6. Colton
Chapter 6
Colton
I leaned over the sink in the bathroom, the dulled sound of the music and the chatter of Smokey’s bleeding in through the hallway and the men’s room door, staring at myself in the mirror. My reflection looked the same — same sharp jaw, same dark hair pulled back, same blue eyes — but I felt different. Restless. Wired. And I was positive it had nothing to do with the Blue Moon.
No, it was Annie.
I knew I was quick to get attached, but this was a record even for me. I had a history of falling too fast, of entering flings and getting myself hurt, or worse, hurting other people. But I liked to think I had a good relationship with my exes and past one-night-stands. I wasn’t the worst person in the world, as far as I knew. But that didn’t mean I didn’t like to have fun — I’d had my fair share of flames that followed the team, and I never turned down a good time when it landed in my lap — and that’s what I’d hoped for tonight.
Somehow, stupidly, I could feel myself slipping into that too-easy mindset of thinking something more could come of it, though. This felt different.
I liked the way she talked . Sure, she’d been nervous at first, but she didn’t get overly flustered with me and Xavi running our mouths. No, she gave it right back a couple of times, and that just made it so much worse. I liked the way she’d looked up at me, as if she hadn’t quite decided if she was impressed or disappointed that I had the balls to speak to her like that. And yeah, she was fucking gorgeous , but that was almost less important. Almost.
Fuck.
I sighed, massaging my jaw with my fingers, and tore my gaze away from myself. It didn’t matter. She had a boyfriend, one she would reluctantly ask for autographs for. That didn’t mean I’d stop thinking about her, even if I should. But it did mean that I should probably stop standing in the goddamn bathroom like an idiot trying to gather himself.
I pushed off the sink and used my shoulder to swing the door open, the sound of Smokey’s pouring back in, but before I could get more than a foot out of the bathroom, a body slammed right into my side.
Her body.
Annie hit me with enough force to rock me back a step, which was honestly kind of impressive, and I barely got my hands on her shoulders before she could stumble.
“ Whoa —” I started, but then I looked down, and Jesus fucking Christ almighty, Annie looked like she needed a hug.
She looked up at me, her blue eyes blowing wide and rimmed with tears, the veins in her whites sticking out like sore thumbs. Her cheeks were that maddening shade of pink again, her lips parted, her hands trembling as she held them in front of her, already retracted from where they’d automatically landed on my side.
My stomach dropped. “Shit. Annie, are you okay?”
She sucked in a breath as she blinked away the tears, her eyes focusing in on me. “I’m—I’m sorry,” she stammered, her legs taking a cautious, clumsy step backward. “I didn’t—” She cut herself off as she glanced back over her shoulder to the closed swinging door that separated us from the rest of Smokey’s, and I could only imagine she was half expecting Cole and Xavi to walk through — them or anyone else from the bar.
To my left, directly opposite, was a door labeled Staff Only . “Come on,” I murmured, keeping my grasp on her shoulders firm. I pulled her toward the staff door and pushed it open with my shoulder, assuming she must have been heading that way anyway to get away from the crowd, and she didn’t protest or hesitate. “Let’s get you some fresh air, sweetheart.”
The staff area’s hallway was fairly tight, but I kept her with me as I navigated through to the door clearly marked EXIT . I hesitated — it was definitely a fire door, and I didn’t want the alarms going off if I pushed it open, but the schedule taped to it outlining trash duties led me to believe that the alarms for this door were disabled. I used my hip to activate the push-bar and the slight chill of the night air swept in, blowing the hair back from her face. God, she looked like a wreck.
A very attractive wreck.
I kept my hands on her as I led her outside, letting the door shut behind us and stepping out into the alley behind Smokey’s. The pavement glistened in the low light from the earlier rain, the neon glow from the Smokey’s Bar sign flickering against the damp brick walls down at the exit of the alleyway. A handful of guys stood beneath the sign, some hundred or so feet away, laughing loudly and drunkenly as they smoked, the faint scent of cigarettes wafting our direction, but their sounds were mostly outdone by the muffled thud of music coming from inside Smokey’s.
I settled her against the wall, taking a step back from her to give her a little space. She folded her arms tightly across her chest, almost retreating, her breathing still a little uneven and sniffly. Tension rolled off her in waves, and she looked as though she was trying to hold herself together with nothing but sticks and scotch tape. Definitely not okay.
“Hey,” I said softly, trying not to spook her as I dipped my head slightly, bringing myself closer to her height to catch her gaze. “What happened?”
She shook her head, her fingers digging into her arms as if that would somehow keep her from falling apart. It was weird, seeing her like this — I didn’t know her very well outside of a few flirtatious words when she’d served us in the past, and although I knew she was obviously a full person with thoughts and feelings and a life, it was still a far cry from the customer-service front she put on behind the bar.
