Chapter Nineteen
Moskins
I have eight missed calls and over twenty unanswered texts from Emaly after hanging up on her yesterday. Apparently, sending her a message on my way home from Winter’s apartment saying I was fine and needed time to myself wasn’t clear enough for her.
She’s always been the one to call me on my shit, but not even she could have calmed the hurricane inside me. If I had talked to her, I would have been a dickhead. Then I would have taken it out on her the way Winter did on me and felt guilty about it for the rest of the night.
I’d told Winter to use me, and that’s exactly what she did. She used and discarded me all at fucking once, like I was a balled-up napkin.
The only two times I’ve looked at my phone in the twenty-four hours since are first, when Jesse Clarkson told me I had to go to Coach Hoffman’s house for a team dinner today, and second, when Mikhail Yokav’s name appeared on the screen.
It isn’t often I’m in direct communication with my father-in-law.
Usually, he goes through his typical channels to get ahold of me when he needs it.
To him, I’m a cockroach beneath his shoe.
He wouldn’t dare try to crush me and ruin his Versace shoes—he’d let the exterminator do it for him.
So, I wasn’t about to let him go to voicemail as much as I was tempted to sulk alone in between all my other responsibilities.
His no-nonsense, “Meet me at my office tomorrow,” left no room for argument or interpretation before he gave me a time and hung up the phone.
Which is why I’m pulling up white-knuckled to Yokav Stadium and glaring at the large block lettering on top of the dome roof.
They designed it to look identical to the Yokav complexes in Russia, which offers very little humble architecture to the area.
It’s not fitting for Fairbanks’s city, which is designed in old brick buildings with Revolutionary War history, but I’m not surprised they were able to get the plans approved.
All it takes is a large check slid across a mahogany desk for anybody with authority in this town to smile and put a stamp of approval on government letterhead. I’ve seen it before, and I’ll see it again.
Yokav’s reputation for getting what he wants is notorious, which is why I soak in the victorious feeling every time he sees me and his daughter together. Because if there’s anything he wants less than a losing hockey season, it’s for me to have any claim over Emaly.
Because that means he can’t.
I’d rather be doing literally anything but this today. I typed and deleted at least three text messages to the unsaved number that I’ve already memorized as Winter’s. It took everything in me not to send something to her. To check in.
I’m not your responsibility, she’d told me. Then why the hell did I want to make her mine?
Fists clenching my keys, I walk to the building I’ve become familiar with over the past week.
The security guards at the front entrance greet me with their usual smiles as they scan my badge and wave me through.
I’ve made small talk with everybody I’ve met here for the sake of civility, even if I’d prefer keeping to myself.
Being an asshole ninety-nine percent of the time takes too much effort, so I’d like to think I sprinkle a little normalcy in when I can, despite what my teammates probably think.
How’d that niceness go for you yesterday, dickwad? an annoying voice in my head asks.
I can still picture Winter splayed out on the couch, blood caked onto her thighs, and tears glazing her eyes that made them look darker than normal. She gave me something she hadn’t given to anybody. I don’t know why she lied about her virginity, but I’m determined to find out.
When she’s ready.
Because if what happened between us yesterday proved anything, it’s that she’s not ready to be honest with herself.
I refuse to regret what we did, because she wanted it.
She wasn’t going to let me leave until she got it.
And if being the person who could give her temporary peace is what I could offer her, I’m not going to guilt myself for it.
I just wish her words didn’t cut so goddamn deep.
How often do I sacrifice myself for those around me?
Emaly. Mikhail. The team. Her. I’ve lived a life of torment, and don’t want to see anybody else deal with the same problems. The look in her eyes, the pure destruction of her soul as she cried, broke me.
It reminded me of everything I’ve gone through and have been determined to never experience again.
It made me want to soak up her sadness and take it all away for good.
I did that for her. I let her use me. Take advantage of me. I let her have whatever she needed at that moment. And for fucking what? For her to take out the boxing gloves because she felt guilty for it? Because she was ashamed of who she decided to let fuck her?
