20. Jake
Chapter twenty
Jake
“ W hat do you mean she no longer works for us?” I say so loudly it makes my head ring.
I’m still in the hospital bed. It’s seven in the morning and I’m tired to death of laying still. My phone magically appeared last night, along with a bag of snacks. I thought Kenzie brought them, but I realize they are locker room snacks, and she doesn’t have access to that part of the arena. It couldn’t have been her, though she swears up and down that it was.
Coach looks at me as if I’m an annoying little kid. I hate when he looks like that. It’s like he can see into my soul and he finds it lacking in some way. I throw my head back on the bed. I take a few deep breaths. I can’t act like I care too much. That would give Allie away and she’d be fired.
But now I hear she voluntarily left for a better career in PT as a woman working with the WNBA’s local Charlotte team. What a mess this has become. I tried to call her this morning, but I think she blocked my calls.
“It’s done,” Coach says. “She’s left. We’re interviewing replacements.” He steps closer to me. “This is for her own good. So I expect you not to raise an issue here, Jake. Your recovery is going to be a full-time job, trust me. We’re going to get you back out there on that ice this season. And you’re going to take us to the Stanley Cup this season. Got it?”
I do want to do that. It’s what I want to do every season—win the Stanley Cup. And if I don’t lead my team to it this season, my value as a franchise player will drop significantly.
I look at my phone. It hurts me that every woman who has ever been in my life hit me up last night and this morning with condolences on my injuries and texts and calls… except for her. Except for Allie.
Then, she left her job for a different job. I think she’s sending me a message here. And I think I better shape up and take a hint. I was a good time for her, though I didn’t think she was that shallow, and while I built some feelings for her, she did not build any for me. Whatever I thought we had, I was wrong.
“Son,” Coach says gruffly. “Put it all behind you. All the things that happened the past few weeks. And focus on the future. You’ve got a few good years left in you. Make them count.”
I find the adrenaline surging through me at his words. He is right. I don’t have the luxury that a twenty-year-old player would have. I’m not twenty. I have to make this season count.
I open my phone, find my text conversation thread with Allie and swipe left, deleting it all. She’s made her choice. She doesn’t want me. She never did. It’s time to move on.
Something shifts in Coach then. He reaches out a hand and shakes mine.
“Good man,” he says, like I’m some brave soldier who just decided to sacrifice something he loves for the service of his country. Coach has the power to make us all feel that way—it’s what makes him a great hockey coach.
It’s only after he leaves to find the doctor so that I can be discharged from the hospital to start my rehab that I realize what I just thought—sacrifice something I love…
Desperately, I clutch my phone, a surge of emotion and desire flooding me. Then, I let it go. I let it all go. This was Allie’s choice. She left without a word.
By the time I’m discharged, I’m back to my single-minded focus the way I need to be. My life is hockey. There’s no room for anything serious with a woman. There’s no room for Allie. There’s no room for… love.
***
“How does it feel to be over halfway through the season?” an eager reporter asks me after a particularly grueling game. I can’t tell them that my shoulder is currently on fire. But I stopped being honest about my pain long ago. I don’t take anything for the pain. I just ignore it. My eye is on the prize and I won’t show weakness when the Stanley Cup is within reach.
I glance around me in the game day locker room we have at the Eagles’ arena. It’s luxury in every way, when compared to the general locker room we use on a daily basis. It makes it special. I see the guys still sweaty, like I am, from three hours on the ice. I see their grit, their determination. I feel their adrenaline.
I look at the reporter and I give her my trademark grin, the one that has come to define me as a confident leader over the years.
“It’s a team effort. That’s why we are here. And that’s why I can say without a doubt that I am proud to be here. Every game, every practice, we get better as a team. And that’s why we are going to win the Stanley Cup. That is why we deserve to win it. Our work ethic is incredible.”
“The regular season ends in two months. How do you think your shoulder’s recovery will compare this year as opposed to last year when you sustained the injury?”
I force another smile. I hate answering this question. Every answer is a new way to tell the same lie: I’m fine. Not even Jones knows that I’m anything but fine.
“I guess my performance on the ice shows that I’m not the injured player I was last year.” I keep it brief, ready to wrap up.
