One More Shot (Hometown Players #1) (13 page)

“You never asked for it,” she replies simply.

“Callie, I asked about him every day for almost an entire year. Why would you keep that from me?!” I’m pissed.
Really
pissed. More pissed than I have been at her in years. She kept us apart. Maybe if…

“He showed up at O’Malley’s while I was waitressing there one night,” Callie explains with a hard edge to her voice. “He was with Hannah. I’d heard rumors she was visiting him in Quebec all season too. And to make matters worse, there were, like, three other girls that night who were hitting on him.”

That news hurts. A lot. Did he really keep hooking up with Hannah when he was in Quebec? Was it really that easy for him? I was sitting in my dorm room in Arizona brokenhearted and he was banging his ex and flirting with everything who walked by—and badgering my sister for my number? What did he want to do? Add me to his entourage?

“He cornered me, drunk, and begged for your Arizona number,” Callie goes on angrily. “I’d seen him a few times already that summer, but the only time he ever mentioned your name was when he was drunk.”

I swallow. This news is ripping me apart.

“So I told him you had a boyfriend.”

“WHAT?”

“You’d gone on some dates with that guy from your biology class, remember?”

“Charlie. From my kinesiology class,” I correct, and grit my teeth before adding “And you shouldn’t have told him that.”

“He stumbled out of O’Malley’s with his arm around a skank and never mentioned you again.”

Callie pauses and her voice softens. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. Because you deserved better than him.”

“What I deserve is not your decision,” I snap.

“He gave me the number. It was my decision,” she counters heatedly. “And tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing if it was me and some loser.”

I look up and see Carl and Tori walking toward me on their way back from Starbucks.

Callie goes on softly. “Jessie, I did what I thought was best. Think about it. Really calm down and think about it. He had wrecked you and finally, after a year away, you were doing well. I had finally stopped worrying about you.”

“I have to go,” I say shortly.

“I love you.”

“Yeah, so you say.” And then I force myself to add “I love you too.”

I hang up the phone and smile tightly as Tori and Carl walk by.

L
ater that night I’m curled up on my couch, watching the heavy rain hit my windows as my playlist titled “The World Sucks” blares from my iPod dock. It’s full of angsty, brokenhearted ballads—everything from R&B to rock to country. I’m feeling melancholy tonight, and the gloomy Seattle weather is making me want to wallow in it. If my sisters were here, Rose would curl up with me on the couch and try to hug it out of me while Callie would give me a shake and tell me to “get over myself.” She wasn’t always so insensitive, but she’d know this current mood was because of our previous conversation about Jordan, and she had zero tolerance for Jordan Garrison–related wallowing.

I sip my blueberry tea—not the kind actual made from blueberries, but the one made from amaretto and Grand Marnier. Lately I’ve needed some help falling asleep at night. Hot toddies always seemed to work. I know Callie means well. I know she wasn’t trying to make my life worse, but I can’t help but wonder…would things be different between Jordan and me if she had given me his phone number five years ago?

She’s right, I
was
dating someone—casually. As my first year at Arizona ended, a guy named Charlie Cohen, who was in my kinesiology class, asked me out. He was nice and it was comfortable, which is why I guess it somehow continued for several months. But it never really turned into anything serious. And if I’d known Jordan wanted to talk to me…

I sigh and pull my laptop off the coffee table, looking for some kind of distraction from the perpetual game of “what if” happening in my head. As I surf Facebook absently and Tori’s status update appears in my news feed, I remember the conversation I had with her earlier.

Warren. Because bunnies live in warrens. Clever.

I type the name into Google. It pops up as the first link. My finger hovers over my mouse and my heart starts thumping in my chest, every beat feeling like an ominous knock on a front door in the middle of a horror movie. But yet, just like the idiots in horror movies, I open the door—I click on the link.

It’s nothing but a pink  page with little cartoon bunnies all over it. In the center is a space for a username and password. I didn’t have the Post-it Tori had written it on but I didn’t need to, it was seared into my brain. Username: Torilicious. Password: Winter4hawks4. I type it and hit enter quickly to avoid thinking about what I’m about to inflict on myself.

