Chapter 8
8
RHYS
“ C arter, your girl won’t stop sending me nudes,” Sebastian says in the shower room as we’re washing off after practice.
“She’s obviously not my girl if she’s sending you nudes,” Carter grouses bitterly.
I bark out a laugh. “What’s the story here?”
“Sebastian stole the girl I was trying to pick up on Friday,” Carter answers, his voice still a sour grumble.
“I did not!” Sebastian exclaims.
“Dude, you butted in the middle of our conversation and spoke French with her for like half an hour,” Carter retorts. “What the fuck did you think you were doing?”
“I overheard she was a French major, and I wanted to practice my French!” Sebastian cries with such naivete that I wouldn’t believe him either if I were in Carter’s shoes.
But I know Sebastian. He’s such a bookish dude by nature that he can get starved for similar company when he’s surrounded by jocks who mostly aren’t.
More than once I’ve seen a guy on the team hanging out or talking with a girl who majors in English, or Philosophy, or something like that, and when Sebastian finds out, he swoops in to talk to them about it—and they ended up totally forgetting the guy they were with and going swoony for Sebastian.
“How do I get her to stop!” Sebastian pleads. “I feel like a bad friend if your girl is sending me pictures of her tits and stuff. I mean, they’re nice, really nice, don’t get me wrong?—”
“You were already a bad friend when you stole her from me with your fucking French sweet talking!” Carter yells.
“I did not steal her, and I was not a bad friend, and I was not sweet-talking her! We were talking about our favorite French songs and poems!”
“Sounds like sweet talking to me,” Hudson interjects.
“And if there’s an authority on sweet talking, it’s my bestie here,” Tuck pipes up in the stall next to him. Tuck always insists on showering right next to Hudson since they’re best friends now, and I can’t decide if it’s adorable or weird. “I mean it, you guys should hear some of the sweet nothings I overhear him whispering in Summer’s ear when Olivia and I are on a double date with them.”
“ Tuck ,” Hudson growls in warning.
I laugh to myself and shake my head as I soap myself up, the conversation still raging and every other guy adding his input.
Conspicuous in his silence, though, is Lane.
I glance at where he’s showering a couple rows down. His expression is morose. His eyes are dim, where normally there’d be a resolute spark in them after a practice, especially after a pre-season practice that always reveals so much to look forward to and so much that needs to be worked on to a team captain’s eyes.
I get it. He’s gotta be feeling left out considering he’s not even cleared for practice yet, and at minimum is going to miss the first couple months of the season.
Lane’s a team captain to his core. And part of being a team captain, for Lane, was always setting an example. He could tell us to work harder because he always busted his ass in practice and in the weight room. He could ream us out about stupid mistakes on the ice because he hardly ever made any. He could lecture us about spending more time reviewing footage because he poured over it with Coach to help him strategize for hours on end.
He's still team captain, because no one could imagine anybody else on the team but Lane stepping into that role, but now he’s not in the thick of it with us. Not yet. He’s not exhausted and sore after practice like the rest of us are, because he’s under doctor’s orders to take it easy to let his leg heal.
I know it’s eating him up. Even though the doctors expect him to be able to be back on the ice by the middle of the season, it’s not guaranteed. And I know any bit of uncertainty over whether he’s going to be able to keep doing the thing he loves is like a stab in the chest.
The only reason he’s even in here showering with us given that he stayed off the ice during practice is because I told him I caught a whiff of his BO while walking with him off the ice, and suggested he get a shower too since we’re going out to eat afterward.
It was total bullshit, but he’d be feeling even worse right now if he were just sitting alone in the locker room, waiting for the rest of us and overhearing a conversation he was left out of.
When we’ve toweled off and are getting dressed by our lockers, the conversation still hasn’t moved past Sebastian and Carter’s night out.
“Don’t blame me just because you fumbled a girl you were into,” Sebastian says. “Jamie fumbled, like, four girls that night and he’s not blaming me! He’s taking responsibility for his own lack of game! Right, Jamie?”
Jamie, the sophomore rookie, rolls his eyes. “Whatever.”
The rest of the guys chuckle. We’ve all seen girls approach Jamie at parties or during nights out only for him to turn red-faced and tongue-tied.
Honestly, on a team where all the other single guys are shameless players, it’s kind of adorable.
Jamie might not be the best at talking to girls, but he’s sure as hell stepping up on the ice.
Last year, he was a second-line forward, but this year, Coach has shifted him to taking Lane’s spot as my fellow first-line defenseman until Lane returns. Jamie’s working his ass off during practices to grow into the role, and he’s impressing everyone.
