“What did you do?” I asked as he settled back in the driver’s seat, panic seeping into my limbs. “If you fucked this up?—”
“I invited her to the game and gave her a pass so she could get into the locker room area afterward. That’s what you wanted, right? To have time with her, to have her get to know you and us and see if you two would fit?”
I nodded, though I resented Cruz prodding me. I was handling the situation. Maybe not well or with any suaveness at all, but I had been handling it.
Cruz drove past Hana, where she still stood, clutching the pass in her hand. I waved. She began to raise her hand but let it fall. She whipped her head around, and I noted the skinny shit striding toward her, his mouth twisted with anger. His eyes moved toward me, and I noted the hot, ugly jealousy in them before Cruz pulled out onto the road.
“My mother has a saying,” Cruz said. “Only the most stubborn survive. That’s been true for me in hockey. You think many kids from the wrong neighborhood in a city that doesn’t have a professional team end up in the NHL?”
“I know the statistics, man. That’s why I do the outreach to the Fifth Ward.” That was one of the roughest neighborhoods in Houston—ironically, perched near the downtown area where hundreds of millions of dollars flowed through the city with lightning speed.
Yes, kids like Cruz, who’d been raised on the edge of the Fifth Ward, were lucky if they had schoolbooks in their classrooms. No lie. The Wildcatters had bought the elementary school new textbooks, and I’d watched six kids—mostly boys—cry as they touched them for the first time.
Povertysucked.
“It’s not just the ability to get on ice,” Cruz said. “It’s the cost of the equipment and teams, travel—all of it is too much for many families. Definitely for mine. So I figured it out. I wasn’t going to let my sisters go hungry because I might have a chance at the pros.”
“How’d you do it?” I asked. Cruz seemed like an open book, but I actually knew very little about his formative years.
He glanced over, and I would’ve sworn his lips curled up in a self-satisfied smile. “Sometimes, you need to beg.”
Chapter6
Hana
“Why did you meet him?” Jeremy asked, his voice a curious mix of whine and imperiousness that grated on my already-scraped-raw nerves. I shoved my hands in my pockets outside the restaurant, stowing the pass Lennon Cruz had handed me even as I tracked their car. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the pass, what I wanted to do, and Jeremy’s presence wasn’t making that any better.
“Why, Hana? He’s old news,” Jeremy stated. “Your clichéd high-school phase. Why do women think athletes are hot? They’re sweaty and stupid—useless to society.” He perked up and refocused on me. “You have to admit, with everything you’re working on here, your life is way better.”
“Do I?” I asked.
Jeremy grabbed my arm, pulling me out of my foggy haze. Aiki used to grab me. My mother, too. Grab me, shake me, put me where they wanted me because they could—because I allowed it and because they wanted to show who was in charge in my life.Not me. That was the clear answer from my mother, from Aiki, and now, from Jeremy. My thoughts, my feelings were secondary. So much for the solicitude he’d shown before. Now, because of a little potential competition, Jeremy’s true self had burst forth.
No wonder I hadn’t wanted him; I must have sensed this ugliness lurking below the urbane surface. My biology professor had once told the class we all could feel danger, but we’d learned to suppress that gut instinct.
“Hey! Are you coming?” called Esther, one of my colleagues and another of Jeremy’s employees. She came toward us, shoving her glasses up her nose as her eyes moved from Jeremy’s tight grip to my face and the tension between us. She gave me a questioning look. Whatever expression she received back—my face was stiff with anxiety—appeared to have an effect.
“Let’s go, Jeremy. We need to eat before we get back to the lab to finish these current projections, right? You wanted to go over the lift mechanism, you said.”
“I expect you to be there, running that data, when we get to the office, Hana.” Jeremy’s voice dripped like acid over me.
I didn’twantto be there. I didn’t want to be near him, not if he thought he could bully me into a decision. Yet even with all those emotions choking me, I nodded.
Old habits died hard, I supposed, and as much as I hated to admit it, I was used to deferring. To Jeremy now, it seemed, and for years before that, to my mother’s will.
I sighed in relief when Jeremy’s fingers uncoiled from my arm. I pulled back with such speed that I stumbled. Esther steadied me with a gentle hand. “He’s done this before,” she breathed into my ear before herding Jeremy away. “And I’m going to let Lennon know.”
What, exactly, had he done before? Who was Lennon? Why would Esther tell me any of this? I wasn’t sure what to make of her comments, and my head ached too much to sort through that set of information.
I watched them walk away, and I didn’t go to the lab; I called a rideshare to go home.
I didn’t have a car, and I hadn’t driven much even before the car accident. Once I’d arrived on the West Coast, I hadn’t needed a car, for which I’d been so very thankful.
Maybe if I’d pushed back harder, been more rebellious in high school, by forcing the issue to buy myself a car…or insisting on spending more time with Pax, I’d have the life I wanted now. I pulled out the pass Cruz had given me and flipped it over, considering.What would the life I want look like?
The first thing to surface was Paxton. He wasn’t wrong when he’d said we were soulmates. I’d missed him with every single breath I’d taken these past three years—the way I would miss not being able to walk. I was sure of that comparison because for weeks, I hadn’t been able to walk. And for months after that, I’d struggled to get my leg strong enough to hold my weight. Such a simple thing, walking—until you couldn’t.
I didn’twantto depend on Paxton for my happiness. He’d already proven once that I shouldn’t. He’d left me, and I’d been miserable. Only a fool would believe he’d changed, that he wouldn’t hurt me again, right?
