Chapter 5
TRAVIS
I’m too restless to sit tonight. The win felt good, but I played like shit.
Things aren’t clicking for me yet this season.
Usually, hockey is the one place I can count on feeling like myself but lately it’s like I’m playing in someone else’s skates.
Uncomfortable and at times, painful. I don’t know what my problem is, but I need to fix it.
I wander around MVP, chatting with my teammates and other friends that came out tonight. It’s early in the season where everyone still makes an effort to stop by after games. Once we get farther into the season, guys will blow it off to spend more time with their families.
Case in point, Nick and Ruby. They’re at a table all alone. Side by side. Him with one arm around the back of her chair and her leaning in so that her shoulder brushes against his chest. They’re here but not really interacting with anyone else. Lost in each other.
I’m making a second lap when a blond at the corner table catches my eye.
She sits with her profile to me. Elbows resting on the table and leaning forward.
She’s with two other girls and the three of them are smiling and laughing.
My pulse picks up speed as recognition clicks into place.
I’ve thought about her so many times I’m surprised it took me this long to place her—even from twenty feet away in a crowded bar.
I’m not sure how long I’m frozen in place, gawking at her, but eventually she looks up and directly at me.
She does a double take before she seems to recognize me too.
I lift a hand in a wave as a smirk lifts the corners of my mouth.
Her eyes widen a fraction and her body tenses before she looks away.
Well…not the exact reaction I was hoping for, but she’s here. That has to mean something.
I resist the urge to walk over to her. I have a hunch that won’t end well. What I need is a game plan.
I circle back around the bar, keeping Hannah in my periphery the entire time. I slide into an empty chair next to Ruby, interrupting whatever sweet moment she and Nick were wrapped up in.
“Hey.” Ruby pulls her attention away from Nick before he does to greet me.
“She’s here.” The words come out breathless as adrenaline pumps through me. My body tingles from head to toe.
“Who?” Ruby asks.
“My neighbor.”
Ruby’s brows lift as her pupils widen. “Really?”
“The one you fell in love with at first sight?” Nick’s tone is part challenge and part disbelief. For a man who has been hopelessly in love with Ruby since basically the first time he laid eyes on her, you’d think he’d be less suspicious.
I nod at Ruby.
She sits tall and looks around. “Where?”
“Behind you. Left, corner table.” I don’t bother answering Nick’s question. I don’t pretend to be an expert on relationships or love, but whatever reaction my body is having now and when I first saw her, it’s like nothing I’ve felt before.
They swivel around at the same time. While they’re busy locating Hannah, I stare unabashedly.
“Which one?” Ruby asks. “It’s a sea of hot women tonight.”
“Blond. Blue dress,” I say without tearing my gaze away. She’s smiling at her friends again but glancing around the bar like she’s looking for someone. Me maybe?
I like the way she holds herself. Is that weird? It feels a little strange even to admit to myself, but it’s true. There’s something about the lean in her upper body and the tilt of her chin that I find interesting. This is what my dating life has come to—admiring women’s body language from afar.
“I know her,” Ruby says while I continue to catalog and study my neighbor’s qualities like I’m cramming for an important test. It’d be the first one in my academic history that I would ace.
Ruby’s words take a moment to register, but when they do, I blink and turn my attention back to her.
“Really?” I ask as I narrow my gaze, hoping to gauge her seriousness. “It would be cruel to tease me.”
“I’m not teasing.” Light laughter trickles out of her as she smiles at me, then looks to Nick. “Do you recognize her?”
“Oh, yeah,” he adds almost like he’s as surprised to put it together as I am that my best friend has been holding out on me. “Hannah something or other, right?”
“You both know her and didn’t tell me?!” It’s completely irrational and doesn’t even make sense, but it still feels like a betrayal.
“We met her over the summer,” Ruby tells me. “She’d just moved here to train at a new place here in Moonshot. She’s a gymnast.”
“You met the hottest woman on the planet this summer and never thought to tell me, your best friend?” I ask Nick, voice full of accusation.
His lips twist into a smirk but he has no reply for me.
I can’t believe this. For weeks I’ve been thinking about her, trying to figure out how to break the ice without being a total stalker and dropping by her house daily, and this whole time the answer was right in front of me.
Ruby takes pity on me and answers my next question before I can ask how they came to meet her. “She’s a client of Everly Wyld. She and Jack were in town and Hannah met up with us one night.”
