that moment in the storage room where Nolan had looked at him not like he was a kid, but like he was someone of interest.

“Eli.” Sandro Zanetti stepped up to Deeley’s other side, concern in his dark eyes. “Are you hurt? Sick? Why are you lying on the floor?”

“Because life’s a travesty,” Eli announced and covered his eyes with both arms.

“Uh . . . what?”

“He’s moping over this article that just went up,” Deeley said.

“He read it?”

“No. He asked me to read it to him.”

“And you did?” Zanetti let out a long-suffering sigh. “Get out of here, Deeley, and take Sandbaker with you.”

“What did I do?” Sandbaker grumbled.

Eli raised his arms and watched as his friends skedaddled out of the locker room, because no one ignored the command of a seventeen-year vet.

Zanetti grabbed Eli by the wrists and hauled him up effortlessly. “You know the carpet is gross, right?”

Eli glanced down at it. “That hadn’t occurred to me, no, but I’m certainly thinking about it now.”

It was vacuumed daily and steam-cleaned weekly, but at the end of a long day, it was pretty nasty.

“What’s going on, Eli?”

Eli tried on a smile.

As a mentor, Zanetti had been . . . kinda terrible. At first. Then he’d slowly started to open up, and now, for whatever reason, Zanetti saw him as a little brother, which was both bewildering and awesome. Eli’s actual sibling—his sister—was almost a decade older than him, and they’d never been all that close.

Still, Zanetti was more than a decade older than him—he was turning forty in February—yet Eli would call him in an emergency before he ever called his sister.

Would also land on his doorstep at 12:45 in the morning after drinking a few too many beers while out with Nolan because the man sent his nerves jingling and he’d needed liquid courage.

And then Nolan had told him about the girlfriend, which . . . ugh.

“The University of Vermont has an astrophysics track as part of their physics major.”

Zanetti didn’t blink at the non-sequitur. “You really think you have time for one more thing on your plate? Besides, they broke up.”

“Who broke up?”

“Nolan and his astrophysics professor.”

Oh god, Eli was happy about that. He was officially a terrible person. “How do you know?”

“We had drinks this summer while he was here visiting Coach.”

Well, fuck. How had Eli missed a visit from Nolan? Probably because he’d been in Saskatoon visiting his parents.

Not that Nolan splitting with his girlfriend made any difference. Sure, he was bisexual, but if the men and women he’d dated were any indication, Nolan was into people with several initials after their name.

Eli could have initials after his name. In high school, he’d been voted most likely to run a Fortune 500 company. He was smart. He had two undergraduate degrees and a couple of certificate programs under his belt. No fancy post-nominals, though. Not yet, at least.

Zanetti jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Want to talk about what happened out there?”

Blowing out a breath, Eli sank onto the seat of his stall. “Why do I suck this season?”