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This hurt much more than I’d been expecting, so the sooner I got away from him, the better it would be.
I hadn’t cried a single tear over Jarvis, but there would be many, many tears for Boone.
CHAPTERTWENTY-SEVEN
Boone
Mavericks Group Text
Lars:I finally got a photo of both girls with their eyes open where neither one of them is crying.
Kon: Cute.
Drew: You’ve sent us more pictures of your daughters than I have of my kids from their first year.
Lars: I can’t help how photogenic they are.
Wes: Here’s Aiden milk-drunk…
Nash: That’s the same face you make when you’re drunk. But seriously, the kid looks like you.
Wes: Future lady killer. I made sure the doctor was careful when she had that scalpel near the family jewels.
Rory: How’d you manage that?
Wes: I glared at her through the window the whole time.
Lars: Here are the girls in their Mavericks outfits.
Lars: And a few from their first bath…
Drew: You’re never going to stop, are you?
Lars: No.
I tappedmy stick against each of my shin guards three times, then dropped my stick to the concrete floor and practiced puck handling without a puck.
This was part of my ritual. On game days, there were things I always did the same way. Hell, nearly every guy on my team had rituals, whether they admitted it or not.
I’d missed my pregame nap, spending the whole hour staring at the ceiling and wondering how I’d fucked things up so badly with Jolie.
Of course I was planning to tell her about Nashville. We’d just never gotten any time alone for me to do it, and then she’d blown up at me after Coach told her, which he shouldn’t have done. He was at the top of my shit list now, and I’d been avoiding him all day.
I’d eaten my pregame meal—a sub sandwich from my favorite deli and an unsweet iced tea—alone in the weight room. I wasn’t in the mood to look at one of Lars’s three hundred baby photos. There was no one but Jolie I wanted to talk to right now, but she wasn’t responding to my texts.
I went into the locker room and put on my headphones, turning on my pregame playlist. My head wasn’t where it needed to be for this game. Going to Nashville was the right move, but it wasn’t an easy one.
Not only was I losing Jolie, I was also going to lose my teammates. I couldn’t imagine calling another team my own. I’d have to, though. It was possible I’d be a fucking mess with a new team, too. I was used to Wes and Nash. I knew how they moved and could anticipate their choices.
A tap on my shoulder made me look. With my elbows resting on my knees, I could see Nash standing there, grinning at me.
“What?” I said, turning off the music.
“Who pissed in your cornflakes?”
I sat up straight, glaring at him. “What do you want?”
He turned his phone screen toward me. “Just wanted to show you this.”
