Chapter 38 – Waylon
chapter
thirty-eight
Waylon
She didn’t show. I gave it twenty minutes before texting her. Twenty-two, actually.
Me: Looking for you, Flash.
She didn’t respond.
Me: Are you mad?
Last night had been a clusterfuck.
You’re the one who fucked her in the closet at a party.
Was I too rough? Fuck, maybe? I’d walked out of that closet thinking that was the hottest shit I’d ever done in my life.
I hadn’t stuck around the party, just grabbed another T-shirt from Trace’s room, then gone back to mine. If I’d seen her with Kane, I might have lost my shit.
Weren’t you the one that said sneaking around was hot?
I was that idiot.
And now she wasn’t here and she wasn’t texting me back.
I stood at the trailhead anyway for two minutes, watching my breath cloud in front of my face and disappear. I checked my watch once, told myself I was warming up, and checked it again. The second hand had never moved so slow in my life.
She’s not coming. You know she’s not.
I pushed off and started running.
The gravel was frozen hard, and it made a different sound this time of year, a dry tick under each step instead of the summer crunch.
The first quarter mile was all uphill, and my lungs were slow to adjust, the cold cutting in at the back of my throat.
I found my rhythm around the old wooden bench at the half-mile marker, the one with the plaque somebody’s grandmother had paid for, and by the milepost, I was breathing fine.
The route was the same, the hill, the turn at the low stone wall where the trail bent around the pines.
I watched the sun come up from the top of the hill, the eastern campus going peach and then gold, the lake catching the light in pieces.
It was a good sunrise, the same one I’d been looking at every morning for months, and now she wasn’t there.
I hadn’t had her long enough to justify missing her this much.
I looked for a long time anyway.
Then I ran back down the hill and pushed the last mile hard enough to outrun the lecture my psych-minor roommate gave me sophomore year about activity-based emotional suppression. He’d called me a textbook case and cited sources. I’d told him to touch grass.
I kept running.
My phone buzzed while I was still three blocks from the cottage. I slowed to a walk and pulled it from my sleeve pocket. The sweat on the back of my neck had already started going cold.
It was Aaron. I answered.
“Way.” His voice already had that careful, neutral sound that meant bad news. “I wanted to catch you before you saw it yourself.”
I stopped walking. A bird startled off a power line somewhere above me. “Saw what?”
“Remember the clip from the fight? Somebody’s cut of it just got picked up by one of the bigger hockey accounts — half a million views since about two a.m. and still climbing. It’s not new footage, but it’s got legs now.” A small pause. “Scouts are asking harder questions.”
I knew how they talked about this kind of thing. I’d known it the second I’d heard the suspension number. Three games. Marcus got two. The junior with the clean record got one more than the instigator, and everybody who looked at that was going to come to the same conclusion.
“How bad.”
“It’s managed. Not catastrophic. But two teams that had you solidly top twenty have made calls asking about character.” He paused. “Nashville and Vegas.”
“Nashville and Vegas?”
“Nashville’s the one I’m worried about. Their GM likes a profile. You were the profile.”
The cold had gotten inside my collar and stayed there. “And now?”
“Now they have questions. Which I can smooth over. But Way, you’re supposed to be the safe pick. The steady one. That’s your value to them.”
“I hear you.”
“I need you to understand what’s at stake if this gets any messier.”
I understood what was at stake. I’d understood it since I was eleven years old, when my mom was pulling her second double in a week.
I was eating cereal for dinner because the grocery budget didn’t stretch that month, and I was the reason it didn’t stretch — beer league fees, skate sharpenings, the tournament in Syracuse.
The draft was her way out as much as mine.
It was the whole reason for any of this.
“I hear you, Aaron.”
“Stay clean.” He didn’t say it sharp. He said it tired. “Whatever’s happening in your personal life. Keep it quiet.” He hung up.
I stood there another minute on the frozen sidewalk before heading home and grabbing a shower. Stay clean. Keep it quiet. I went over Aaron’s rules the whole way home and already knew I was going to break them at the trailhead.
Mom’s call came next. I barely let it ring before picking up. “Hey, Mom.”
“Hey.” Her voice was warm and a little rough, the way it always was at the end of a rotation, the kind of tired that didn’t fully go away anymore.
Behind her I could hear the ER: the tinny overhead page, a rolling cart, somebody saying room eight in the flat voice nurses used when they’d been saying room eight for twelve hours. “I heard about the suspension.”
“Who told you?”
“Trace’s mom texted me.” She sighed. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Way.”
“Seriously, Mom. Three games and I’m back. It’s handled.”
She was quiet, which meant she was deciding how hard to push.
I heard a door swing open on her end, a voice call her name, and her answer: “One minute.” Then the background noise dropped.
She’d ducked into a stairwell or a supply closet, somewhere with a door she could close. She did that for me. She always had.
“I’m coming up for the winter showcase,” she said. “The one against Clarkson. If you’re not still suspended for that one.”
“I’m not. That one I’ll play.”
“Good.” Another pause. “I already put in for the Friday. I’ll drive up Thursday night. Stay at the Hampton like last year.”
“Mom, you don’t have to —”
“I want to.” She paused. “Way.”
“Yeah?”
“Something going on? I know you and Marcus have never gotten along, but, baby, this isn’t you.”
“He’s a dick. He said something dickish. But I’m under control. I swear.”
She waited another beat, then said, “That nice girl. The tutor. The one you mentioned a while back, didn’t catch her name. You still study together?”
My chest went tight.
I’d mentioned Josie exactly one time, in passing. How did she remember?
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Mmm.”
“Everything okay there?”
Shit, how did she always know? “Yeah, we’re good. Friends even.”
Yeah right.
I’d fucked up and fallen for my enemy’s girl.