Chapter 33 – Waylon
chapter
thirty-three
Waylon
Well, that was fucked up. I wanted to start the whole fucking day over.
But my first worry was Josie. I knew she was probably freaking out.
I’d let that motherfucker get in my head, and now it was going to cost me. Maybe Josie too.
So far on Coach’s end, Marcus and I were each suspended for a game. But the fallout wouldn’t stop there.
You know she’s given it up to me seven ways from Sunday. Don’t buy the virginal act. That ass is too good to give up.
That was what Kane had said on the ice, low enough that only I could hear it. He was lying, and I knew it. I just couldn’t stand him thinking it.
But I’d still thrown down with my own teammate on center ice like a rookie. Because Marcus put Josie’s name in his mouth at a hockey game, and I lost every ounce of sense I’d ever had.
Congratulations, Johnson. Real smart.
Coach chewed me out for twenty minutes after the game.
He stood three feet from my face in his office with the door shut and told me exactly how many ways I’d fucked myself.
I was suspended for one game, effective immediately, the film of the incident was going to the athletic director Monday, and any further misconduct meant I was off the roster. My draft was fucked.
Then Aaron called and ripped me a new one because Aaron had numbers. Draft stock numbers. Scout interest numbers. The kind of numbers that made your stomach drop even when you knew you deserved it.
I’d driven the long way from the arena because I needed the time.
I needed the cold air coming in through the cracked window and my hands on the steering wheel instead of on anything else.
My knuckles were split. I’d iced them in the locker room.
He’d started it, and I’d finished it, yet the refs didn’t give a shit about the difference.
Kimmy had texted me after the final buzzer. Marcus had cornered Josie in the hallway. Lena and Kimmy had been with her so he couldn’t do much, but she was shaken up.
I wanted to hit something until my knuckles split all over again. But Josie didn’t need that from me right now. She was probably scared enough.
Now I stood outside her door at Hadley Hall.
The door opened.
She was in the gray sweatshirt again, the too-big one, her hair in a lopsided knot. Her eyes were dry but red at the edges, and her arms were crossed tight over her chest.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” My voice barely worked.
She looked at my knuckles, then back at my face. I watched her clock the split skin, the swelling, the tape I hadn’t bothered to take off. Her jaw worked once.
“You should go,” she said. “Marcus is going to go after you. You can’t be here. He’s going to tell everyone you started it. And if you’re here —”
“No,” I said.
She stopped. “I’m getting really sick of you overgrown cavemen telling me no.”
“I want you,” I said. “Marcus is just bullshit. I’ll be okay. But right now I’m here for you.”
She blinked.
“I know what it could cost, Josie. And I want you anyway. Let me worry about what happens to me.”
She shuddered. “Your draft. The team. Everything you built.”
“You don’t get to decide that for me.” Same thing I’d said in this apartment two nights ago. “That’s not your call. I’m telling you I want you.”
She pressed her lips together. Her chin started to shake, but she caught it and held it still by force.
“Please. Can I come in?”
It took her a moment, but she stepped back and let me pass.
I shut the door behind me.
I didn’t cross the room. I leaned against the door and put my hands in my pockets because I didn’t trust them anywhere else.
My hands wanted to be on her face, and that wasn’t what she needed right now.
There were six steps between the door and where she stood.
I counted them and stayed put, and it was the hardest thing I’d done all day.
“What happened in the hall? What did he say?” I asked.
Her gaze moved to the floor. “He was waiting outside the tunnel when the game ended. Kimmy and Lena were with me. He didn’t touch me.” She swallowed. “He just talked. Said as far as he’s concerned, we’re still together. That he knows how you’ve been looking at me. That I’m his.”
“Fuck.”
“Then he said I embarrassed him by not wearing his jersey, and everyone noticed.”
My teeth ground together so hard I felt it in my temples.
“He’s wrong,” I said.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I do.”
She shook her head. “You should cut your losses. I’m serious, Waylon. I am not going to be the reason —”
“Stop.” I pulled my hands out of my pockets.
“Stop doing that. You keep trying to save me from something I already chose. I chose this. I chose you. The day you crashed into me on the running path, I was done. I didn’t know it yet, but I was done.
” I kept my voice steady because one of us needed to be.
“The suspension is one game. Aaron will handle it. Trace has my back. My mom raised me to show up for things that matter, and you matter. You.”
I crossed the room. Her shoulders pulled in tighter, but she didn’t step back, and I stopped close enough to see the pulse jumping at the base of her throat.
“I’m not him.” I let that sit.
“I know you’re not.”
“And I’m not leaving.”
“I know.” Her voice finally broke, and she pressed her face into my chest the way she’d done the other night, fists in my hoodie, breathing hard. I wrapped both arms around her and held on.
Her scent wrapped around me, and I pressed my mouth to the top of her head.
“You should cut your losses,” she said against my chest, muffled and half-hearted.
“Stop saying that.”
“Make me.”
I almost laughed. The corner of my mouth pulled, and I pressed it into her hair and held her tighter.
She tipped her head back and rested her chin on my chest. Her eyes were wet, and her jaw was set, and she looked up at me like she was trying to memorize something she expected to lose.
“He’s not going to stop,” she said.
“He will. I’ll make sure of it.”
“I know. What do we do now, though?”
I brought my hand to her jaw the way I had two nights ago, thumb at her cheekbone. Her pulse hammered against my palm.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what we do. It doesn’t matter. Marcus doesn’t matter. All I know is I want to be with you. We’ll figure it out.”