26
Ryan
By the time practice ended, my body had stopped distinguishing between the damage Briggs caused the night before and the damage I’d done to myself that afternoon.
Coach kept us in video for nearly an hour before putting us through conditioning drills that had nothing to do with Saturday’s game and everything to do with making sure none of us mistook Thanksgiving for permission to become lazy.
I skated every sprint as though Lance Harlen stood behind the net.
Every turn carried Charm’s silence with me, and every shot became the key I’d ripped from her ring.
Anything that followed me onto the ice could be weaponized. Stepping off it was where the trouble started.
My left knee stiffened before I reached the hallway.
My ribs pulled whenever I breathed too deeply, and the bruise beneath my eye had darkened enough that two teammates asked whether I’d spent Thanksgiving introducing my face to a door.
I told them the door lost, and the story worked until I walked into the cold and found four assholes tailgating in the nearly empty parking lot.
Cade sat on the lowered tailgate of his SUV with a beer between his hands.
Easton leaned against the side, his backward cap covering his hair, while Rider dug through an open cooler.
Briggs occupied a folding chair he must have bought on the way there because no one carried patio furniture in his vehicle without planning something obnoxious.
He saw me first and raised his beer. “Look who survived.”
I stopped beside my truck and stared at them. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Tailgating,” Rider said as he straightened from the cooler.
“The game is tomorrow.”
“We’re early.”
“The parking lot is almost empty.”
“Better service.”
Cade lifted the beer in his hand. “Come here.”
“I need a shower.”
“The apartment has one.”
“I’m aware.”
“So come have a beer first.”
I should’ve left. My body was exhausted, my head ached, and everything inside me wanted the silence of my apartment even though I already knew that silence would turn against me the second I was alone.
Rider reached into the cooler and held out a bottle, and I walked over.
No one acknowledged the decision or looked relieved when I took the beer. Easton slid the bottle opener across the tailgate. I popped the cap and drank while leaning my weight against the SUV to give my left knee a break.
Cade’s gaze dropped toward my leg. “You’re limping.”
“I’m stiff.”
“You’re limping, Ry.”
“I know how I’m walking.”
Briggs looked over the top of his sunglasses. “I offered to carry him this morning.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I considered it privately.”
“You were too busy screaming about the pool lights.”
“They change colors.”
Easton’s eyebrows rose. “You weren’t exaggerating?”
“I never exaggerate about recreational lighting.”
Rider pulled another beer from the cooler. “You exaggerate about everything.”
“I’m six-five. The truth arrives exaggerated.”
Their stupidity settled around me without asking for anything in return.
I took another drink and looked across the parking lot toward the darkening sky.
Most of the team had already left. A few vehicles remained near the players’ entrance, and maintenance trucks lined the far side of the building.
No women lingered near the doors, and no strawberry-blond hair moved between the parked cars.
It was only my guys standing in a freezing parking lot, waiting for me to finish pretending I didn’t need them.
“What happened at the lodge?” I asked.
Easton winced. “You’re going to need to define happened.”
“You all said you had it handled.”
“We did,” Rider said. “They were the problem.”
Cade turned toward him. “You called everyone dumb fucks.”
“They were behaving like dumb fucks.”
“You included yourself.”
“I believe in fair criticism.”
I looked at Cade. “What happened?”
He rubbed one hand over his jaw. “Briggs carried Charm inside after you left.”
My attention moved immediately to Briggs.
He didn’t avoid it. “She stood in the parking lot until she started turning blue. My coldness only goes so far.”
“You carried her?”
His expression shifted slightly. “You know how soft I get when girls cry. It was a weak moment.”
“You are a dumb fuck.” I knew Briggs, though. Charm’s legs had probably given out, and the giant asshole carried her into the lodge while trying to make her laugh because his anger didn’t erase the fact that she was one of ours.
She’d been mine once, too.
“Good,” I muttered. “Be the hero I refuse to be. I would’ve kept her standing there.”
The words came out uglier than I felt. Briggs studied me until the pressure of his stare made me relent.
“She shouldn’t have been left in the cold,” I said.
“No, she shouldn’t have.”
“But you still followed me.”
“The first chance I got.”
“I know.”
“I told her it was a new day and I could be her friend today.” Briggs accepted the beer Rider handed him. “Then I told her I wouldn’t carry messages to you, and I came here.”
Something in my chest loosened enough to hurt. I’d spent most of my life expecting people to leave as soon as loving me became inconvenient, yet those four assholes had built their entire night around making sure I didn’t disappear into an empty apartment.
