I have a problem.
Her name is Addie Bloom.
She doesn’t have the decency to bid on me while I’m on stage, which shouldn’t be a surprise.
Her coaching salary can’t compete with the big donors in this room.
Plus she doesn’t want me.
And I shouldn’t want her.
I shouldn’t.
But every moment I’m in the same breathing space as her, she’s all I can see. All I can concentrate on. All I know.
That pink dress—just fuck me. She’s goddamn gorgeous. And she still smells like lavender. And the way she was laughing before she saw us—I miss that laugh.
I missher.
I never should’ve left her the way I did. I should’ve gone back and apologized for getting mad that she didn’t think we were serious. We went fromlet’s hook up every few weeksto metelling her I should move in with her and she should wear my jersey to the Thrusters’ preseason opener.
She was in the midst of a personal crisis, worrying she couldn’t do her job while the Fireballs were headed into their second playoffs with a team that would go all the way and make fucking history.
And I asked her to put me and our relationship at the top of her priority list when she was feeling the pressure of being a young coach for a historically terrible team that was being watched and analyzed by the entire damn country.
I thought I was taking care of her, just like I take care of everyone in my life to the best of my ability. And she didn’t want me to.
Her rejection—the way she didn’t need me at all—was so foreign a concept that I couldn’t handle it.
“Most people don’t scowl after they go for ten grand at an auction, Uncle Duncan,” Paisley whispers to me as I retake my seat.
“My shoes are tight,” I mutter back.
“Those ugly things you’ve had for as long as I’ve known you?Nowthey hurt?”
“Yes.”
I shoot another look back at Addie’s table.
She and Waverly are whispering about something, and whatever it is has Waverly cracking up.
“Dude, if Cooper Rock realizes how much you’re staring at his wife, you’re fucked next season,” Rooster Applebottom says on my other side. “He’ll pay guys to fuck you up on the ice.”
Rooster’s fun. He’s offering a chance to go skydiving tonight.
“He’s not staring at Waverly,” Paisley tells him. “He’s staring at the woman with her. Maddie, right?”
“Addie,” I correct without thinking, then shift a look at my niece, who grins.
“Addie,” she says, zero shame in the mischief shining through her. “Right.”
“You’re obsessed with the Fireballs’ lady coach?” Zeus Berger asks from Paisley’s other side.
He retired from the Thrusters a few years back, and now he and his wife, who’s an even bigger badass than Addie, are raising quadruplets.
Quadzeuslets, Z-man calls them. He’s close to seven feet tall, built like a dump truck, and he’s equal parts troublemaker and teddy bear. His identical twin, Ares, played for the Thrusters for a few years before and after Zeus. He retired at the end of this past season. Time to focus on his wife and kids as well.
All these guys I played with forever are moving on.
