13. Riley
Chapter Thirteen
RILEY
“Shit.” I jerked awake at the beam of sunlight heating up my goddamn eyeballs.
In the same instant, I specifically did not remember ever moving back upstairs to my room.
The arms around my naked body were another clue that this was not my own bed.
And then, the heated body of my lover wrapped all over me was really what gave Cameron away. “Cam,” I hissed. “We overslept.”
Cameron’s room was inconveniently positioned just next to the kitchen and the common area. I could hear the clinking of cutlery in bowls and the footsteps outside the room. Our teammates were just there and the moment this door opened, they would sure as hell see me walking out.
“What?” Cam murmured.
“It’s morning,” I said, panic touching my voice. “We fell asleep. Dammit.”
I got up first, no matter how much it pained me to leave the warmth our bodies had created under the sheets.
Naked and dazed, it took me a moment to find my clothes and put them on.
Cameron followed, reluctantly leaving the bed and also getting dressed.
His hair was unruly as fuck from the pillow and from the action last night in which he’d been lying on his back for a solid forty minutes.
He was cute as a disgruntled kitten now, but I didn’t have time for that. I went for the door and took the knob. Several voices were loudly talking outside.
We had been getting significant glances now and then, but we’d just tossed that to the oddness in the change of our behavior toward one another.
Cameron and I had stopped bickering. And while I was sure Caden had his suspicions, he and I rarely spoke of intimate things and he knew how to keep a secret if he knew one.
But the rest of them hadn’t picked up on it just yet.
And now, we were screwed.
“I’m coming with you,” Cameron offered bravely.
“Chivalry lives,” I replied, my grimness matching his bravery. “Let’s just get it over with, alright?”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Cam said.
We opened the door to dead silence. Every spoon stopped midway to its designated mouth and every pair of eyeballs moved to find two messy-haired, sleepy, and blatantly well-satisfied in the sex department guys filing out of Cam’s room.
We stopped at the door and waited numbly as the silence drowned the room.
“God fucking dammit.” Sawyer stomped his foot hard and pushed a hand into his pocket, pulled out a small wad of cash, and counted a couple of bills which he crumpled into balls and threw at Avery.
Avery, in turn, hooted. “I fucking knew it. Pay up, bitches.” He collected the bills shamelessly, then thrust his hands out for others.
Several growly guys were muttering their annoyance.
Horrified as much as I was, I couldn’t stop gaping at the scene that played out before us.
Cameron and I quietly filed out of the room to the overall disapproval of one half of our team and the cheers and applause from the other half.
Sebastian glared at us. “You couldn’t keep it in your pants, could you?
” There was a slight hint of a smirk on his lips as he handed some cash to Tyler.
“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” hurried Avery. “How long has this been going on?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “I have no idea what this is all about.”
“Drop the act, Cap. Your shirt is inside out. How long?” Avery demanded, so fucking smug. “September?”
Cameron was the one to give in and nod.
Avery clapped his hands and walked up to Tyler with an even less bearable smirk on his face. “Now you pay up.”
Tyler rolled his eyes. “Fuck. I really thought it was Christmas.”
“Wait, let me get this straight,” I said. “You’ve all been betting on us fucking?”
Avery shook his head. “No. Of course not. Are you crazy? That’s not how betting works. Only half of us were betting on you fucking. The other half are losers.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Sawyer said. “I really thought I had a nose for these things.”
“Do you even know how disrespectful that is?” I asked, but try as I may, I couldn’t hide the smile that was lighting up my face.
They had all speculated about this. That had to mean there was something real about this thing Cameron and I had.
Right? There was something here if the entire, mostly straight team of hockey jocks picked up on it.
“Oh boo-hoo,” Avery said. “Let me wipe your crybaby tears with all this cash.” He laughed out loud and I couldn’t stop my own laughter from breaking out.
“Asshole.” I punched his shoulder playfully.
By the kitchen island, I spotted Caden. It was his heavy gaze that drew my attention. When our eyes met, he gave a little nod and the faintest ghost of a smile.
I smiled back at him, but a sense of foreboding filled me sooner than I could keep up with my own thoughts.