Where the hell was I? What could have possibly been more important?
“Everly is her agent?” I only know of Everly because her husband, Jack, is a dominant hockey player on Nick’s old team, the Wildcats.
“Yeah.” Ruby nods. She doesn’t say anything else, but she waits like she expects me to toss another dozen questions at her.
Which I absolutely plan to do, but not before running all this new information through my mind again. It feels like unraveling a secret. Discovering a new hobby where each nugget of knowledge buries you further into obsession. Hockey was like that for me once.
I was six the first time I played. I loved it but it was more than that.
It gave me community, purpose, and freedom.
For a few hours at a time, I thought of nothing but the sport.
I didn’t worry about being a kid who wasn’t meeting expectations or didn’t feel like he fit in with his family of origin – not that I could have put that into words at the time.
Hockey consumed me from the start. Kind of like the woman across the bar.
“What else do you know about her?” I ask Ruby and Nick. “Spare no details.”
Nick huffs a laugh like he thinks I’m joking. I’ve never been more serious in my life. I want to know everything.
“Let me think,” Ruby says, gaze lifting to the ceiling as she gets a contemplative look on her face. “I think she said she was from Colorado. Umm…she moved here to train at a new gym.”
“You already said that.”
“Easy,” Nick warns in a low voice.
I roll my eyes at his protectiveness and ignore him.
“What else you got for me?” I ask Ruby, left leg bouncing rapidly under the table.
“Oh!” Her eyes light up. “She has an ex-boyfriend that she still talks to or did. We texted him that night?”
“Well, that’s a buzzkill.”
“No, it wasn’t like that,” Ruby insists.
“It was Everly’s idea. We were doing a hypothetical questions game where we each texted our significant others to see what they would do in a scenario.
You know what, it actually started because she was talking about dating and how all the guys she had been talking to lately seemed like they wouldn’t notice if she went missing. ”
“You lost me, Ruby-Doo. Hypothetical scenario questions?”
“Everly texted Jack, I texted Nick, and Hannah texted her ex. We asked all three the same question about what they’d do if we went missing.”
“I remember that.” Nick smiles and looks adoringly at Ruby, an expression that she mirrors back at him.
“What did he say?” I ask.
Ruby continues to stare at Nick. “You said, ‘I’m looking at you right now. So if you’re missing then I’m—’”
“Hallucinating the most beautiful girl in the world,” he finishes for her.
“You two are cute, but I need you to focus. What did Hannah’s ex say?” I clarify my question for Ruby but then hold my fist out to Nick. “Pulling out the rizz!”
Nick laughs as he bumps his fist against mine. “Stop stealing slang from Aidan.”
“Stop being so stupidly in love that everything that comes out of your mouth sounds like a line,” I toss back at him.
His only reply is to grin a little wider.
“I can’t remember exactly what her ex said in reply, but I remember she was disappointed. Though to be fair, by comparison of Nick and Jack’s responses, it would have been hard to not fall short.”
“Idiotic ex-boyfriend. Got it.”
“I did not say that,” Ruby says as if she feels the need to stand up for the guy.
“Any man that let her go is an idiot.”
“And you think I’m the one tossing out lines,” Nick mutters with a shake of his head.
It isn’t a line though. Which is maybe his point.
“Anything else?” I’m buzzing for more information.
“No, I don’t think so…” She trails off with that thoughtful expression again. “She was really nice though. I liked her a lot. And her arms are the reason I started doing push-ups every day.”
“You’re perfect.” Nick lowers his head to place a quick kiss on her lips.
I turn my attention away from them and back to Hannah. Two guys stand at the edge of the table, partially blocking my view. I can’t make out whether or not she’s smiling, but her body language has shifted. Instead of erect and confident, she’s hunched in on herself.
I stand quickly, sending my chair screeching backward. “Introduce me.”
“I thought you already met her,” Ruby says, brows pinched.
“Yeah, but now you can vouch for what a good guy I am.”
“Can she?” Nick asks in a ribbing tone.
“Fuck off, Galaxy. You’re dead to me.” I still can’t believe he met her this summer. Months ago.
“Please?” I give Ruby my best pleading expression, complete with puppy dog eyes and pouty lip.
It works because she laughs and gets to her feet, albeit slower than I’d like.
“Fine. I want to say hi to her anyway.”