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I’m walking in through the hotel lobby after practice and meetings this afternoon. I’m anxious as fuck about the game tonight. The last few we’ve been playing better, but something’s still missing. Something more than the woman I keep telling myself not to want.
Pulling out my phone, I nod to a couple of guys wearing Slayers jerseys watching me from the coffee stand. One of our trainers is talking up some chick next to the restaurant. Perfect, I can call with a blow-by-blow account for an excuse. She’ll love it.
I wait for the line to connect, for that missingsomethingin my chest to fill in at the sound of her voice, Matty in the background chirping out updates on drama at school or his Lego city.
“Rux!”
I pull the phone back, checking to make sure I dialed Cammy’s number and not Matty’s.
“Hey, little man, what are you doing with your mom’s phone?” I ask, imagining him at the kitchen table with an action figure and Cammy at the counter starting on dinner.
“My mom and dad are napping right now.”
I’m a guy known for my lightning-fast reflexes. For snap decisions that make or break a game. That means processing information at the speed of a flying puck.
But this?
The skin across my cheeks feels funny and my voice doesn’t sound like my own when I choke out the only word I can manage, “What?”
“Sleeping. I guess, maybe, they didn’t get enough sleep last night,” he tells me casually in that throaty little voice I love.
Trainer forgotten, I turn where I am and start walking back toward the street. Toward the airport or maybe the highway.
Everything inside me demands action. Retribution. An ass-kicking. Me on my knees in front of Cammy begging her to give me another chance. Telling her I fucked up. I didn’t mean it.
Good enough for her or not,I don’t want her to pick him.
If she deserves more security in her future than I can give her, then she sure as fuck deserves more than the guy who abandoned her seven years ago!
Matty’s still chatting. He sounds almost amused.
And why wouldn’t he be? He’s seven. And his mother and father are together in the way people who are part of a family are together.
He’s probably elated.
I should be. It’s why I ripped my heart out and let his mother go. So she would have the clarity to make this kind of choice.
He’s talking about dinosaurs and Play-Doh now, and how his dad is really good at building. How he showed him how to do some of it, but Matty didn’t think his was as good.
“No way, Matty. I bet yours is the best of them all.”
I should get off the phone. Let Matty get back to his family. But even knowing that Cammy and Jeremy—
Fuck!
I can’t make myself hang up.
More than ever, I feel the need to hold on. To listen to every word that Matty is telling me about how the orange and the green got too mixed up and couldn’t be separated. And how his dad was really good at making stuff but didn’t know how to wreck it the way I did.
This kid has no idea how right he is. I know how to wreck things, whether I mean to or not.
“Okay, Rux, my dad’s getting up now. I have to go.”
Jesus, the visual running through my head right now makes me sick. Jeremy, with his perfect pretty-boy hair sticking up like mine does after Cammy’s had her fingers in it for an hour. Some smug, satisfied look on his face as he staggers out of her bedroom… Maybe giving her a few minutes to get herself put back together before she rejoins her son.
“I’ll talk to you later, Matty.”
“Oh, Rux?”