By the time I replied something to Avery and Sawyer, who were in a heated argument with Tyler detailing the entire timeline of my rivalry with Cameron, Caden had disappeared from the common area.
I tossed it aside and made my way to the fridge to grab some breakfast. Laughs and questions that had no place being asked among friends were filling the room. Which one was the bottom? Had we ever done it in other rooms? Was there preferential treatment on ice?
“I’m not answering that. I’m not answering that, either. And so long as nobody’s seducing Coach Murray, I don’t see how there would be any conflict of interest.” I said no more than that. But those answers pretty much gave the truth away.
Tyler was the one to point at the sofa with eerie precision. “I bet it’s that spot where Sebastian just sat.”
“Ew. What? No way. Why’d you even say that?” Sebastian scooted to the actual spot from Christmas Eve.
“Nobody noticed they’d built a fire in here?” Tyler asked. “That’s why I was sure it was Christmas. Damn. All that money.”
“Don’t weep,” Avery suggested. “I’ll buy you an ice cream. It’s only fifty bucks, anyway.”
Tyler shrugged and decided to accept the consolation prize while my cheeks burned like our Christmas fire. Cameron, however, joined me at the kitchen island and wore a little smile of his own. “Twenty years ago, this would have been unimaginable.”
“Hm, yeah, no sense of decorum or honor among these guys,” I said, purposefully misunderstanding his meaning.
The truth was, it was an incredible thing.
A team of athletes that made a bloodthirsty sport their entire life, was so unfazed by two of their teammates fucking all over their shared house that it really felt like our society had progressed this morning.
Cameron and I ate and evaded the increasingly personal questions thrown our way, replying with bewildered looks and questions of our own. “How the fuck do you even know what a rusty trombone means?” I gawked at Sawyer.
He shrugged. “I’m a man of the world, my friend.
I’ve been around the block.” He ran a heavily inked hand through his pitch-black hair and let a messy arch form over his forehead, then assumed his resting bitch face.
Then he asked if the Czech hunter was a real thing and fuck if I knew what to say to that.
The mess of the morning gave way to the business of the day.
I never got a chance to sit down — or, preferably, lie down — with Cameron to unpack all the excitement of the morning.
And I never got to check in with Caden, either.
Instead, we were all dragged to different faculty buildings for lectures.
The schedules only allowed us all to reconvene at night and by that time, I was so tired that I first headed to my room to shower and crash in bed for a few minutes.
Caden was at his desk when I entered the room. He looked at me over his shoulder and the same sense of loss crossed his face.
Dread filled me more acutely this time. I feared I knew what this could be. But I’d never gotten a hint from him. I’d never even seen him look at me like that. I was certain he was seeing other guys, too.
I mean, Caden was hot. He was tall and his thick, floppy curls gave him the look of a Greek statue of an ideal athlete. But I’d never been drawn to him. Even at my loneliest, last year, Caden had been my friend, but little else.
So when he looked at me sadly like this, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to react or what to say to him. I slowed down, shut the door, and frowned a little. “Are you alright?”
“Me? Yeah. Why?” he asked. Again, the way he looked at me was like death was following me.
“It’s just…you’re being kinda…I dunno.” Dammit. I inhaled and parsed through my thoughts. “You looked kinda sad since Cam and I left his room this morning.”
He cringed. “It’s nothing. I just…” His eyebrows contorted and he looked properly pained.
I saw this wasn’t something a few words would solve, so I walked up to the other desk and sat on my chair, then turned on it to face Caden. “You can tell me whatever’s bothering you, you know that, right?”
“I know. It’s just that…” He sighed. “Don’t get me wrong, Cap. I’m happy for you. You’ve had a shitty deal of the hand for the last few years. I’m glad you and Cameron are clicking. But the West Coast and all that. I guess I’m just sad that it can’t go on forever like this.”
I frowned when I lost his trail of thoughts. “What does the West Coast have to do with anything? He’s been back since August.”
Caden slouched. Everything about him got smaller as he closed his eyes in regret. Whatever it was, he was just admitting a blunder to himself. Slowly, he opened his eyes. “Shit.” It was a whisper. “You don’t know.”
“I don’t know…what?” I made a goofy, confused smile and shook my head in expectation.