It’s a pretty basic website with a collage of candid photos of NHL players at the top above the menu and a welcome message from whoever runs it. Under that is a list of every single player in the NHL, every name a link that clicks through to their dedicated “stories” page. I click on Devin’s name first, because I don’t have the courage to click on Jordan’s. There’s many more pictures than stories. Devin walking to his car at the airport after a road trip, ordering coffee at a Starbucks, at a park in Brooklyn with Conner, and there’s even a one of him at the lake in Silver Bay, standing waist-high in the water, dripping wet and looking like an Adonis. The recent stories are about seeing him out but not doing anything with him, thank God. There are only two stories from girls who claim to have slept with him—one says it happened his first year in Brooklyn and that he has a giant penis. I scrunch up my nose at that because, ew…it’s Devin. The second says it happened on a road trip to Kansas City after he was married to Ashleigh, but the more I read the more I know the poster is lying her face off. She’s vague, and the details she does give sound like she stole them from an erotica book. Handcuffs and paddles? Not Devin’s style. Plus she said he came over to her house from the bar, and it’s common knowledge that although hockey players go out on road trips, they have to sleep at the hotel with the team. No exceptions. And the other posters call her out too, one of them explaining that Devin wasn’t even on the road trip in question because he was injured at the time.

I click on Luc’s name next. The pictures are much more compromising than Devin’s. Mostly girls Luc kissing girls at bars or walking in and out of road-trip hotels with a variety of girls—sometimes more than one at the same time. A shot of him shirtless, standing on top of a bar holding a pitcher of beer in one hand and a short blonde’s ass in the other, makes me roll my eyes. I don’t read the stories, but there are quite a few. I feel like I don’t want to know about Luc because I don’t want Rose to see me look at him any differently. She’s been crushing on him since she knew how to crush.

Then I do what I came here to do to begin with—I click on Jordan Garrison’s name. The thread is seventeen pages long. Seventeen! Luc’s was only five and Devin’s was two. I start to feel cold despite the cozy blanket I’m under and the warm booze I’m sipping.

The next hour is a blur of stories and pictures—Jordan making out with two girls at once at a bar, Jordan making out with a girl in a cab, Jordan groping a willing girl in an alley outside a club. Jordan lowering himself into a hot tub across from two girls. The girls are topless and Jordan isn’t wearing a suit—I know because his half his bare ass is visible. The stories are graphic and, sadly, I can confirm from my own knowledge that a lot of them are true. They describe his anatomy, the noises he makes and the way he moves with a clarity that brings back my own memories. Every single post seems to scorch little holes in my heart, like cigarette burns, but I don’t stop reading. I click on the newest one, which was posted while he was in Silver Bay throwing himself back in my life. It’s from username JustJackie111 and starts by thanking a previous poster for telling her the Winterhawks players like to hang out at the Barnacle down on the waterfront near the arena. Then she explains how they showed up after a preseason game and how adorable Jordan looked limping around in his air cast. She talks in great detail about the flirting and the drinking and how he invited her to some other player’s condo after the bar closed. She then goes on to talk about the various positions and how many orgasms she had. She ends her kiss-and-tell session with “
You girls were SO right! He does not disappoint!”

Under her little blurb is a selfie—of her giving a thumbs-up, lying in bed next to a sleeping, clueless Jordan, the sheets barely covering his naked body.

“Actually, he does disappoint,” I argue at the unknown girl like a pathetic loser.

I log out of the website and close my laptop with a loud smack. I head to the kitchen to make another, stronger blueberry tea and wipe at the one tear that has managed to escape, despite my willpower, and slide down my cheek.

Callie did me a favor. This guy—the one on this site—I don’t want him in my life.

I
lace my skates for morning practice while my teammates yammer around me. Despite meeting the coaching staff the morning after they got in from the road trip, running drills for them and then practicing with the team yesterday, Coach still said I would be a game-time decision. I was frustrated. I needed to get back on the ice. Hockey was the only thing in my life that made me feel right. It used to be hockey and Jessie, but then I lost Jessie. It had been hockey and only hockey ever since. This was the first prolonged amount of time I didn’t have it—couldn’t have it—and that, coupled with her reappearance in my life and her complete and repetitive condemnation, was making my life pretty much a living nightmare. I had to play tonight. I just had to.