I exhaled roughly through my nose and lifted a hand to her face, brushing a loose strand of hair back behind her ear with a feather-light touch. She stilled almost immediately, her breath hitching, but she didn’t flinch. “Annie,” I said quietly, letting her name hang in the air for a moment. “Talk to me. Come on, you won’t feel any better by just clinging to yourself like a koala.”
Her lips parted like she might actually speak again, but then she hesitated, pressing them together and huffing out a breath through her nostrils. “It’s stupid,” she rasped, the words a little broken.
My lips scrunched a little at the side, my head tilting slightly. “Doesn’t seem stupid if it’s got you crying.”
A weak, breathless laugh escaped her lips, but there wasn’t a hint of humor in it — just pure exhaustion and irritation. I didn’t push her, didn’t say anything, just let the silence hang between us, nothing but the distant sound of drunken cackling and the cars on the road, trying to let her know that she could take her time and that I was happy to be patient.
But I stilled when she finally spoke.
“Elliot saw your number,” she breathed, her voice barely above a whisper. I didn’t move, didn’t change my expression despite my desperate need to. “He wasn’t exactly happy about it.”
I bit back my urge to either laugh at his clearly fragile masculinity or curse in irritation that he obviously did something because of it to make her cry. “In what way?”
Her tongue poked at her cheek as she turned her gaze from me, looking somewhere behind me, off into the middle distance. I shook the thought away of exactly what else I wanted poking the inside of her cheek. “He said I was embarrassing myself. That I was acting like I’m somebody when I’m just a bartender who sings a few songs. That I’d let it go to my head.”
My jaw clenched hard enough that I momentarily worried I’d crack a fucking tooth.
I wanted to punch him, wanted to get him out on the ice so I could throw him against the boards. What a goddamn dick .
“Jesus,” I muttered, exhaling sharply and rolling my shoulders back to keep some of the anger from bleeding into my voice. “He actually said that?”
She nodded, her gaze still fixed elsewhere, and swiped the side of her thumb under her eye shakily.
I forced myself to breathe, to inhale and exhale in slow, measured breaths to level myself out, sucking my teeth for good measure. “I have no idea what kind of game he’s playing,” I said, “but he’s full of fuckin’ shit.”
Her gaze snapped back to mine, those blue eyes shining with tears, her jaw quivering. “What?”
I forced a small chuckle. “I mean, come on .” I leaned in slightly, careful to make sure she wasn’t upset more by it, just enough to make sure she kept her eyes on me. “You think I’d just hand my number out to any bartender who sings a few songs? Give me some credit here.”
A flicker of something rippled across her face — surprise, confusion, maybe even amusement, I couldn’t be sure. But then a small, huffed breath of air came out her nostrils, her lips twitching ever so slightly upward. Almost a laugh. “That’s such a lie,” she sniffled. “I’ve seen you giving out your number to anyone who so much as looks at you for long enough. And besides, you haven’t even heard me sing.”
I tilt my head back and forth. “ Well , you see, the walls between the staff area and the men's bathroom are quite thin,” I chuckled, actually meaning it this time. “I may have heard you singing to yourself once or twice. Talent knows talent, sweetheart.”
Her cheeks flushed rosy pink again, a stark contrast to the pale olive tones of her skin. “You’re ridiculous,” she rasped, wiping her cheek again, that tiny, barely perceptible smile still lingering.
“Yeah, yeah, guilty as charged,” I grinned. I couldn’t help myself — I let my gaze linger on her, drifting down to her plump, pink lips before drifting back up to her eyes. “I think a part of you likes that, though.”
She blinked at me as if she wasn’t sure what exactly to say to that. I could see her struggling with it, could see the way her mouth parted slightly, the way her fingers flexed where they gripped her arms?—
“Annie.”
She went still as a goddamn statue at the unfamiliar voice, recognition flickering in her eyes. I turned my head, already knowing exactly who I was going to see, but still felt my anger burn hotter the moment my gaze landed all five-foot-eleven-inches of a man who clearly didn’t deserve her. He was scrawny in comparison, his shaved head and glasses giving me the impression of some art-school dropout hipster wannabe, and his button-up plaid shirt wasn’t exactly helping in that department.
His face was twisted in some kind of mix of exasperation and self-righteous frustration, like he was the one who had somehow been wronged here, and although the current situation didn’t exactly look the best considering his irritation over me just giving her my number , it wasn’t like he’d done anything to help her when she was upset.
“You left,” he said, his voice tight as he stared at her. He took a single step forward, and I shifted instinctively, letting a little bit more of my body take up the space between them. “For fuck’s sake, Annie, can we just?—”
I turned a little more, not touching him, not getting in his face, just positioning myself in the way , blocking his path.
His eyes flicked to me, blazing with impatience, before snapping back to her. “Come on. Let me take you home.”
In the corner of my eye, I could see her shrinking back, her breath hitching sharply.
