Chapter 45 #3
“But you still did it,” she said with a tilt of her head.
“You still stayed.” She took a deep breath, folded the newspaper clipping back up, and put it in her pocket.
“So now, when my dads or the other coaches tell me to fight like a girl, I know what that looks like. Before now, I thought my mom was the only badass like that. I thought maybe she was a mutant or something, and that there weren’t more of her out there.
More girls like me. But now I have you, too. ”
The world went quiet around me. Not dramatically silent, but just quiet. And… still.
“You fight like you mean it,” I said firmly, battling through the emotion in my throat. “Even if other people don’t like it. You never change for them. Only for you. That’s what it means.”
She nodded once, as if that confirmed something important inside her.
“Good,” she replied. “Because my brother thought it meant I should bite people.”
“It does!” Toby shouted from the other side of the group, and Tanner tipped his head back and laughed. “Girls shouldn’t punch! They should bite!”
We all turned in Toby’s direction, to find him halfway up the courthouse statue base, shoes untied, shirt half untucked, holding what looked like a half-eaten hockey puck… maybe it was chocolate, though. I doubt the kid would have eaten an actual hockey puck—right?
Kids were strange. And Toby led the weird ones like their king.
“Daddy told her to fight like a girl, and she punched me two seconds later!” He cried, getting further up the statue.
I turned to look at Elliot and Travis, expecting them to give chase as he climbed the marble thing with a mushed hockey puck in hand.
But they just watched with exasperated looks on their faces.
“You told her she skated like a drunk squirrel,” Elliot replied calmly. “You had it coming.”
“I was giving construction crim-itism!”
I put my hands on my cheeks as watched him climb higher, flubbing words and smearing what looked like poop all over some old dude that founded the town on principles of equality and honor. Or so the plaque at the bottom said, though most everyone had lost the plot recently.
Yeah, spread a little more doo-doo on that old dude, Tobe.
Toby attempted to leap off the statue and immediately misjudged the height, landing in a heap of limbs and cackles on the concrete ground below.
I winced, and so did Goldie, covering her mouth in shock as he lay there all bent up in a weird pile.
Travis didn’t even flinch, though, as Elliot palmed his forehead.
“You good, man?” Travis asked.
“Yeah,” Toby shrugged, wiping dirt off his hockey puck before taking another bite. “I think two chocolate hockey pucks was a bad idea though.” He grimaced a little, holding his stomach. “I don’t feel so good.”
That seemed to get the men’s attention as they both leaped for him. “Two?” Elliot snapped as Travis picked the boy up under his arm like a football and raced up the steps to the garbage can. “Did your mom get you one too?”
Emmie held her hands up as they looked back at her when Toby started throwing up into the garbage can, drawing a very displeased look from an old lady walking out of the courthouse.
“I only saw him using the nacho cheese pump as a drinking fountain again.” The guys groaned, and she huffed, “Toddlers are so not my job.”
“I’m not a toddler!” Toby called back between heaves. “I’m a preteen.”
“And I’m ready to go home.” Tanner said, throwing his arm over Goldie’s shoulders and winking at me. “What about you? Ready to map out our new game plan?”
“Oh, you’re going to be great at calling plays from the bench.” I smirked. “With me and Emmie out there, we won’t even need you.”
“Damn right!” she cheered, jumping up for a high five as we walked away.
At some point Jasper and Thomas had disappeared, leaving only the Hayes family behind to deal with whatever chaos was being purged out of Toby’s soul via his stomach.
“Makes you want a couple of kids, doesn’t it?” Goldie sighed wistfully, and Tanner and I both stared at each other in shock.
“Puking kids makes you think of reproducing?” I deadpanned with a shiver. “I’d have to say I was having quite the opposite reaction.”
“Same.” Tanner said, grimacing over his shoulder as Toby let out some wild child screech of delight before running across the steps toward where they parked.
The kid acted like he hadn’t just blown chunks in a trash can like a twenty-one-year-old girl after a night of drinking jungle juice out of a trash can. It was freaking impressive.
“Puking kids don’t make me think that,” Goldie said. “But awe-struck little girls who choose to idolize women like Rhea sure do.”
“Damn,” Tanner sighed, “When you put it like that, then yeah, I can see the appeal.”
I rolled my eyes, shoving him with my hip as I took his place and held Goldie’s hand. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, butter me up all you want, Officer Golden Boy. I’m still going to make you eat my ice during that game. Teammate or not.”
“Teammate,” he mused as we got to his truck in the parking lot, as if he were thinking hard on that word. “That has a certain ring to it, actually.” He smirked, leaning in and kissing me hard before leaning over and kissing Goldie deep enough to make her moan. “I like the sound of that a lot.”
“Weirdo.” I said with a smirk, already imagining the sexy role-play Goldie was going to think up for us after watching us play on the same team in two days' time.
The girl had a serious hockey kink.