“Fuck. Listen, it’s really none of my business. I overheard something I wasn’t supposed to hear. And maybe I’m wrong. I wasn’t there in the room when they talked. I just passed by the door that was a little ajar.” He was blurting words fast and I waved my hand to stop him.
“I get it. You weren’t eavesdropping. But what happened?” I asked.
“Erm.” Caden forced a short silence, then gave in.
“That agent, Manning — you know him — was talking to Cam in Coach Murray’s office.
I don’t know what they said, but it sounded like he was signing on to represent Cameron.
Or would, soon. And he was saying something about West Coast teams wanting Cameron, but nothing’s certain yet. ”
“Oh,” I said, keeping my tone cool if I couldn’t keep the heat of surprise out of my face. My mind spun but I nodded shortly. “That? That’s good news, right?”
“Is it?” Caden asked. There was no venom in his tone. He was only doing this to protect a friend, but I couldn’t stand the idea of being weak and needing protection. Even from a friend.
“Course it is,” I insisted, my voice pitched higher. “We knew this was just a…college thing. You can’t have relationships and hockey, right?” Suddenly, it was too hard to talk. My eyes stung and my mind spun faster. “So…we’re good?”
“Yeah,” Caden said, obviously taken aback by my reaction. “Of course we’re good.”
I slapped his shoulder. It was the least I could do to show him some encouragement for being on my side.
But I couldn’t let myself break down here and now.
I couldn’t sit still and attempt to process these thoughts around anyone.
“Anyway,” I said, keeping my tone flat because my voice was shaky and about to crack.
“I came to change. I think I’ll go for a quick run.
Didn’t get a chance this morning, ya know? ”
I did change, quickly, hiding my face from Caden who sat quietly and waited for me to leave.
And when I did, I shut the door and rushed down the stairs.
As I walked out of the house, my vision blurred, but I trudged on.
The ground was wet from the last snow that had melted a few days earlier and the rain that had fallen yesterday, but it wasn’t so slippery that I couldn’t jog and clear my head.
But as I stepped onto the path, I saw him. The first and last love of my life. The guy who’d left me once before and made me swear off falling in love again. It was timely, in fact, that I learned this piece of information today. I only wished I had known it yesterday.
Cameron smiled at me and gestured with his chin. A silent, ‘What’s up?’
I couldn’t control the frown that broke over my face as I marched on and bumped my shoulder against his. He stepped aside quickly.
“What the hell?” he called after me as I walked off the path in front of our house and stepped onto the paved road that would take me all around Northwood. “Riley?”
I didn’t stay to hear his calls after that. I broke into a jog and disappeared into the night. I needed to cool off. I needed to sort through my thoughts. I needed to get my heart to beat in some kind of rhythm.
It was lucky that I had learned my lesson early on. You will always be left behind. It was lucky that I was so good at hockey that my future was safe. I had agents vying for my attention and the drafting period coming up. I was going to do just fine.
I didn’t need some guy to make me feel whole, even if he was the only one I had ever cared for.
Those you kept the closest to your heart hurt you the worst. He would leave me.
Of course he would. It was all fun and games in his room until he had a ticket out of his boring life again.
I was a passing piece of entertainment, to be used however the fuck Cameron Martinez wanted.
And though it was the role I had adored playing up until now, it wasn’t something I would weep over again.
I wasn’t going to let him break my heart again, either.
I wasn’t going to sacrifice my own future and leave the agents waiting for my response. Because committing now, meant accepting the reality of our future. Which was nothing. There was no future for us.
I’d baited Manning and Hawke and Richards to wait for my call because I couldn’t accept the fact that we would be drafted in a few months. I couldn’t bring myself to sign that goddamn piece of paper and have someone work to take me away from this universe.
But I was a sentimental child in all of this. Instead of using reason, I always let my heart and imagination rule over me.
No more.
I needed to accept that our future was hockey.
I needed to accept that Cameron and I had no way to ensure we could stay together even if we wanted to.
And if he was so willing to jump ship and head back to the West Coast, he probably didn’t give a fuck about me now any more than he had three years ago.
Cameron Martinez only thought about himself. And he was the smart one between the two of us. I should have taken that trick out of his book a long time ago.
All of this was one big mistake.
I ran like hell.