16. Cole
Chapter 16
Cole
C olton dropped onto the leather sectional like it was solely his and not something we’d picked out together, one arm slung over the back, his other hand tossing a hockey puck lazily up and down. The living room stretched wide and open, all high ceilings and exposed beams, the massive windows on the west side letting in the last of the evening sun across the dark tiling. The kitchen beyond sat in silence — usually, Xavi would be in there by now, cooking up something beneath the matte black cabinets, fiddling with the built-in espresso machine only he knew how to use. But he’d gone over to Smokey’s to help his dad with something, leaving me and Colton alone.
I stood in the doorway between the living room and the hall, freshly showered from my workout in the home gym, a towel slung over my shoulder. Colton didn’t look at me, but there was a heaviness there, something unsaid in the way he avoided my gaze.
But then I spotted it.
Just beneath his right ear, a red and purple, small but absolutely there. A hickey. Either he was still playing the field, or?—
He looked at me, finally, his eyes bright but his jaw set, a nervous tension rolling off him in waves. An easy answer. “You kissed her.” My voice didn’t rise, didn’t bend to the irritation rising in my blood.
Colton stopped spinning the puck. He didn’t say a word, but his Adam’s apple shifted, his mouth parted, something caught in his throat.
I just waited.
He took a deep breath in, releasing half of it through his nose. “I fucked her.”
Oh. Oh .
My nostrils flared, my hand curling into a fist around the towel over my shoulder, and I flung it at the wall, the fabric hitting it in a wet slap. “Great.”
“It wasn’t like?—”
“No, save it,” I cut in, my tongue running over my canines, my anger rising. I breathed through it, trying to calm myself down, trying to tuck everything away into neat little organized boxes and compartmentalize, but it was so difficult. Why was it so hard when it came to her?
“It just happened, Cole,” Colton said hesitantly, all of his cockiness draining as he sat forward, his elbows on his knees.
“Of course it did.” I let out a breath of hot air, my hands flexing, desperate to embed themselves in the drywall. The rush of emotions was coming too quick to process, my mind drifting back to Jenny, to the way it had felt when I’d walked in on her with a player from another team.
“Look, she called me,” Colton swallowed, raking a hand through his untied hair, his eyes flicking toward the window like he needed to check if the world had stopped turning. “She needed a distraction. Elliot’s been blowing her up nonstop, and she just needed a break. I picked us up some lunch and it just… happened.”
“You do realize she isn’t a fucking flame, right?” I snapped before I thought twice, properly hearing his words. Elliot’s been blowing her up nonstop. I wanted more information on that, but I’d already picked an argument.
“Do I look like an idiot, man?” Colton shot back, his brows furrowing. “I know that. I like her, have I not made that clear? Do you think what you said to me at that afterparty wasn’t playing on repeat in my head the whole goddamn time?”
He stood, facing me now, crossing his arms like he was scolding a child.
“This wasn’t a hookup. At least, it didn’t feel like one.” His words cut a little harder than I think he thought they would — they weren’t meant maliciously, but the sentiment was the same. If it didn’t feel like a hookup, then I had to wager a guess that she’d made up her mind. “Listen. I think… I think she might be open to what I’d suggested to you guys before. Not just one of us. All of us.”
All of us. Well, that beat down the assumption I’d made. “What the hell are you saying?”
“I’m saying she hasn’t made a decision yet. I’m saying she’d definitely thought about it before I even brought it up to her.”
A surge of shock hit me hard enough to make me take a step back. “What?”
“We’ve shared before,” he said, his voice a little lower, like he was trying to calm a startled rabbit.
“Yeah, Colton, flames. We’ve shared flames . One night stands that didn’t mean shit,” I bit back. “What you’re suggesting?—”
“I know. I know.” He swallowed, his throat working as he stretched his neck. “This isn’t a flame who wants the full team experience. This is Annie. And it wouldn’t be casual.”
I blinked at him. Part of me was relieved at least that he understood that, but the other part of me, the confused part that was still burning for a woman I barely knew, didn’t know how to process this.
“We’d have to be smart,” he continued, taking a step toward me. “And careful. Real with each other and with her. Is that something you could handle?”
I took a deep breath, the emotions swirling in my gut, trying to place each one. Was that something I could handle? Was I capable of that after Jenny?
There wasn’t a single part of me that was sure I could. But I knew damn well that I didn’t want to lose here, didn’t want to walk away if there was still a part of her that wanted me.
“I could try,” I offered.
Silence bloomed between us as he nodded slowly. It was heavy and dense, hanging in the air like smoke.
“Xavi, though.”
Colton gave a one-shouldered shrug, but I could tell he was still a little tense. “I know what he said. But he’s in it already even if he doesn’t want to be. We can talk to him.”
I let out a slow breath. The ache in my chest was turning, morphing from the hint of jealousy that he’d slept with her to something closer to fear. Fear of this backfiring, fear of this being too much for me to handle, fear of falling harder for her and then not being enough. But I nodded, just once. “We need to see if she genuinely wants that.”
“I invited her to the next away game,” he offered. “We could talk to her then. All of us.”
I shook my head. Although the prospect of taking her with us to the next away game was tempting, I wanted to sort this out sooner, wanted answers as quickly as I could get them. She didn’t have to make a decision, but if that’s where her head was at, then I wanted to steel myself up for it. And we needed to know how Xavi felt. “No, that’s not for another week and a half. We can talk to Xavi when he gets home and go from there.”