I hated the soothing timber of his tone. I hated that he was still patting my head. Most of all, I hated that I wasn’t going to be able to slip over to Micah’s house and snuggle into his warm arms after practice—if it was a weekend. I didn’t even remember what fucking day of the week it was anymore.
Everything was shit.
“Grunt once to let me know if you’re alive. Twice if you’re dead,” he murmured, a satanic fairy godmother, breezing goodwill into my ear.
I grunted twice, just to be an asshole.
He chuckled. “Mom was worried about you because you haven’t been to dinner at our house. I told her—”
“Why did you tell her anything?” I interrupted, still not coming out into the open. I flipped him off, but he couldn’t see me. “Don’t be nosy.”
“Well, because I’m worried. I don’t know,” he said quietly, and I hated that Milo, my best friend, sounded lost and sad because of me.
Growling, I shrugged. “Sorry.”
He shook me with a hand on my back. “You missed two practices and a ton of classes. You have to get up. You can’t keep doing this.”
I remained silent. Maybe if I pretended to be a rock he would leave.
“Listen,” he said, and the steel in his tone shocked me because it was very un-Milo-like. “If you don’t get to practice this morning, Coach is going to lose his fucking mind. He followed me into the shower yesterday to demand to know where the fuck you were. With the season getting close to officially starting, the man is unhinged. He’s not taking any shit from anyone.Andhe’s announcing the starters for the season. You will be lucky if he doesn’t cut you completely out of spite. And besides, Alexanderhasn’t been there.”
“What?” I asked, shoving down my comforter. The light stung my eyes and I blinked.
Milo flashed me a big grin and cupped my cheeks.
I shrugged him off with a glare.
He tapped my nose, and I swatted at him. “He’s been missing, too! You’re in the clear. Let’s be real, with Coach intake no prisonersmode, Alexander’s gone if he doesn’t surface. Forever. College career over.”
Staring at the ceiling, I shrugged. “Who cares?”
Milo leaned over me until he was scowling directly into my face. I hated that I’d made him upset because he was one of the most cheerful people I knew. “Are you serious? Since when are you a quitter, Hinode? Where is your team spirit?”
He sounded so much like Coach that my lips twitched toward a smile, even though an awful pit lived directly inside my stomach and it opened wider. It ran miles into the center of the earth. The hole was full of piranhas that kept gnawing at the rest of me. Ugh, I hated this.
“Do you want that fucker, Alexander, to win?” He raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “I thought you were better than that.”
I grabbed Milo by the collar and yanked him down beside me. He laughed as he crashed to the bed, and I felt better after I smacked him a few times with a pillow.
“What you don’t get is that I really don’t care about Alexander. I couldn’t fucking care less about him. I stopped caring weeks ago.” I finished my minirant by slapping him across the face with my pillow, then tossed it aside.
Milo rested his cheek on the bed and pouted at me. “I don’t get it.”
“I can’t give a shit about the feud with Alexander if I want to be with Micah. And I chose Micah.” My voice was rough, and I cleared my throat, but I had a feeling it wasn’t going to do much to help. I hated that all this bullshit had bubbled over.
“Well, I get all that,” he said softly, but his bottom lip jutted farther. “Don’t you care about me, too? I want you, my best buddy, to be at my side as we annihilate every other team this season.” He flashed a wide grin.
Ruffling his hair, I snorted. “I’ve never heard anyone make basketball sound like a love song. You have talent. Come sing in the band.”
“Either you get out of bed, or I’m getting my mom to come here.” He flicked my ear. “I’ll tell her how depressed you are, and then she’ll make you go talk to her therapist, Bob. She loves Bob. So, either you do what I’m asking now, or I’ll set her loose on you because she likes you a lot and she would do it. And I care about you enough to do that to you.” He wrinkled his nose. “It’s the extreme option.”
I glared at him, but he only stared at me, his brown eyes gleaming with love and care and all the bullshit that made me like him in the first place.
“Fuck. Fine. You’re a pain in the ass.”
“Yes!” He hopped up on the bed, bouncing me all around. “Let’s get to practice!”
Sniffing myself, I grimaced. Yeah, I’d been wallowing for a few days. Maybe he had a point. “I’ll hop in the shower.”
