Ruby’s words take a moment to register, but when they do, I blink and turn my attention back to her.
“Really?” I ask as I narrow my gaze, hoping to gauge her seriousness. “It would be cruel to tease me.”
“I’m not teasing.” Light laughter trickles out of her as she smiles at me, then looks to Nick. “Do you recognize her?”
“Oh, yeah,” he adds almost like he’s as surprised to put it together as I am that my best friend has been holding out on me. “Hannah something or other, right?”
“You both know her and didn’t tell me?!” It’s completely irrational and doesn’t even make sense, but it still feels like a betrayal.
“We met her over the summer,” Ruby tells me. “She’d just moved here to train at a new place here in Moonshot. She’s a gymnast.”
“You met the hottest woman on the planet this summer and never thought to tellme, your best friend?” I ask Nick, voice full of accusation.
His lips twist into a smirk but he has no reply for me.
I can’t believe this. For weeks I’ve been thinking about her, trying to figure out how to break the ice without being a total stalker and dropping by her house daily, and this whole time the answer was right in front of me.
Ruby takes pity on me and answers my next question before I can ask how they came to meet her. “She’s a client of Everly Wyld. She and Jack were in town and Hannah met up with us one night.”
Where the hell was I? What could have possibly been more important?
“Everly is her agent?” I only know of Everly because her husband, Jack, is a dominant hockey player on Nick’s old team, the Wildcats.
“Yeah.” Ruby nods. She doesn’t say anything else, but she waits like she expects me to toss another dozen questions at her.
Which I absolutely plan to do, but not before running all this new information through my mind again. It feels like unraveling a secret. Discovering a new hobby where each nugget of knowledge buries you further into obsession. Hockey was like that for me once.
I was six the first time I played. I loved it but it was more than that. It gave me community, purpose, and freedom. For a few hours at a time, I thought of nothing but the sport. I didn’t worry about being a kid who wasn’t meeting expectations or didn’t feel like he fit in with his family of origin – not that I could have put that into words at the time. Hockey consumed me from the start. Kind of like the woman across the bar.
“What else do you know about her?” I ask Ruby and Nick. “Spare no details.”
Nick huffs a laugh like he thinks I’m joking. I’ve never been more serious in my life. I want to know everything.
“Let me think,” Ruby says, gaze lifting to the ceiling as she gets a contemplative look on her face. “I think she said she was from Colorado. Umm…she moved here to train at a new gym.”
“You already said that.”
“Easy,” Nick warns in a low voice.
I roll my eyes at his protectiveness and ignore him.
“What else you got for me?” I ask Ruby, left leg bouncing rapidly under the table.
“Oh!” Her eyes light up. “She has an ex-boyfriend that she still talks to or did. We texted him that night?”
“Well, that’s a buzzkill.”
“No, it wasn’t like that,” Ruby insists. “It was Everly’s idea. We were doing a hypothetical questions game where we each texted our significant others to see what they would do in a scenario. You know what, it actually started because she was talking about dating and how all the guys she had been talking to lately seemed like they wouldn’t notice if she went missing.”
“You lost me, Ruby-Doo. Hypothetical scenario questions?”
“Everly texted Jack, I texted Nick, and Hannah texted her ex. We asked all three the same question about what they’d do if we went missing.”
“I remember that.” Nick smiles and looks adoringly at Ruby, an expression that she mirrors back at him.
“What did he say?” I ask.
Ruby continues to stare at Nick. “You said, ‘I’m looking at you right now. So if you’re missing then I’m?—’”
