AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Josh.”
“I… He says nothing happened with her, but he’s lying.”
“How can you be so sure?”
She gave a small shrug, focusing on the bottle in her hands. “I just know. I kept him at arm’s length, and, in the end, I pushed him into another girl’s arms. He’s twenty-two, and I made him wait all this time, and, in the end, he realized I wasn’t worth it.”
“Hey, don’t make excuses for him.”
My hand curled into a fist against my thigh. I was an asshole. I rarely fucked the same girl twice, but I never made promises. They knew what they were getting, and if they expected more, that was on them.
But Josh had made promises to Dayna. He’d stood by her side for months.Months. And at the first taste of freedom, he’d fucked her over.
“Can I ask you something?”
Dayna nodded.
“Why’d you two never… you know?”
“Dalton’s death broke me. It broke me in ways I didn’t think were possible. I was so lost, Aiden. It’s why I stayed away, why I…”
“Hey, you don’t have to tell me. I shouldn’t have—”
“No”—she forced a smile—“it’s okay. I think it’s time I talked about it.”
She drained half the bottle of water and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I closed myself off after my brother’s death. Carson tried. He tried so hard to help me heal, but, in the end, I needed to get away from Dupont Beach. College was hard at first. I found it difficult to make friends, to let people in.
“Cancer, right?”
She nodded, pain glittering in her eyes.
I’d heard the story—everyone at Lakeshore U had.
Dalton Benson and Carson Walsh were an urban myth around campus—a legend. Best friends who rose through the ranks together right out of peewee. The dynamic duo. Two of college hockey’s rising stars, both playing for the Lakers.
Until Dalton got sick at the end of freshman year.
“It came out of nowhere,” her voice cracked. “And within four months, he was gone. It didn’t feel real. One day he was there, still laughing in his hospital bed, cussing at the TV whenever we watched the Blue Jackets play. And then he was gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. I can talk about it now, but it took me a long time to come to terms with it. Part of me never will. He was my big brother, you know. The person I looked up to more than anything. And he was going places, Aiden. He was going all the way.”
“He still holds the record for most goals scored by a right-winger at Lakeshore,” I said. I only knew because Noah, our star right-winger, had made it his mission to try and beat it.
“I know. I check the end-of-season stats every year.”
Sadness radiated from her, and I wanted to fix it. For the first time ever, I wanted to put the sparkle back in a girl’s eyes and make her smile again.
Fuck.
She obviously had some kind of magical powers because she was doing things to me no other girl ever had.
“It was too hard being here, being reminded of him every second of every day. So I moved to Boston and never looked back.
“I didn’t officially meet Josh until last summer. We had some mutual friends, and we’d seen each other around, but I didn’t put myself out there.”
“What changed?”
