Chapter 6
six
SEBASTIAN
I’m stalking Indigo Bloom.
For the last four days, I’ve broken out in a cold sweat any time my phone vibrated with a text or incoming call. What if this time it was her? Except, it never was.
The last time I hung out with the kids at the hospital, they asked me if I was okay because I was so distracted. I felt terrible because I haven’t gotten to spend as much time with them lately as I’d like to, and when I was with them, my mind was elsewhere.
Though they did love that my miniature figurine ended up looking like shit because of it, while all of theirs looked great. They didn’t let me live it down that Declan’s wizard looked better than mine, and he’s only ten and he’s sick.
Not only that, but when I checked my phone for the tenth time in an hour, Savannah looked at me through narrowed eyes and asked if I was “waiting for a call from my old person’s doctor.”
I love those kids, but man, they’re the most adorable little shits sometimes. It’s a humbling experience to be roasted by three pint-sized cancer patients.
So here I am, parked a few houses down from Indie’s bungalow, music playing quietly, hat pulled low over my head, sunglasses on, hoping the tint of my windows is enough to keep her from noticing me if and when she leaves the house. It’s been three hours, and so far, she hasn’t.
Maybe I should run with Griffin’s idea and hire a PI because I won’t be able to sit in front of her place for hours on end most days. We don’t have practice this morning, but that’s not usually the case since we’re in the home stretch of the regular season.
Is that crazy? Probably. Am I genuinely considering it? Yes.
I’m not proud, but I am desperate.
“One more hour,” I tell myself. “You can’t sit here all day.”
The song changes to something more upbeat right as the door of her bungalow opens. Is this it? With my luck, it’ll be Lola who walks out.
My heart skips a beat, and I choke on my own saliva when a pink-haired woman steps onto the porch. Indie says something at the door, most likely to Lola, hikes a backpack onto her back, and waves before walking down the stairs and onto the sidewalk.
What do I do?
Do I follow her in my car? Get out and walk on foot? No, I can’t follow her on foot. I don’t want to scare her. But what if she walks somewhere I can’t follow in the car?
I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with myself.
Ultimately, I turn on the car and watch her make it to the end of the block, where she turns left. Following slowly, I keep as much distance as possible between us. It’s ten in the morning. Is this what she normally does at this time of day?
I follow her for another ten blocks and stop, pulling into an open space on the street, when Indie enters a little neighborhood coffee shop called The Bean House. When she hasn’t emerged half an hour later, I decide to call it. She could be in there for hours, and I have things I need to do.
Like figuring out how I’m going to stake out her house around this time every day to see if this is a normal routine or something out of the ordinary.
Totally normal behavior.
She walks to the same coffee shop almost daily around the same time.
At least, from what I’ve seen on the days I’m able to stake out her house.
We have only a handful of regular-season games left, so we’re spending early mornings in the gym and afternoons on the ice.
I spend my time in between parked down the block from Indie’s bungalow.
Every day, she hikes her backpack up her shoulders, waves to Lola, and hurries the twelve-ish blocks to the coffee shop.
Once she disappears, she can be there for hours.
One day, I waited around for almost four hours before she finally walked out of the little cafe with a thoughtful expression, more distracted than she’d been when she walked in.
I followed her home to make sure she got there safely. And that’s how I justified sitting there like a creep for hours just to get a glimpse of her again. Because I needed to keep her safe.
Griffin knows what I’m doing, but I’ve sworn him to secrecy.
I know damn well that if I tell the other guys that I’m stalking the woman I fell in love with at sixteen, they’ll give me endless shit and talk me out of it.
After all, Logan and his girlfriend, Blair, recently dealt with a real-life, dangerous stalker who set fire to Blair and Reed’s, her little brother, apartment.
Stalking isn’t cute, and I know it. But ever since seeing her face at that game, I’m desperate.
Desperate to see her, to hear her voice, to touch her.
Even if all she does is tell me to fuck off and never contact her again.
I simply need to know for certain why she left that summer.
To clear the air. To finally tell her I love her after all these years.
I loved her then, and I love her still. It’s okay if she doesn’t feel the same, but I need to say it.
I’ve spent the past week trying to decide how to make an opening to speak with Indie. Griffin has had a million ideas, each more ridiculous than the last, but I keep coming back to my simplest, most basic idea.
Which is why I’ve been jogging around her block, shirtless and sweaty, for the past twenty minutes. Hopefully, none of the neighbors are paying close attention, because what I’m doing is not normal.
