I could see Cruz now. He had his car window down, the late-afternoon air bathing his thickly muscled arm as it rested on the door frame. He shrugged, and I clicked off my phone and shoved it in my pocket. He saw me and did the same, then started the engine.
“Doesn’t mean you can’t either,” he said, continuing our conversation in person as he pulled up.
I settled into the seat, slammed the door, and deflated as I touched my cheek. The pep talk I’d given myself moments before was lost under the weight of seeing the skinny shit’s arm around Hana. “Maybe I should have left her alone.”
“And spiral down into a useless sack of misery? Nah, man. But you do need to get to the bottom of the situation.”
I slumped, not wanting him to say the next words, but this was Cruz, and he was relentless. “You need to call your parents and find out what your mom knows about the situation, what your parents did. Then you need to find out what your parents told Hana and whatshebelieves happened. I’m positive there’s more to this story than either of you understands.” He shot me a look. “More than your folks have told you even now. But you probably loosened their lips by threatening to disown them.”
“I didn’t threaten to disown them,” I said, affronted. “I simply told my father we no longer had a relationship.”
Cruz’s lips curled in the beginnings of a grin…I thought. His beard was so bushy it was hard to tell. Dude needed a barber to whack that thing back.
I turned in my seat to face him. “Why do you care? I mean, I get that me being content means my head’s in the game, but you seem to care a lot about the whole team’s happiness.”
“Course I care,” Cruz snapped, shooting me a surly look. “Why wouldn’t I?”
I scratched my head. “Dunno. I mean, it just seems like you’re spending time helping us be happy when you could be working on your own life.”
Cruz’s hands tightened on the steering wheel to the point that it creaked under the pressure. I worried it would snap and we’d careen into a building. Instead, Cruz took a long breath in through his nose and let it out slowly. “Yeah, I guess I never told y’all that story. Because it sucks.” He shot me a beady eye. “My girl’s gone. Basically dead and buried. There’s no happiness in the cards for me, man. Not now, not ever. So the best I can do is see your shining happy faces and know I had a part in making it so.”
Dead? I gaped. Then I swallowed, but my throat was dry, and I coughed. Once I finished wheezing, I said, “Cruz, that’s…Fuck,man. I’m sorry.”
He stared out the windshield, his shoulders rounded forward. “Me, too. Me, too.”
* * *
“The first taskis to show up when the skinny shit isn’t there,” Cruz said as we holed up in our hotel room for the night. I’d splurged, getting us a nice two-bedroom suite just a couple of miles from Hana’s lab. I figured Cruz deserved to sleep in comfort and work out in a state-of-the-art gym after he’d managed to find out where Hana was.
“I’ll go over to her place in the morning,” I said.
“What happens if the boyfriend’s there?” Cruz asked. He dipped his spoon into a weird mashup of cottage cheese and berries, drizzled over the top with honey. Looked like ass to me, but he seemed to enjoy it. Plus, it met the team’s nutrition standards.
“I’ll beat him up and kidnap her,” I joked, though it wasn’t really a joke.
Cruz chewed. “Might come to that,” he said. “But first, send her a text and let her know you’ll be around tomorrow morning and would like to take her to breakfast.”
“I don’t have her number.” I crossed my arms over my chest, glaring at Cruz as if to dare him to make fun of me.
Instead, he shot me a sly smile and pulled a piece of paper from his front pocket. He dropped it in my lap and settled backward, much like a king surveying his lands.
I gaped. “How…”
He waved his hand. “Elementary sleuthing, dear Watson.”
I rolled my eyes at his terrible British accent, but I unfolded the paper and tapped the digits into my phone, happy to have Hana’s number again. Once finished, I set my phone down and raised my eyebrows at him. “I didn’t think you condoned violence off the ice.”
“I don’t, normally, but I don’t like the skinny shit, as you call him.”
“You haven’t even met him.”
He shook his head. “Don’t need to. Know the type. Assholes who think their big brains somehow should push ours around—because we must have littler minds simply because we play sports.”
“Well, my guess is that he has more formal education than we do, and from a top-tier university,” I countered.
“So? You’re smart, Naese.Realsmart. That’s why NASA asked you to come out—you can synthesize all their science-y words and make it so us dumb-jock meatheads can understand.”
I laughed and half-heartedly punched his shoulder. “You’re just as smart as me. You’re the one reading about string theory.”
