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Because good or not, he was…God…he was disappointed.
And it was a heavy disappointment, one that sank deep.
Another ping and he glanced back at his phone.
Wanted to call, but knew you had the game. Didn’t want you to wait any longer.
And that was it. Gianna hadn’t added anything else, hadn’t given him a single clue to her own feelings about the results. Was she relieved? Happy? Sad?
He considered her stories about her grandmother and mother, how they’d both been single mothers, how they’d struggled. Never once when she talked about them did Gianna allude to how she would feel in that same situation.
Goddammit. That had been his fault. He’d pushed off all talk about the pregnancy and the two of them had held firm to it. At the time, he thought he’d been saving them from stressing out about an unknown, but now, there was too much he didn’t know. Things he desperately wanted to know.
Like how she was feeling.
He’d replayed their time together over and over since leaving her, the memories on auto-repeat. It felt as if they’d been at that cabin for years, not a mere five days, the two of them sharing a lifetime. A wonderful lifetime.
“Game time!” Tank called out. “Look alive, El Train.”
Elio was surprised to discover most of the team had already filed out, so he was forced to put the text and Gianna out of his mind, something that was surprisingly difficult to do.
He’d never had a hard time shutting the world out when it was game time. Because in the past, the game, the competition, and winning was all that mattered to him.
That wasn’t true anymore.
Now there was something that mattered even more.
And it was her.
* * *
“What a game,” Preston said as he took a swig of Guinness. “We fucking kicked ass.”
They had. They’d shutout Carolina, winning soundly four goals to nil. Preston had scored, as had Elio. He should be in high spirits, like his teammate, but he was struggling to get there, Gianna’s text still rattling around in the back of his brain.
He hadn’t texted or called her back yet, not sure what he was going to say.
Preston glanced around Pat’s Pub and grinned. “Big crowd here tonight. Wonder if they’ve got music planned for later.”
Elio gestured toward the stage where a guitar and amp were set up. “I think that’s a good bet.”
Preston’s eyes lit up. “Wouldn’t it be cool if Hunter Maxwell was in town? I wouldn’t mind hearing him perform. Or even Aubrey Summers.”
The best/craziest part about the pub was the fact that the Collins family, who owned it, included not one, not two, not three, but four famous musicians. Like, world famous.
And while it was rare, it wasn’t unheard of for Hunter or Aubrey, or even Sky Mitchell and Teagan Collins, to perform there when in town.
Elio had been introduced to Pat’s Irish Pub during his first year playing for Baltimore. His teammate, Alex Stone, had taken him around the city shortly after Elio had signed. Alex, team captain at the time, had lived in Baltimore for several years, long enough that he’d determined what bars were popular with tourists and which were local favorites.
Pat’s ranked at the top of both lists, serving drinks to a steady crowd of regulars while serving up meals that had the tourists planning return trips just for another bite of Riley’s, Shepherd’s Pie.
Over the years, Elio had brought quite a few of his teammates to the pub, much to the delight of the sports-mad Collins family. Add in the fact his cousins, Layla and Erin, had both married into the Collins clan, it had become a home away from home, the place he came when he felt homesick.
“Hey, guys,” Alex Stone said, approaching their table. “That was one hell of a game.”
Preston and Elio stood up, offering handshakes that morphed into guy hugs, both happy to see their old teammate.
The Baltimore team had changed quite a bit from the early days, enough that Elio was starting to feel his age. He wasn’t the oldest on the team, but he wasn’t far from it. Preston was only a couple years younger, which meant he and Elio had been teammates the longest.
