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Damn it.
With a sigh, I look up at Coach. “There’s a girl.”
“Ahh, fuck,” Coach groans. “Why is it always a girl when it comes to you assholes?”
“Yeah, my thoughts exactly,” I mutter. “She’s kind of the girl I’ve been in love with since I was twelve.”
His head snaps up and he gapes at me as though I just told him a big blue alien appeared in his locker room and fucked Bobby up the ass. “What?” he grunts, wide-eyed.
I lean back in my seat, feeling like this meeting is about to be a little longer than intended. “We were together for six years before she up and left for New York without a goodbye, and now she’s back,” I explain.
“I’m not seeing your problem,” he tells me. “It was years ago.”
“Yeah, well . . . I keep accidentally falling into her bed.”
“Right,” he says with a nod. He takes a breath, thinking it through before dragging his hand down his face. “The way I see it, you both have some unresolved issues that you need to sort out before you run yourself into the ground or ruin a game.”
“Agreed,” I say.
“Good, now get out of here,” he says. I get up from my chair and turn to leave, but he stops me in the doorway. “Jax,” he says with a more serious tone in his voice. “If you’re still in love with this girl after years of being apart, then I dare say she’s the one for you. You’d be a fool to mess that up.”
“How do I trust that she won’t leave again?” I ask, hoping he might have the answers to all of my problems.
“Faith, Jaxon,” he says. “You know as well as I do that trust is earned, not given. Maybe she just needs the chance to earn yours back.” With that, he gives me one final nod and turns his eyes down to the paperwork on his desk, excusing me from the room, not realizing just how heavy his words are on my shoulders.
Heading down to the locker room, I quickly kick off my skates and start pulling off my training gear, my mind once again a rush of thoughts. After three long years apart, I am still madly in love with Cassandra Waters. But how the hell can I be sure she won’t leave? The first time was devastating. Going through that again … Well fuck, it’d kill me.
I find Bobby in the locker room and sit down beside him to take my skates off. “All good, man?” he asks, referring to my meeting with Coach.
“Yeah, he just wanted to bust my balls a little,” I explain with a grunt, grabbing my shit for a shower.
“Heading home?” he asks as he stands and picks up his hockey gear.
“Nope,” I say with a wide grin.
He shakes his head and strides for the doors with a hasty goodbye to the rest of the guys as I grab a towel and head into the shower. After all, I don’t want to smell like a dirty locker room when I’m sliding into Cass later. Stepping into the shower, I let out a sigh as the warm water rushes over my sore muscles and realize that maybe Coach is right. Maybe I am overdoing it a little.
Movement catches my eye, and I turn to see Xander walking out of the showers, trying to pull a shirt on. His arm raises above his head and my gaze is drawn to the massive purple bruise across his ribs. In fact, there are smaller cuts and bruises all over him.
What the fuck?
“Dude?” I say, stopping him in his tracks. He turns to look at me and instantly realizes what I’ve seen.
“It’s nothing, man,” he says with a shake of his head before pulling his shirt the rest of the way down and leaving the room. I think about going after him, but I’m naked and not really in the mood to get my ass whipped by twenty towels for leaving the showers in my birthday suit.
I finish off my shower wondering who the hell could have done that to him, and more importantly, why? If he was in some kind of trouble, he knows he could come to us. We would back him up, or we’d at least try to resolve the issue and prevent it from happening again. If he gets caught fighting, especially on school grounds, he’ll be kicked from the team. That kid is too valuable to lose.
Stepping out of the shower, I wrap a towel around my waist before heading back to my locker and pulling on a pair of jeans and a shirt. I promise myself to look into this thing with Xander—or at least try. The kid is a black sheep, and if he wanted to tell us something, he would have done it already.
