“I can ask them for a different room,” he says.
I shake my head. “The team’ll know something’s up.”
“I can sleep on the floor.”
“You cannot play a literal professional sport after sleeping on the floor.” I scan the room for another place to rest. There’s an armchair in the corner, one that looks entirely too stiff-backed to be comfortable. “I can sleep there.”
“Absolutely not. Lack of sleep is a migraine trigger.” Brayden says that, then turns a faint pink under his tan, as if he’s embarrassed to be caught caring about another person. “I mean, it is, right?”
Something right below my breastbone aches, dangerously close to my heart. That he researched migraine triggers; that he committed them to memory. For me. Because of me. Something that can’t be fake unlike…the rest of this. “Yes, lack of sleep can be a problem.”
“So we’ll share the bed. It’s king-sized. It’s not a big deal.” Though the slightly tense set of his shoulders says otherwise.
I glance at the clock. It’s evening, though we gained an hour because of the time difference. I thought I’d spend this trip counting the minutes until I was back in Atlanta. Now, I want as much time as possible before we get to bed—together. “You want to go out to dinner? Or just out-out?”
For a moment, Brayden’s forehead scrunches. He might tell me no. He’s been going on late-night runs, the location on his phone making circuits around the neighborhood but going nofarther. When he says good night to me, the only smell on his breath is Gatorade. “I’d like that.”
And he says it quietly enough that I can just make out the sound of Asher in the next room, rattling around like a secret.
Chapter Thirty
Asher
“C’mon,Adler, quit sulking and come out with us.” LeBlanc is at my hotel room doorway, dressed for the club. I showered off the plane smell, not thinking about the torture of the plane. An hour and a half of watching them. Savannah studying too intently for her to notice the way Brayden was looking at her—like he never wanted to look anywhere else. Except of course to occasionally shoot me a glare.
Now I figured I could just grab dinner and, I don’t know, forget about everything for a while. Most especially the way Savannah looked and tasted and sounded, coming apart in her husband’s house.You deserve better, I tried to tell her. But that had clearly backfired. So I’m gonna spend four days on the road having to see them together. Hear them together, if the thin hotel walls have anything to say about it.
LeBlanc bangs on my open doorframe with his meaty catcher’s palm. “C’mon,” he says, again. “Get your mind off whatever’s going on with you.”
“Nothing’s going on,” I lie.
“Sure, uh-huh.”
Catchers are always like this—unofficial team captains, part-time team therapists. Usually, I’m good enough at managing my own shit—or masking it, as my last therapist told me—that they leave me alone. “Okay,” I say finally, “I’ll come out.”
“Wearing that?”
I’m in a band T-shirt, a pair of jeans frayed at the knee. “Yeah.”
“Damn, dude, whoever she is, I promise there’ll be another.”
Not who I want. But I grab my stuff and let LeBlanc shoo me toward the elevator.
An hour later,I’m drinking alone. Or trying to. We’re at a club, seated in a booth: me, LeBlanc, Crawford, a few other guys on the team. For the past thirty minutes, LeBlanc has been corralling women toward me like this is a dating show, half of whom Crawford has swooped in to take once I’ve made it clear I’m not interested. The woman sitting next to me—Clara, I’m pretty sure, but it’s hard to hear—has been trying to get me to talk for a while. I’m being an asshole.I’m being like him.
Clara is statuesque and curvy, with dark hair and green eyes. If I didn’t know better, I’d think LeBlanc thought I had a type. Clara works for the public defender’s office. Clara is half in my lap and entirely off my mind. My thoughts keep cutting from her to flashes of Savannah, laid out on her bed. To the teasing look in her eyes, the one she can’t quite suppress, even withBraydenaround. The one that makes me want to crawl over broken glass to reach her. But right now I’m too much of a coward to even go next door to her hotel room.
“Hey,” I say to Clara, and she peers up at me with interest, “you can probably tell, but I’m kinda getting over a situation.”
Clara drapes her hand over my thigh. “You want some help with that?” she purrs.
I don’t want to get over it.The bar gets somehow louder. Everything is clatters and noise and bright light, and I need to get the fuck out of here before I do something drastic, like tell anyone the truth. I fucked someone else’s wife and rather than regretting it, all I can think about is how much I want to do it again. “Not really,” I say.
Clara laughs. “Oh, you’re down bad.”
“I—” I begin, trying to deny it, but Clara is right. “Yeah.”
“Well, what are you gonna do about it?”