“Thank you.”
Briggs nodded, letting the words stand without making me regret saying them.
Cade looked down at his bottle. “Charm asked us to get you back to the lodge.”
“No.”
“She said she would stay in the second cabin.”
“The answer is still no.”
“She said she wouldn’t come into the main one if you were there.”
I drank again and kept my voice level. “Still no.”
“That’s what I told her.”
My gaze shifted toward him. “Then why are you asking me now?”
“I’m not asking you to see her. I said I couldn’t make any promises for you.” He glanced at the others before continuing. “The women are staying in the second cabin tonight.”
I looked between them. “All of them?”
“Aura, Bliss, Charm, Vivi, Gayle, and Skylar,” Easton said. “Nobody’s going near the main lodge.”
“What did that cost you?”
His mouth twisted. “A pretty bad fight.”
“With Aura?”
“She forbade me from coming to your apartment.”
I lowered the bottle. “She fucking what?”
“Exactly.”
Rider pointed his beer toward him. “He handled it with the emotional intelligence of a grenade.”
“She told me I wasn’t allowed to support my friend.”
“She said she didn’t want you turning it into sides.”
“There are sides.”
Rider looked at me and waved toward Easton. “See what I mean? Grenade.”
Easton gave him the middle finger, and Cade shook his head.
“Bliss and I got into it too,” Cade said.
“Over what?”
“She didn’t want to sleep without me.”
The words pulled unexpectedly at my chest. Cade and Bliss were attached in a way that should’ve been unhealthy, but it worked because neither of them had ever pretended to want anything different.
Bliss didn’t hide how much she loved him, and Cade didn’t make her guess whether she mattered when someone else was watching.
“You should stay with her,” I said.
“I’m staying with you.”
“Cade.”
“I told her I wasn’t leaving you in hell because she couldn’t sleep alone.”
I stared at him. “You actually said that?”
“Yeah.”
“That was fucking brutal.”
“I know.”
“Did she cry?”
His jaw flexed. “Yeah.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“I know that too.”
I took a long drink to force down whatever tried to rise through my throat. “You didn’t need to do that. I had Briggs.”
“You have all of us.”
The sentence landed with more weight than Cade gave it. Rider closed the cooler and sat on top of it, saving me from having to find an answer.
“Then I had to break ass on everybody because none of them know how to conduct a productive disagreement.”
“You called the women dumb fucks,” Easton reminded him.
“I called all of you dumb fucks.”
“It’s an imbalance,” Briggs said solemnly.
“Exactly.”
“What did you tell them?” I asked.
Rider took a long drink before answering. “The guys calm you down, and the women calm Charm down. We try to get you back to the lodge so everyone can have their men, women, emotional-support pillows, or whatever else they require.”
“That was your voice of reason?”
“No one else had one.”
“He also told Charm she stays away if you come back,” Cade said. “That was the hard limit.”
I looked at Rider, and he held my stare without backing down.
“She understood,” he said. “I told her if she heard you losing it, she stayed away because she was the reason you needed someone there.”
My fingers tightened around the beer bottle. “How did she take that?”
“How do you think?”
I looked away before he could see the answer in my face.
Rider’s voice softened without losing its firmness. “She agreed.”
The parking-lot light above us flickered before settling into a weak orange glow. Cold worked through my sweat-damp hair and the thin team jacket I’d thrown on after practice.
I didn’t want to return to the lodge, and I wanted the master suite even less.
The closed closet held every gift I’d bought for Charm, while the rest of the place held the memories I’d intended to make with her.
My apartment was smaller and empty enough that I could see the walls instead of staring at a future that would never happen.
Cade nudged my shoe with his. “The main lodge is safe tonight.”
I lifted an eyebrow, and he continued before I could tell him to fuck off.
“No girls and no Charm. Nobody is going to corner you or ask you to listen. You don’t go near the second cabin, and they don’t come near us.”
“You made a custody arrangement for a vacation?”
“Rider did.”
“Temporary restraining order,” Rider said. “Very official.”
“You drew the dividing line on a napkin,” Easton told him.
“It was the paper available.”
Briggs took another drink. “He used ketchup.”
“I needed visual impact.”
A laugh slipped out before I could stop it. Pain caught beneath my ribs, but the sound survived, and Cade watched me as though it mattered more than he wanted me to know.
“Come back with us,” he said.
“I’m staying at the apartment.”
“You can leave whenever you want.”
“I know.”