35. Colton
Chapter 35
Colton
I wasn’t normally one to wake up early. Sleep usually took ahold of me and kept me down until the late hours of the morning, and I wasn’t necessarily known for being a morning person in the slightest — I’d apparently punched Xavi square in the jaw once for waking me up for a flight I’d forgotten to set an alarm for, but I didn’t remember it.
But it was different this morning.
The stress that weighed on me from the conversation with Coach had made it difficult to sleep, even with Annie in my arms half the night when she wasn’t naturally shifting between the three of us. So when the dark behind the curtain had slowly begun to lift, I’d kissed Annie on the forehead and slipped out of the bed, changed into my workout gear, and went out through the garage as quietly as I could. No point trying to use the home gym and inevitably waking them up since it was so close to the spare bedroom.
Jogging wasn’t my favorite exercise, but it was something, and it was enough to drown out some of the chaos in my head.
The heavy fall of my sneakers on the asphalt, the occasional car with its headlights on in the lowlight of the sunrise, and my heavy breathing made up the majority of the noise in my ears, and I almost wished I’d brought my headphones with me so I had something to listen to besides myself. Even the birds hadn’t started their morning songs yet, at least not fully.
But my feet sounded weird the longer I focused on it. Like they weren’t perfectly in sync, my foot would fall onto the tarmac, and half a second later, I’d hear it, or an echo of it.
My brows furrowed.
Weird.
But then a breath I was sure wasn’t mine caught up to my ears, too, and I glanced over my shoulder. Another man, about twenty feet back on the opposite side of the road, hood up and dressed in cheap basketball shorts and shoes I didn’t recognize as any particular athletic brand. Weirder. This neighborhood was full of wealthier-than-average people, and although I knew there were definitely frugal rich snobs in here, I’d never seen someone out running here in shit you could buy at Walmart.
I cut down one of the smaller side roads, and he turned down it ten seconds later.
My heart pounded a little harder, but there was a chance he just lived on this road, or maybe he was visiting someone and they lived on this road. My stress must have just been causing me to get a little paranoid.
I turned right into the neighborhood park, the man-made lake with a fountain at its center on my left and a fence to my right.
He followed.
I slipped my phone from my pocket, keeping my pace steady, and shot a text to Cole that I wasn’t even sure he’d see if he was still sleeping, but he was bound to wake up before Xav.
Me: Think I’m being followed.
I sent through my location, too, just to make sure. It wasn’t like I was afraid they’d attack me — I was positive I’d win against the scrawny frame behind me. But I wasn’t above worrying that they had something I couldn’t defend against with muscle alone.
My phone buzzed in my hand.
Cole: What?
Cole: Are you serious? I’ll bring the car around.
A flash went off behind me, followed by a hissed shit , and I nearly rolled my eyes.
I cut a corner, the fence blocking line of sight for a second, and stopped.
A couple of seconds later, the body rounded the corner. I reached out, grabbing a fistful of the guy’s hoodie, and slammed him up against the fence, the wood rocking slightly from the force of it, keeping him pinned with my arm across his collarbones.
“Do you really have nothing better to do than photograph?—”
He looked up at me, his hood tipping back just enough to get a good look at his face, his glasses, the hint of buzzed hair showing. My annoyance immediately turned into gut-twisting disgust.
“What the fuck ?” I hissed.
The little camera came up between us, and Elliot’s finger pushed in on the button, the flash going off in my face. I ripped it from his hand with my free one and tossed it as hard as I could to my right, watching as it soared, bounced on the grass, and rolled straight into the man-made lake.
He snorted.
“The pictures go straight to my phone,” he said, his head tipping back on the wooden face. “So, congrats, Colton, you destroyed my camera for no good reason.”
I wasn’t above reaching into the pocket of his basketball shorts for his phone.
“Backed up to the cloud. It’ll be kind of hard to break something you can’t get your hands on?—”
“What the hell are you doing?” I snapped, pushing my forearm into him harder. “Are you seriously this fucking insane, man?”
He shrugged beneath my hold. “I’m helping.”
“ Helping ?” I laughed, but the sound was hollow, angry. “Helping who ? Annie? You’re off your goddamn rocker if you think you’re helping her.”
“I’m helping her get her fucking life back,” he spat, his nostrils flaring, his lips curling back. “You think knocking her up and derailing her entire world is a good thing? You think taking her away from stability is a positive ? I bet you don’t even know whose kid it is , for all you know it could be mine? — ”
I saw red. Dark, crimson red, and I wanted to paint with it. “It’s my fucking kid,” I snarled, pulling him away from the fence so I could slam him back into it, the wood splintering beneath him. He grunted from the impact, his Adam’s apple working on a rough swallow.
“You believe her?” he laughed, a little breathless.
Of course I did. I didn’t need proof, even though we had it — Cole went with her to her first scan last week after winning rock, paper, scissors. Eleven weeks now. It lined up. But I didn’t need to prove it to him. “How do you know she’s pregnant?” I asked, the realization hitting me quickly. She hadn’t talked to Elliot — at least, if she had, she hadn’t told us.
“Her dad told me.”
I narrowed my gaze at him. “You talk to her father?”
“You think I’m doing this just for her and myself?” He snorted. “Nah, I’m getting a pretty penny out of it.”
“You’re insane,” I breathed.
“I’ve got other pictures, you know,” he smirked, and I pushed harder on his chest, tempted to let myself feel his ribs break beneath them. “You guys are shockingly bad at remembering to close your blinds when you’re at home. Could take them to the press.”
“Colton!”
I didn’t turn at the shout of my name. I could hear the Escalade idling, could hear Cole’s voice, the slamming of a car door, the frantic footfall. But all I could think about was what Elliot had said.
You guys are shockingly bad at remembering to close your blinds when you’re at home.
I felt like I was going to be sick.
“Why?” I pushed into his chest a little harder. “ Why ?”
“Because I care about her and want her to see sense,” he hissed. “So if it takes me going public with it to fuck over your situation and get her out of it, then that’s what I’ll do.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” A hand, Cole’s hand, cut into view, grasping the top of Elliot’s hood and pulling him to the side, out of my grasp and onto the grass. “Have you not learned yet?”
“Cole, don’t,” I said, my voice like gravel. “Don’t hurt him. He’ll just sue.”
“He’ll sue ? With what money, his book royalties?” Cole put his shoe dead in the center of Elliot’s chest, holding him down.
“He’s working with Annie’s dad.”
“Fuck.”
Elliot held up his hands in surrender, his lips breaking into a smirk as he laid there on the grass.
“Just… shit, you know I don’t want to, but let him go,” I sighed, grasping Cole by the shoulder and pulling back gently. He let me. “For once, we need to use our brains.”
Cole spat in his general direction, taking a few steps back and removing his foot from Elliot’s chest.
“Get the fuck out of here before I call the police for stalking me,” I said.
Elliot pushed until he was sitting up, wiping the dirt and morning dew off on his basketball shorts, his gaze flicking between us like he wasn’t convinced we wouldn’t just let our fists fly. But I wasn’t about to be arrested for assault unnecessarily when we had a kid on the way.
“You come back here again and I won’t be as forgiving,” I added. “Believe me when I say you don’t want three sets of fists hitting your skull.”