Chapter 23 – Trace
chapter
twenty-three
Trace
I had fucked up.
Monumentally. Catastrophically. In every way that mattered.
The taste of blood in my mouth was nothing compared to the sick feeling in my gut. Lena was gone. She'd walked away from me, up the dorm steps, through the door, gone, and I couldn't even blame her.
She looked at you like you were just another disappointment.
First, I hadn't exactly been honest about Trevor being okay with me and her.
Okay, I hadn't lied outright. I just hadn't told my brother everything.
Like I left out that the girl I found was Lena.
I'd told him I had a girlfriend for the events.
I'd told him Aaron was on board. I'd just conveniently omitted the part where the girlfriend in question was the same woman I'd sworn never to touch.
The whole stupid no-same-girlfriends pact we'd made as kids.
Bullshit. You hid the truth from her and she knew it.
They had dated so long ago, but he always felt like he owned her in some way.
But she'd been mine first. No, we hadn't dated, but I was the one who cared about her.
Who laughed at her bad jokes. Who always let her pick the movie.
Who noticed when she got quiet and asked what was wrong instead of assuming everything was fine.
She was always supposed to be mine. And I destroyed that. And then he'd fucked it all up.
The memory of her this morning, sleepy and satisfied, braids a mess across the hotel pillow, the way she'd smiled at me like I was her whole world. It made my chest ache so badly I pressed my fist against my sternum. For a few perfect hours, I'd had everything I'd ever wanted. And now it was gone.
Because you took the coward's way out and she paid the price.
I could still smell coconut on my shirt from when she'd been pressed against me outside the Range Rover.
Still taste her lips from our goodbye kiss that I hadn't known would be our last. The way she'd looked at me when I'd fed her breakfast, nudging eggs across the table, making sure she ate.
Like I was someone worth keeping around.
And you threw it all away.
But the worst thing was I hadn't been truthful to her. She'd never had to spell it out. No Trevor drama was the one unspoken condition, the line she shouldn't have had to draw. And I'd brought it straight to her doorstep.
You trampled all over it.
When I finally had my idiot brother in a chokehold on the concrete, I'd looked up toward the dorm entrance and she was gone. The door was still swinging shut, that slow hydraulic close that campus doors did, and I watched it seal like it was closing on something I'd never get back.
I hadn't even realized when she'd left because Trevor and I had been too busy knocking the shit out of each other.
I'd been so focused on making him bleed for calling her a whore that I'd missed the only thing that actually mattered.
Lena walking away from me without a word.
Without slamming the door. Without screaming.
Just leaving. Quiet and deliberate, like she'd practiced this before.
Because she has. How many times has she had to walk away from someone who hurt her?
By the time Trevor tapped out and we both rolled apart, we were heaving and sporting matching damage. I'd broken his nose. I could tell by the angle. Something in my left side ground together when I breathed in a way that said ribs. Not broken, maybe. But close.
My knuckles were split and bleeding. Again.
The tape from the Matt incident had torn off during the fight, and now both hands were a mess of old scabs and new cuts.
Behind us, the Range Rover sat with a fresh dent in the passenger door where we'd slammed into it.
Sixty grand in a custom paint job and I couldn't bring myself to care.
Students walking by were giving us a wide berth, a couple of freshmen openly recording on their phones.
One of them had his camera angled right at my face.
Great. This would be all over social media within the hour.
I could already see the headlines. Coulter Brothers Brawl Outside Dorm.
Aaron was going to lose his mind. Coach Bergman's zero-tolerance policy was going to come crashing down on me, and the draft stock Aaron had spent months carefully building, the charity event, the press table, the carefully curated image of the stable, respectable Trace Coulter, all of it, evaporated.
Aaron had texted once.
Money Man: Seattle saw the video. We need to talk.
I hadn't answered yet, but the draft board didn't forget.
But that wasn't even the worst part. The worst part was Lena. She was going to see herself reduced to the girl two brothers beat each other up over on a viral video. The girl who got called a whore in front of her own dorm.
Just what she needed. More humiliation because of you.
