Delay of Game (5 page)

I was surprised when Noelle Payne joined us. Noelle was new to our group. She was dating Liam Kallen, a guy we called Kally who’d only joined the team about six weeks ago, at the trade deadline. We’d tried to welcome her in, but Noelle was a little different. I’d always thought of her as a hippie-dippie kind of chick. Not that I didn’t like her. I just didn’t really know her yet.

That was why it surprised me when not only did she come over to sit with us but she plopped down on the floor by my feet, her long, flowery skirt making a pool around her.

“He’s not going to die,” she said. “I would feel it…”

I could only stare at her and blink in my confusion. She would
feel
it? What did that mean?

But Jonny came back over, holding out a bottle of water. “The coffee looked stale,” he said.

“Thank you.” I took it and held it in my hands.

He nodded and walked away since my girls had taken his seat. I followed him with my eyes. He found a quiet spot in the corner, near Zee and Soupy and a few of the other older guys on the team, the leadership group. He didn’t sit, though. He stood with his back against the wall, this big, hulking, solid presence. And he stared at me.

“Did he tell you?” Laura asked. “God, he probably blames himself.”

I sipped from my bottle and glanced at her in question. What on earth was she talking about? She nudged her head in Jonny’s direction, her lips turned down.

“Tell me what?” I asked. The man almost never spoke. Besides, there was no reason Jonny should blame himself for Daddy’s health. If anyone was to blame, it was me for not making sure he’d done all the things the doctors had told him he needed to do. The only thing he’d told me was that he was sorry. That he needed me to know he was sorry.

Oh God. I dropped the cap of my water bottle on the floor. It rolled away from me, not stopping until it had settled near Soupy’s feet across the way. Jonny
did
blame himself. But why?

“The guys said Scotty was yelling at Jonny for leaving the bench,” she said. “That he was really laying into him for doing that even though they had told him not to.”

Daddy had been visibly upset ever since that moment in the game. I knew; I’d been watching him instead of the game because I was so worried about him getting too stressed out. He’d gotten up on the bench behind the players, screaming. His face had turned purple. He’d been rubbing his jaw and yelling more than normal and hadn’t been able to calm himself down after that.

Well, fuck.

I shot my head up again, staring at Jonny from across the waiting room. He was still just staring back at me with those too-fucking-serious eyes. Most of the time, I found it hard to stop myself from melting into those eyes. I was always daydreaming about how they would change if he was fucking me. It was safe to daydream about that—not safe to act on it. He was still a damn hockey player, and I didn’t want anything to do with any more hockey players. There were already too many of them in my life, damn it.

But now he was the hockey player who had just set off my father’s heart attack. I knew it wasn’t rational to blame him for it, but the ability to let reason make my decisions for me seemed to have left my body the minute I’d seen those stupid lines on the pee stick.

I got up and headed in his direction without the first fucking clue what I was doing.

SHE FLUNG HER
bottle of water in my face.

The water was cool, not cold, but the actual temperature of it wasn’t important. It splashed all over me like a bucket of ice water.

I’d known Sara would be mad. She had every right to be mad. Her dad, the only family she had, was in the hospital after having a heart attack and it was all my fault. I deserved a hell of a lot worse than a bottle of water tossed in my face.

She apparently agreed with that sentiment.

The water had barely started to drip before she started in on me. “You fucking son of a bitch,” she said, but the words came out through tears. Those tears killed me. The fact that she was crying like that hurt me a hell of a lot more than a little water ever would.

I didn’t do anything to try to convince her I wasn’t to blame, nothing to try to mollify her. I stood there and waited for her to get her anger back. She needed to yell some more so she could work it out of her system. Just like Scotty…

That was what I always did to defuse anger that was directed me, at least when I wasn’t in a game-time situation. I stood back and allowed whoever was angry to let it all loose, taking whatever they had to give, until they were done. It was easier that way.

Sara had every right to be angry with me, to take it out on me. She deserved the chance to beat me to a bloody pulp, if that would make her feel any better. I doubted it would, but I was more than willing to let her try. I didn’t even flinch when she drew her arm back, her little hand balled into a really poor fist that she was sending in my direction. But Zee came up behind her and tried to pull her off, gripping her arms in his hands.

I shook my head. “Let her go. Let her hit me.” Mad was a hell of a lot better than broken. I could handle her being pissed at me, especially when I’d earned it as thoroughly as I had.

I was afraid that as soon as she worked the initial rush of anger out, she’d just be a crying mess. That was how my mom had been after my father left her—after he’d left
us
, actually. She’d been furious, for a while, because he’d walked out and left her with no job, four kids, and a mortgage she didn’t know how she’d pay. But once all the anger had gone, she was just beat-down for a while. Crying all the time. Lonely. Sad. Essentially hopeless.

She’d done the best she could for us, no thanks to him. But if I ever saw him again, I’d probably hit him the way Sara was trying to hit me, only I wouldn’t just be trying to do it, and I’d be sure to do a hell of a lot more damage than she could. I knew how to hit to hurt. Someone ought to teach Sara how to do that, actually. She needed to be able to defend herself, and what she was doing wouldn’t cut it. One of these days I’d give her lessons—if she would let me. Or maybe I should just ask Dana do it. Pushing my luck with Sara right now would be stupid.