Absolutely not. Not a chance in hell was I letting her go with him.
“She’s good here,” I said casually, tilting my head slightly and narrowing my eyes at him. “Why don’t you head home, man? I think she’s got some thinking to do without you in her space.”
Elliot huffed out an angry breath and pushed his glasses up his nose. “This isn’t any of your business.”
I scoffed, the sound bleeding into a short, humorless laugh. “It’s not? She ran into me crying . Pretty sure that makes it my business.”
His upper lip twitched into a tight scowl. “You don’t even know her.”
“I know enough,” I snapped, my voice dropping slightly. “I know she’s standing out here crying because of you . I know you ran your mouth in there and made her feel like shit over something that arguably is nothing . Are you genuinely so fragile that you can’t even handle a man giving your girl his phone number? Do you truly feel like that’s some earth-shattering betrayal?”
“You don’t know shit,” Elliot snapped, his foot inching forward before thinking better of it. “That’s not what happened.”
“Oh? It’s not?” I glanced back at Annie briefly, making sure she was still there, and I stilled when I realized she’d taken a step toward me. For a brief, worried second, I wondered if she was inching toward him , but then I felt the unmistakable sensation of the back of my jacket moving, her hand clenching around some of the loose fabric hesitantly.
That shouldn’t have had me excited. It really shouldn’t have been. But I found myself hoping and praying that my trousers were loose enough to hide the failing material of my boxers.
“Then what did happen?”
Elliot pursed his lips, his shoulders tight as he leaned slightly to his right, looking past me to Annie. “Can we please just go?”
She didn’t move.
He ran a hand over his buzzed head, sighing loudly in anger. “How else are you getting home, An? You want to fucking walk?”
“ That’s what you’re worried about right now?” I scoffed. “Not the fact that she’s crying, or the fact that you apparently don’t know how to keep your goddamn mouth shut when a shitty thought runs through it. Come on, man?—”
His gaze snapped back to me. “I don’t know what kind of game you think I’m playing, but I do care about her.”
I took another step to my left, cutting off his view of her completely. “Then maybe you should act like it.”
“She needs a ride home.”
“She can ride with me,” I said instantly, not even thinking twice about it. There was room in Cole’s Escalade. She’d have to put up with sitting in the backseat with Xav, but I was sure he’d shower her with plenty of attention.
I felt Annie tug, just barely, at the back of my jacket — a warning.
Elliot let out a sharp, bitter laugh, the sound cutting through the muffled quiet of the alleyway. “Right. Perfect. So she’ll leave with you instead?” He shook his head, his glasses sliding down his nose again, but he pushed them back up with a single finger, his nostrils flaring. “Fucking unbelievable. She’s not a puck bunny, Miller, or at least I didn’t think she was one until she walked off and came back with your goddamn number. Hell, she doesn’t even pay attention to the games half the time. What do you even want with her?”
My pulse hammered in my veins, tickling my wrists, my neck, thundering in my ears. I didn’t flinch at his words, but he was pushing buttons I didn’t realize mattered to me, buttons I wasn’t sure he even knew he was pushing.
“She’s not like the other girls in there,” he spat, his words angry as if that was somehow meant to be an insult to me, an insinuation that my standards were too low and somehow it was a problem that she was above them. “She doesn’t need to be caught up in all this shit. It’ll go to her head. She’s not some fan girl looking to score with a player, she’s just trying and fucking failing to make it. She’s not like you.”
It took everything, everything , in my power to keep myself from slipping into the mentality of being on the ice, the idea of tackling him to the goddamn ground sounding better and better. I took a step forward, not even noticing I’d moved until Annie pulled harshly on my jacket, a strong, silent warning to not do shit about this.
But god, I wanted to. I wanted to beat his face until he was black and blue.
“Colton,” Annie said, her voice wavering as I refused to take a step back. I glanced back at her over my shoulder, my ponytail brushing against my neck, and steeled my jaw. Her eyes weren’t on me the way Elliot thought they were — they were just wide and confused , like she was still trying to process everything, and I could tell she didn’t have it in her to watch this carry on, to watch this play out. She wanted this situation to be over.
I swallowed down the urge to drive my knee into his balls and turned back to Elliot, taking a deep breath to calm myself at least a little. “You need to leave,” I said, my voice level but hard. “You don’t get to talk to her like that. Not now, not ever. Go home.”
Elliot hesitated, his jaw working. I could see the wheels turning in his head — he wanted to keep arguing, wanted to make his point, wanted to take Annie home and keep his prize at the end of the night.
But he wasn’t going to win this.
“Annie,” he said, his tone bitter and cold, hoping for something, anything. But all he got in response was silence.
“Get the fuck out of here,” I snapped, my voice rising, my patience wearing thin. It was sharp enough that Annie flinched, her grip on my jacket tightening instinctually. “ Go .”