“Oh my God! There are two hot pieces of ass out there!” Alexandre announces as he wanders into the dressing room.

“You’re late, Larue,” Avery Westwood, ever the team captain, chastises him lightly.

“Sorry, I got distracted by
les belle filles
,” he says with a lascivious wink.

Alex resorts to his native French whenever he’s making excuses or lying his ass off. I think he thinks it makes him seem adorable. Chicks seem to think so anyway.

“Why girls here?” Igor asks in his broken Russian-English.

“I don’t know.” Alex shrugs. “They’re talking to the trainers. They’re smoking hot!”

“What do they look like?” our goalie, Mike Choochinsky whom we affectionately call Chooch, wants to know as he pulls his practice jersey over his head.

“There’s a tall blonde with a big rack,” Alex explains excitedly. “And then there’s the other one. Tiny but with a phenomenal ass. She is the reason yoga pants were invented.”

“Brunette?” Chooch asks. “I like brunettes in yoga pants.”

I grab my stick and check the tape on it.

“
Chatains rouge
.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I ask, not because I care about the girls but because I’ve never heard the French words he just used.

“Umm…” Alex is at a loss for the translation.

“Chestnut and red,” Pierre, one of our French defensemen, pipes up as he gets up to head for the ice. “She has auburn hair.”

I turn and stare at him and then Alex.

“What?” Alex asks confused by the look on my face.

“Great ass…” I repeat his words.

“Yeah, man. Like perfect.”

“What is she doing here?” I wonder aloud, knowing without a doubt that he just described Jessie.

“You know her?” Alex asks.

I leave the dressing room without giving him an answer and head down the hall.

I peek into the training room but no one is there. When I make it down the tunnel to the rink, Mick, Tori and Jessie standing together in a huddle by the bench. I hit the ice and skate over toward them.

“Garrison!” Mick says as he sees me coming. “You remember Tori and Jessie.”

“Yeah, of course.” I try to keep my voice relaxed and unaffected.

“They brought me the notes on your treatment,” he says as he holds up a file folder. “I invited them to watch practice.”

“Great! Well, enjoy, ladies. Good seeing you again.” I keep my eyes on Jessie the entire time, even while I skate, backward, across the ice to join the rest of my team who are filtering onto the ice.

Practice is light. Coach takes a lot more time with me than the others. I know his style—he’s diligent. He wants to make sure I’m ready, not just physically but mentally. I do everything he asks and say everything he wants to hear. I need to play.

“Okay, Jordan, looking good,” Coach finally says with a flicker of a smile on his road-worn face. “I’m leaning toward yes. Let’s talk after practice.”

I smile and skate over to the bench to grab my Gatorade. I suddenly feel happier than I have in months. Chooch is standing by the bench with his own water bottle. He looks at me and smiles deviously.

“Larue wasn’t kidding, huh?” he says, and his eyes move to the girls sitting a few rows up from the bench. “They’re fucking hot.”

“Yeah.” I say feeling that tight, cold clench in my gut I used to get when Chance would talk about Jessie in our high school locker room.

Chooch puts his water bottle down and his eyes grow wide as he nudges me. “Oh! She’s moving. Look at that!”

I glance over and watch Jessie make her way down the stairs. She’s moving fast and her perky little chest is bouncing lightly as her hips move side to side. Chooch makes a low appreciative growling sound, and it makes me think of the years and years I had to hear this from Chance and my other high school teammates. I like it even less now.

Jessie reaches the bottom step and, without looking at me, turns and heads down the tunnel, giving Choochinsky a perfect view of her backside.

“What a tail on her!” Chooch whispers. “Magnificent.”

I shove him a little harder than I should. “That’s her. The girl I told you I knew. From home.”

Chooch thinks hard because, clearly, my fucked-up love life is not noteworthy to him. Finally, his eyes flare in recognition. “That’s her?”

“Yep.”

“Wow, man…I can see why you want that back.”

Before I can respond Coach calls out and points to the net. “Chooch, in the cage! Shoot-out drill! Hurry up, the Storm has the ice in fifteen.”

I glance down the tunnel where Jessie disappeared and wonder where she went as I skate over to take my shots on Chooch.