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“Am I the last one to call?” I chuckled.
“Yep,” he chuckled back. “The others have been calling me all morning.”
The Spartans were playing their second playoff game tomorrow afternoon, and there was nothing quite like playing in the playoffs. Yeah, the big game was a huge deal, but the journey to get there had a different kind of energy to it. For football, it was one and done; it was sudden death. There wasn’t a series that gave you hope like in other sports. If the Spartans lost today, they’d be out of it, and that was that.
However, honestly, I couldn’t see Raven minding much this time around. He wanted to marry Esme more than he wanted to win the Super Bowl, so losing today’s game would just get him to the altar faster. Their plan was to get married at the end of February, but that’d been planned on the hope that the Spartans would win the Super Bowl.
Of course, Raven could have married Esme months ago, but we all blame that on Sebastian. Had he not waited almost fifteen years to finally ask Nova out, then he and Nova would have been married already, and Raven wouldn’t have felt like he’d had to wait. For whatever reason, Sebastian and Nova had to marry first, and we’d all known it. Sebastian had fallen in love with Nova when we’d been kids, and he’d been honest with all of us about it. Well, all of us, except Nova. So, even though Raven had wanted to marry Esme a long time ago, he’d been waiting on Sebastian.
Luckily for all of us, Sebastian and Nova had gotten married immediately after they’d gotten together. With no point in needing to wait to see if it’d work out, they’d gotten married a couple of weeks before Christmas, and we’d all been there for their quick civil ceremony. My sister had just wanted to marry Sebastian, no fancy wedding needed.
It was also lucky that Esme was another easygoing female. She also wasn’t interested in a huge wedding, so that was going to make things a lot easier on all of us. It was one thing to take the day off during the season, it was quite another to take a bunch of them off to try to put a traditional wedding together. No way would all of us be able to take that kind of time off at the same time.
“Well, my money’s on you guys tomorrow,” I told him unnecessarily.
“It’d better be,” he laughed.
“How’s Esme?”
“She’s good,” he replied, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “All of Nova’s baby talk is putting ideas in her head.”
“I thought you wanted kids?” I asked, a little surprised by the comment.
“I do,” he insisted. “I just…I don’t know. I think I want Nova and Seb to have their own spotlight still. If we get pregnant at the same time that they do, then we’ll be sharing that attention.”
“Which would be perfect, because then your kids will grow up together,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, I know,” he muttered a bit. “But…I really think that Nova should be pregnant alone. This family’s first baby should belong to Nova and Sebastian, and I think that Nova should get all the attention on this first one.”
“Always the dad,” I chuckled.
“I have no problem following right behind them, I just…Esme and I can wait a few more months,” he went on.
“But if you get Esme pregnant, then Nova will have someone in the family that can actually support her and understand what she’s going through,” I reminded him. “We’re going to be shit at pacifying a pregnant woman. What the fuck do we know about any of that?”
Raven let out a laugh. “I might wait just to see Sebastian suffer alone.”
That got a huge smile out of me. “You do make a great point.”
After a second or two, he asked, “How’s the shoulder?”
“C’mon,” I groaned. “It’s not that bad.”
“Don’t ‘c’mon’ me, Orion Knight,” he replied sternly, taking his father-figure role seriously. “If you don’t get that shit checked-”
“I know, I know, I know,” I grumbled.
“Do you?” he chastised. “Because you’re acting like you don’t know better, O.”
“It’s just a little sore after-”
“Every fucking game,” he finished for me. “Get that shit checked out, dude. I mean it.”
Three weeks ago, my shoulder had started bothering me, but I had chalked it up to old age. Yeah, I was only twenty-eight, but in athlete years, I was pushing forty. If a team made it to the playoffs, you could hit one-hundred games in one season, and that was a lot of fucking games. They took a toll on your body, no matter how great the therapy equipment was.
Nevertheless, my left shoulder was beginning to ache beyond the couple of hours after a game, and I knew that I needed to take that seriously, even without Raven’s voice in my ear. Basketball was my livelihood, and though I could live comfortably for the rest of my life without it, I still had a burning passion for the sport, and I wanted to play for another good five years or so.
Now, it wasn’t like I was some prima donna, cry-baby, entitled jock. I didn’t mind asking for help, or advice, or seeing a doctor for whatever was bothering me. My issue had to do with the lack of privacy in the world today. With social media giving everyone the impression that they had a right into your private life, the last thing that I needed was an onslaught of speculation if it got out that I had to see a physical therapist for my shoulder. While there was a chance that no one would care, there was still a chance that the internet could turn it into a circus, and the team didn’t need that kind of distraction right now. We were on our way to winning back-to-back championships, so that was the last thing that we needed. Still, Raven was the kind of asshole that would show up at my door, cock me one in the face, then drag me to a doctor.