After we’re dressed, Lane, Sebastian, Tuck, Hudson, and I—the usual gang—all agree to head to the ramen place for lunch.
I slap Lane on the back as we step out of the practice facility. “Jamie’s pretty sharp out there, but I can’t wait to be playing next to you again.”
“Yeah,” Lane says, his voice sounding forced, and the weak smile on his face looking even more forced.
I can tell Lane just isn’t in the mood to talk about hockey right now. We lag a couple paces behind the rest of the guys, and I talk about hearing news that a comedy series we like to watch together finally has a start date for its next season. With something other than hockey to talk about, Lane’s perked up a bit by the time we get to the restaurant.
My stomach’s growling so hard I can feel it in my limbs as Hudson pulls the door open; but when we walk in, the surly middle-aged proprietor who’s always behind the order counter is missing.
“Huh,” Tuck muses. “Where is he?”
Sebastian shrugs. “People need to use the bathroom sometimes.”
But in the moment of quiet that follows, we all hear a twinkling giggle from somewhere behind the counter.
“Was that …?” Hudson begins, tilting his ear in the direction of the sound like there was something about it he recognized.
The five of us stealthily step to the counter, like we’re sleuths investigating the mystery of the briefly missing ramen shop owner.
We hear the sound again. Louder and more distinct this time.
“That’s definitely a woman giggling,” I whisper, leaning slightly over the counter and craning my neck to see if I can spot anyone back there in the staff-only area.
It’s weird, because the guy who owns this shop is borderline misanthropic. And the only reason I say borderline is because, strangely, Hudson and Tuck are friendly with him. Everyone else who’s come here would call the owner, Kazu, anything from pretty rude to a total asshole .
Hudson and Tuck insist he’s just misunderstood, though. Whatever. Either way, a woman’s soft, high-pitched giggle is the absolute last thing you expect to hear from behind the counter in this place.
Then, from down a hallway that we can’t quite glimpse from where we’re standing, we hear a door open.
Then another giggle, more subdued this time—and a gruff, masculine chuckle follows it.
Two sets of footsteps pad toward us.
Then, a high-pitched gasp as a curvy, vivacious-looking woman sees us, and her cheeks turn cherry-red.
It’s Cindy, the owner of Last Word, a bookstore-slash-coffee shop in town.
She recoils backward in surprise, bumping into the broad, sturdy chest of Kazu, the ramen shop owner, who’s following right behind her.
The way his eyes open in surprise and his eyebrows elevate slightly at being spotted is the most emotion I’ve ever seen this dude show.
An even louder gasp comes from Tuck, whose brows are reaching for his hairline and whose mouth is stretched in a massive, open smile. Even Hudson is reacting, his lips puckered in interest and surprise.
Hudson and Tuck were obsessed with these two last year, treating them like their own personal reality show. They were convinced that they had a thing for each other but were dancing around it because neither of them knew how to make a move.
Most of us were skeptical, but it’s hard to argue now.
I guess one of them must have figured out how to make that move over the summer.
“Oh, boys, hello,” Cindy collects herself. She knows us as regular customers at her place. “I was stopping by to … deliver … the newsletter. You know. The Cedar Shade Small Business Association newsletter. To Kazu. Because he owns a small business. In Cedar Shade. You’re in it right now!”
“Yes, the newsletter,” Kazu pronounces in his usual deadpan. “Thank you. I will read it.”
We’re all holding back titters at their awkwardness over being discovered. I don’t know if they’re trying to keep whatever’s going on between them a secret or if they’re just feeling flustered about unexpectedly being spotted together for the first time.
Either way, it’s amusing to witness.
Cindy excuses herself, and Kazu takes our orders. When we clamber into our normal circular booth at the front of the store, Hudson and Tuck immediately whip out their phones to send the latest update in the Cindy/Kazu saga to their girlfriends, who were just as into the will-they-won’t-they speculation last year.
I’m happy to see Lane more animated as he joins in on the conversation flying around the table. But now, I’m the one feeling a little out of it.
After seeing Cindy and Kazu as an apparent new couple, and then seeing Hudson and Tuck so eager to message the girls they’ve fallen for … fuck, I’m feeling envious.
I want that, too. Someone I can feel head over heels for. Someone who’s all mine. Someone who’s more than just a hookup or a short-term fling who I hold at arm’s length because I don’t want them to get too attached.
Someone who I want to get as attached as possible, because I want to be just as attached to them.
But there’s only one person in the whole fucking world I want that with. And she’s the one person I can’t have.