Every time I run past her house, I speed up in case she or Lola are close enough to glance out the window. I don’t want her to spot me yet. Not until she’s outside.
Sweat drips down my bare chest as I circle the block again. It’s the beginning of April, so the weather is warming up enough that my shirtless state isn’t completely illogical.
The shirtless part was Griffin’s idea. When we’d discussed my plan, he placed a palm on my shoulder, grinned like a loon, and said, “You gotta oil yourself up and run shirtless, dude. She hasn’t seen you since you were seventeen and scrawny, and you were all kitted out at the game.
Show her what she’d be walking away from. Make her drool.”
I’m not sure she’s going to drool over my body, but I figure it’s worth a shot. And I’m desperate enough to try it.
“See you later, Lols.” Her voice jolts me out of my thoughts, and I come to a dead stop at the end of the block.
Indie. She’s coming.
If I was hooked up to an EKG, a doctor would probably be concerned about how fast my heart is pounding in my chest. This isn’t from exertion. It’s all nerves.
This is it.
I pull the bill of my hat down lower over my face and start jogging again once I hear her feet slapping the bungalow stairs as she descends them. My earbuds are in my ears, even though I don’t have any music playing through them. I need her to think I didn’t see or hear her.
Feet pounding to the rhythm of my heartbeat, I jog down the sidewalk toward Indigo Bloom and whatever fate awaits me.
She’s not paying attention, her chin tucked into her chest as she frowns at her phone, so she doesn’t see me in time to avoid the collision.
“Shit,” she squeaks as she runs straight into my sweaty chest. Her phone clatters to the sidewalk as I wrap my arms around her to keep her from falling backward after she bounces off me. Unfortunately, she has enough momentum that I lose my footing, and we both go down.
Fuck. I was supposed to catch her. This was supposed to be smooth.
Instead, I’m spinning us around so it’s my ass that will take the force of the fall while I let out an undignified sound that is embarrassingly close to a shriek.
“Oh my god,” Indie cries, her hands going to my shoulders and gripping tightly as we fall in what feels like slow motion.
A slow-motion disaster.
My ass hits the sidewalk, Indie flails as she tries to brace herself, her forehead smacking into mine and knocking my hat off, and then she’s in my lap, straddling me.
It’s only thanks to the throbbing of my forehead that I don’t pop a damn boner beneath her as the full weight of her gorgeous curves presses into me.
Fuck, she feels like heaven. How many times have I thought about what she would feel like in my arms? My imagination had nothing on reality.
“I’m so sorry!” Her voice is panicked. She rubs her head as she looks up. “I wasn’t paying attention, and I should have been. Are you oka—”
The words die in her throat when she registers me.
The hand still gripping one of my shoulders tightens as her eyes widen, her cheeks flush a gorgeous shade of pink, and her jaw drops.
There’s a momentary flash of something that looks a hell of a lot like the way the girl I spent summers with would look at me.
Open. Happy. Hopeful. Then it shutters, and I watch her throw walls up between us.
I do a lot of visualizing as part of my game-day prep. I run through scenarios and plays and visualize how I’ll stop the puck. It helps me feel prepared. By the time I step onto the ice, I’ve already stopped a hundred pucks in a hundred ways, and my nerves are gone.
So, of course, I visualized how this moment would go.
I played out a dozen scenarios in my mind.
Sometimes we’d run into each other. Sometimes she’d see me first and stop.
Sometimes she’d be confused to see me, others she’d be excited, and in a few she was angry.
I thought I’d prepared for all eventualities.
But I never prepared for the possibility that she’d lock her emotions down in an iron cage and stare at me with a blank expression that gives nothing at all away.
Somehow, this is worse than the scenarios I played out where she was furious.
My fingers flex where I’m still holding her to me, soaking up the warmth of her body, memorizing her softness and the way she shivers just enough to prove she’s not completely unaffected when I let my palms slide down to her hips.
If this is the first and last time I get to touch her in a decade, I’m going to commit every single moment to memory.
The wind blows a strand of pink hair into Indie’s face, and I reach up to brush it behind her ear, savoring the skim of my fingers over her cheek. She sucks in a breath, and I have to tell myself to do the same.
She’s so beautiful. So familiar yet different. I’ve been holding my breath, afraid to break whatever tenuous spell we’re both under.
Then she does it for me.
“Sebastian?”