Nah. She’ll have to deal with those demons on her own and come to me when she’s ready to talk about them. I can’t help her with whatever internal battle is waging inside her until she’s ready to approach the topic herself.
Jaw grinding, I think back to my own demons. They hang out with the skeletons in my closet that date back to my childhood. Bones that I dug up for the sake of relatability. And Winter may as well have slapped me in the face with them.
As I approach the top floor of the building where Mikhail’s office spans almost a third of the floor plan, anxiety sinks into my gut. I wish I didn’t feel this way whenever he’s involved, but I’ve always had to be cautious around him.
“Come in,” he calls out after I knock on the partially open door.
I take a deep breath, roll my shoulders, and enter the space that’s far too white and warm to fit the brooding, calculated man sitting behind the desk.
“Hi, si—”
“Sit,” he cuts me off, not looking up from the papers he’s scanning.
Some of them are highlighted. Some of them are redacted.
There’s ink written in the margins. I don’t bother asking what he’s doing, because he won’t tell me.
It’s likely a new deal, because he never seems to know when enough is enough.
Frankly, ignorance is bliss when it comes to the Russian businessman.
I claim the same seat I did last time, which is far enough away from the desk not to feel overtaken by his personal bubble or the smoky scent of tobacco from the cigars he loves.
“Sir, what is this meeting about? If it’s regarding the gala, everything is set.
I made sure Dawson has a suit, and Clarkson is going as well.
Everyone will be on their best behavior. ”
Usually, I know exactly why he wants to speak to me because it’s typically not good.
But the only press I’ve been getting lately is the positive kind, and the mixed reviews that surrounded me have cast me in a better light more often than not.
I’m captured with my team and not with women.
I keep to myself, living under the radar.
There isn’t anything for him to complain about.
And he’s not the type to praise me for my good behavior, which leaves me at a loss for what this entails.
“I don’t care about the gala,” he informs me.
You’d think he would, since he’s a donor to the Historical Association hosting it.
When Hoffman spoke to him and Janel about doing a meet-and-greet to gain extra money for the Association and put positive attention on the Fireflies, he seemed to appreciate the idea.
I’d told Hoffman to keep my name out of it because he would have shot it down if he knew it was mine.
“My daughter,” he begins slowly, still writing down something with his ballpoint pen that has his name engraved in gold lettering, “is hiding something from me. And I don’t appreciate it.”
There are a lot of things he could have said, but I wasn’t anticipating that. “What makes you think that?” I ask curiously.
When his head lifts, there’s no amusement on it.
In fact, he doesn’t offer me any emotion.
His face is completely unreadable; save the unimpressed glint to his dark eyes that’s a permanent fixture whenever I’m around.
Emaly has the same color eyes as her father, but hers are always full of light that makes the brown far less threatening. “How dumb do you think I am?”
His thick accent makes the question sound like a warning, as if I need to be very careful with my answer.
“Is that a trick question?” I reply, tilting my head as I try to relax in my seat. If he sees how tense I am, he’ll know how uncomfortable this is for me. Then he’ll use it against me, which I have no intention of allowing him to do.
His nostrils flare as he slowly puts his pen down onto the papers scattered across his desk, which means this conversation is about to get messy. “We both know that my daughter’s priorities have always been unbalanced.”
That’s his opinion, not mine. “I think her priorities are hers to focus on alone without any of us stepping in.”
Mikhail, to nobody’s surprise, does not agree with the sentiment. “When she put herself through college, I didn’t stop her because it was clear she’d never make it as an athlete the way Sasha can.”
It takes everything in me not to point out why that is, which never seems to matter to him.
She’s always been sick. For years, nobody could figure out what was wrong with her.
When the professionals told her and her parents that it was “simply fibromyalgia,” her father accused her of trying to fake her illnesses so that she didn’t have to skate.
But I saw her—the pain she suffered through.
The dizzy spells. How pale she’d get when she tried pushing herself for her parents’ approval.
She was prone to migraines that would wipe her out for hours.
There was more to it than some cop-out diagnosis the doctors slapped on her file and sent her away with.
I was the only one who saw it.
Not her father.