Even though I’d asked him to let her go, Zee didn’t do it right away. What had been a manic assault of fists flying at me quickly turned into defeated sobs when his strength outmatched hers. Big, heaving, gut-wrenching sobs, like the kind that Cadence, my youngest sister, had always cried. The kind that tore my heart out. The kind that made me want to rip the head off the asshole who had brought them on, but in this case, I was the asshole.

Fuck
. This was exactly what I was
not
prepared for. You’d think that with three younger sisters and a mother who’d been treated like shit for years and then left by my asswipe of a father, I’d be better prepared to deal with crying like this. But I wasn’t. Not from Sara Thomas, at least. It wasn’t so much that her tears made me uncomfortable. I just felt fucking useless when a woman I knew—even if I didn’t know her well—was that upset and I couldn’t do anything to fix it.

I hated seeing Sara like that. I knew it wouldn’t be happening if not for what I’d done during the game earlier, and there wasn’t a goddamn fucking thing I could do to make it better. I couldn’t undo her dad’s heart attack or cardiac episode or whatever the fuck the doctors wanted to call it. I couldn’t turn back time and make a different decision in the game so he didn’t get so worked up and this wouldn’t have happened. I couldn’t do anything, and that left me feeling powerless.

I fucking hated feeling powerless.

That had to be what Sara felt, too. Helpless. No control. A passenger, waiting to see what would happen.

Zee finally let go of her arms, but Sara didn’t hit me like she should have. She didn’t run back to the other women she’d been sitting with before coming to beat the snot out of me. She didn’t start cussing me out again. Instead, she collapsed against me, falling into my arms and grabbing both of my lapels in her hands. She pulled me closer to her and buried her face in my chest while these massive sobs wracked her body.

I did the only thing I knew how to do in a situation like that: I put both my arms around her, drew her close, and held on tight. It was the only thing I’d ever been able to do with Mom or my sisters. I had never managed to come up with the right words to say at a time like this. I wasn’t the kind of guy who could make a joke and get them to laugh and then everything would be all right again. All I could do was hold them until it stopped, however long that took. So I held Sara, and I would keep holding her until she wanted me to let her go.

Zee gave me a nod, like he approved of what I was doing, and then he backed off. Fucking lot of help he was. Not that this was a mess he’d had anything to do with creating. This was all on me, so I supposed it was only right that I should be the one cleaning it up.

And I couldn’t deny that I liked the feeling of having Sara in my arms. Not that I ever would have wanted it to be for a reason like this.

It didn’t matter that she’d made a water-drenched, snotty mess of my suit; I was crazy attracted to her. She was always walking around in her skinny jeans and flirty skirts and designer tops and fuck-me shoes, and I couldn’t stop myself from looking. And wanting.

But what I wanted didn’t matter. She was the coach’s daughter, which made her as off-limits as they come.

That was why I’d never done anything stupid like ask her out. Besides, I wasn’t anything close to the right guy for her. She liked to party, to go out dancing and clubbing and all sorts of other things that were much more Burnzie’s scene than mine. Burnzie was a guy who was the absolute life of the party anywhere he went. But me? I was more often the designated driver, the guy who made sure everyone got home alive, if I went along for something like that in the first place. I didn’t mind having a beer every now and then, and a night with a few of the guys sometimes was fine, but partying held no interest for me.

Probably because of my father, come to think of it, not that it mattered right now.

Nothing mattered except for the fact that Sara was in my arms, crying so hard she was practically hyperventilating from the force of it. Not only that, but every fucking eye in this waiting room was focused squarely on her. I knew they didn’t mean any harm, that they were just worried about both Scotty and Sara and couldn’t help staring because she was so upset. But I also knew that she would be embarrassed once she stopped crying if she turned around and found them all staring like that. We were in the corner of the room, but that wasn’t really giving us any privacy.

I didn’t stand there thinking about it any longer than I had to. I put one arm under her knees, the other behind her back, picked her up, and carried her out of the waiting room.

She lifted her head, her eyes bloodshot and puffy, her nose red. “What…?”

There were chairs scattered throughout the emergency room lobby, and only a couple of people waiting to be taken back. Better yet, none of them were people who knew Sara, at least as far as I knew. I found a quiet corner and sat down with her on my lap.

“I thought you could use some privacy,” I explained. The table next to me had a box of tissues on it. I picked up the whole thing and handed it to her.

She sniffled and tugged two tissues from the box. “Why are you being nice to me? I was just awful to you.”

“I deserved a lot worse than that.”

Shaking her head, she blew her nose. “No, you didn’t. No one deserves to have water thrown on him like that. I just flipped out for a minute. God, I was going to hit you. It’s all these stupid h— Never mind. Nothing excuses my behavior.”

There was nothing that could absolve
me
from what
I’d
done. I didn’t want to argue with her about it right now, though. I just wanted to comfort her in whatever way I could.

Her tears had slowed, and her sobs had dropped off until she was hiccupping from the crying jag, so I knew the worst was over. At least for now.

Sara made no move to get off my lap, and I was definitely not in a hurry for her to leave it. I had one hand on her thigh, just above her knee, and the other was sliding up and down her spine in slow, steady movements. She rested her head on my shoulder.