“And what do you have to say about your former PT taking the forward for Charlotte’s WNBA team from injured to healed in a matter of six weeks? It was also a shoulder injury?” a different reporter asks me.
I clench my jaw. I don’t let myself think about Allie. It’s a totally off limits topic for me. It hurts in a way I hate to think about or admit. Allie did this to me—she abandoned me when I needed her the most. She bailed on me. According to Coach, she went to a better opportunity for her career. And she did it without one single backwards glance at me.
It fills me with equal parts anger and pain. The betrayal, the way that she did it, is what hurts so much. It has made me question every interaction I ever had with her. Was I being used the whole time? Was she sleeping with me for sport or so that she would manipulate something out of me? But she left before she could finish the job?
I feel disgusted by her. I look right into the reporter’s camera. “PTs come and go. Not one of them is memorable or special. I really don’t know which one you’re talking about. They’re all the same to me.” I can’t keep the coldness out of my tone.
Coach steps forward then, and I realize he’d been listening in to the interviews. He tells the reporters time is up and then he watches each one file out. Two of the younger females try to drop their business cards discreetly to me, but he snatches up both cards as they leave.
I chuckle at him as the locker room door closes and the team is alone again. “I would never, Coach.” I give him a feigned hurt expression. “How dare you even think that a man of honor such as myself would take up any lady we work with on her offer of sex, pleasure, and everything else that comes with it?”
The whole room laughs. I am still a bad boy in their minds, albeit a reformed one just for this season.
Coach fixes one of his stern looks on me. “Mhmm, and why is that? Why is our team captain not chasing the ladies?”
I wink. “Because I don’t have to.” I stand up and head to the showers. “They come to me.”
“Jake!” he calls out. “I’m watching you.”
I wave him off. He has been on me like a hawk on its prey ever since Allie worked for us a few months ago. But that was August. We’re now in December. I haven’t seen or heard from her once. Kenzie is back to her constant flight schedule and without Allie as the glue between my sister and me, well, we sort of haven’t really been in touch much either.
I step into the shower stall of our game day locker room and my mind has a flashback to Allie helping me the night I got hit on the ice. I sigh. That shower was fully open. She was right there, watching me, helping me… touching me.
“God damn it,” I swear. I miss that woman. It’s stupid. It’s illogical. It might even be insane. She left me ! Not the other way around. I stand in the privacy of the stall, hearing the guys and coach still going at it with man jokes and ridicules out in the locker room. After I leave here, I’ll go home to my lonely house. I’ll sleep in that bed where Kenzie caught Allie and me all those months ago. And I’ll wake up thinking about her. Just like I always do.
She grabbed hold of me in ways she never should have, only to turn around and leave me. I let my mind wander to the good times. Like the first time we had sex. Like the way her body responded to me. I think of the many ways she was loving and kind to me. I lean against the shower wall. My hand grasps my cock and I stroke it, Allie’s blue eyes so real and vivid in my imagination it’s almost like she’s here with me.
“Allie,” I murmur. “Why did you fucking go? Why did you leave?”
I feel anger. It fuels me to stroke harder. I want to take her in my arms. I want to shout, to demand answers. But ultimately, I want to love her. I want to hold her so tight that there’s no way in this world she would ever be able to leave me again.
My cock explodes at the idea of it, of a future with her by my side. I let it all come out in my orgasm—all the longing, the confusion, the pain, the betrayal. Everything.
I breathe in and out in ragged gasps, worked up emotionally in ways I never have been before Allie came into my life. I am so frustrated by the lack of answers that I want to slam my fist into something.
But I don’t. And I won’t.
I lather soap on my body, rinse off, and reach for a towel. The flashbacks I have of Allie reach deep into every part of my life. Was that part of her plan, too? To ingrain herself in my home, my work, my everything… only to abruptly and without a word up and leave me in my hour of need? I was in a hospital bed the night that she left me.
I wrap the towel around my waist, my heart hardening again. No. She will not control me like this. I will conquer these feelings. I will learn to live my life without her and be glad about it.
I stomp my way toward my gym bag and pull on some clothes. Thank the gods that no one is around to see me hiss and wince in agony as my shoulder flares up when I pull my shirt on. That is a lie worth telling. That is a secret worth keeping.
After all, I have a Stanley Cup Championship to win this season.