I sat on the bottom step of the dorm entrance, elbows on my knees, blood dripping from my split lip onto the concrete between my Jordans.
The October sun cut low through the oak trees lining the quad, throwing long shadows across the walkway, but I couldn't feel the warmth.
Couldn't feel anything except the hollow ache in my chest and the grinding protest of my ribs every time I inhaled.
Somewhere across campus a bell tower chimed the hour.
The memory of her laughing at breakfast. The way she'd introduced me to her mother with such pride. The trust in her eyes when she'd whispered my name in that dark hotel suite, her body wrapped around mine like I was the only thing keeping her anchored.
All gone. Because you're a coward.
I could picture her right now. Up in her room with the string lights and the corkboard and the frog succulent that judged everyone.
Maybe crying. Maybe not. Maybe she was just sitting on her bed, staring at the wall, quietly filing me away in the same category as Trevor and Matt and her father.
Men who let her down. Men who told her everything was fine and then proved it wasn't.
You made her cry. Just like Trevor did.
I shoved up from the step and glowered at my brother.
Trevor was leaning against the stair railing, pressing the hem of his shirt to his nose.
The shirt had been white this morning, some Italian label knowing him, and now blood had soaked through the front turning it rust-brown.
His eye was already swelling shut, the skin going a dark ugly purple around the socket.
The Rolex on his wrist had a crack running through the crystal, which would have made me feel guilty if he hadn't called Lena a whore ten minutes ago.
"Are you fucking happy now?"
He spat a glob of red onto the sidewalk and pushed off the railing. "You're saying this like I'm the one who fucked up. You are the one who betrayed me. I'm your brother."
Betrayed him? What about what I did to her?
I stared at him. "You know what? I should thank you. You're the reason I even got with Lena."
He snarled, his busted lip pulling back from bloodied teeth. For a second, he looked like he wanted to go again.
"Oh yeah," I continued. "If you'd just kept your fucking dick in your pants with the deputy commissioner's daughter, I wouldn't have needed the fake girlfriend.
Aaron told me that if I didn't want to fuck up my chances in the draft, I needed someone stable.
Someone who wasn't after the clout from dating someone with our money and name.
Someone who was going to smile real pretty and not be a problem.
" I swiped at the blood on my chin with the back of my hand.
"As always, I'm the one who gets forced into a box because you fucked up. "
Fake girlfriend. Is that all she was to you?
The words tasted like ash in my mouth. It had started as fake, but somewhere along the way it had become the most real thing in my life. More real than hockey, more real than family, more real than anything I'd ever known.
And now she thinks it was all an act.
Trevor crossed his arms, wincing when the movement pulled at something in his shoulder. "Maybe if you weren't trying to be like me, you wouldn't feel shoved into a box."
I stepped toward him, the metallic smell of blood sharp between us. "Are you fucking serious right now? You think I'm trying to be like you?"
He's deflecting. Classic Trevor.
"Well aren't you? You could have picked any sport.
But you just had to pick hockey." He paced three steps along the railing, one hand still pinching his nose, the other gesturing with the bloody shirt.
"And every step I had, you had to run up on it and do your level best to beat it.
All the sports the Coulters play, you just had to pick hockey?
" He swiped at the blood coming out of his nose, wincing when his fingers made contact.
"I knew it pissed you off when I went out with Lena.
I knew how much you wanted her. But I had her first."
No you didn't. You dated her. You never had her. Not really.
The rage that shot through me was white-hot.
My hands balled into fists and my split knuckles screamed but I barely felt it.
My brother, the one I'd looked up to my entire life, the one I'd wanted to be when I was eight years old watching him skate, was talking about the woman who meant everything to me like she was a trophy he'd won and I'd stolen.
Love. Fuck. You're in deep.
My brother. The one I had idolized. And that look on his face, jaw set, nostrils flaring, wounded pride radiating off him like heat, didn't look like anger anymore. It looked a hell of a lot like jealousy.
I sat back down on the step, the cold concrete biting through my slacks. The fight had gone out of me. Not because Trevor had won, but because yelling at him wasn't going to bring Lena back downstairs.