Unexpected Goal (The Breakaway #3)

PROLOGUE

The whiskey burns going down, sharp and bitter on my tongue, and for a second it steals my breath completely. It floods my chest with heat a moment later, almost enough to drown out the bruise forming on my ribs.

Almost.

I signal the bartender for another and try not to think about the fact that this is the third Tuesday in a row I've ended up here.

Same stool, same whiskey, same sticky floors.

The neon signs throw red and gold hues across the bar top, Coors and Bud Light, and one busted Miller that flickers every few seconds like it can't commit.

The kind of place where nobody knows your name and nobody wants to. I fit right in.

There are cities you move to and cities you run to.

Ridgeport is the second kind. I knew that when I signed, I signed anyway, because there was nothing left in Pinewood worth staying for and a lot worth leaving behind.

A team that knew what I'd done, and people who looked at me and could see exactly who I was.

That particular weight sits somewhere between shame and relief, and I've stopped trying to figure out which.

Here, at least, nobody knows yet.

But Reaper's already working on changing that.

He's the captain—which means when he decided I was the enemy somewhere around day three, the rest of the team got the message.

I eat lunch alone in my car, arrive at practice last, and leave first. I exist on this team the same way you exist in a room where everyone's already in conversation, present, visible, irrelevant.

The bruise on my ribs is from today's scrimmage.

His stick, my back, and the whistle that didn't blow.

I know how to take it. In this league, you learn early that fighting back costs more than it's worth.

That every retaliation becomes the story, and the original hit just disappears.

So I skate it off. I always skate it off.

I take another drink and stare at the bottles behind the bar, thinking about nothing in particular, which is something I've gotten very good at.

"Rough day?"

I look up. Dark hair scraped back as if she ran out of time to do anything with it, tired eyes, a hollow smile.

Still put together somehow, her blazer is slightly rumpled too.

She’s the kind of woman who looks like she came straight from somewhere she had to be professional and hasn't quite made it back to herself yet.

She's holding a vodka tonic like it's the only thing keeping her upright.

"Something like that." I swallow another mouthful. "You?"

"Yeah." She slides onto the stool next to me without asking. "Same."

We don't talk much after that; we don't need to. She's running from something, and I'm somewhere past running, but neither of us wants to be alone. The bartender keeps pouring, we keep drinking, and by the third round, her hand lands on my thigh.

"You have a place nearby?"

I should say no; I should finish my drink and go home to the rental house that still smells like fresh paint and sleep off the whiskey, the ribs, and the particular misery of being treated like a ghost by twenty-three men whose respect I'm never going to earn.

I know this. I know exactly how this plays out.

Reaper's face flashes through my mind anyway.

"Yeah." I down the rest of my drink. "Let's go."

The taxi ride is a blur of her mouth on my neck and my hands in her hair. I fumble with my keys at the front door while she laughs against my shoulder, and then we're inside, the fresh paint smell wrapping around us in the dark.

I don't remember much after that, except for clothes on the floor, her nails on my back, and the specific emptiness of wanting to feel something yet successfully feeling nothing instead. I'm asleep before I mean to be.

When I wake up at six-thirty with a pounding headache, she's already gone. But there's a note on my coffee table:

Thanks for the fun – Jessica.

I crumple it up, swallow three aspirin, and stand at the kitchen window looking out at the street for a minute.

A neighbor walks a dog. A car pulls out of a driveway.

The world is doing its ordinary morning things, indifferent and continuous.

I watch it all and feel something I can't quite name, something that sits in my chest like a low-grade bruise.

Not quite angry. Not quite sad. Just the particular sting of being… alone.

I've been good at this for a while now. Starting over in new places, traveling light, leaving before things can get complicated. Some people would call it running, but I've found it's easier to think of it as just not making the same mistakes twice.

I drag myself to practice. Reaper doesn't pass to me for the entire two-hour session, and Coach says nothing. The team says nothing. I drive home to an empty house, sit on the couch, and stare at the ceiling fan, which clicks every few rotations.

I keep meaning to fix that.

And that's the story of my first four weeks in Ridgeport, and one night that meant absolutely nothing.

Or so I thought.