“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Good, because I’m not around enough. I’m too busy gallivanting around the country doing my job.”
I threw up my hands. “Which is so much more important than mine, apparently!”
“Never said it was.”
I walked to the door with him trailing. As I grabbed my coat, he took it from me, perhaps determined to hold it hostage. Instead, he surprised me by holding it out so I could put my arms in it.
This is why I did it. This is why I picked a fight.
All these sappy little gestures were binding me to him like he had shot a love dart into my body. In the world of gastropods, love darts were calcified barbs speared by some snails into their mates during copulation. Sounded sweetly primal, didn’t it? Not so much. Research had shown that darted snails laid fewer eggs and lived for three-fourths of a typical snail life.
Malacologists were curious about this evolutionary quirk: why evolve love darts if the mother of your offspring was harmed? The current thinking was that it came down to genetic selfishness. The darts discouraged the mother from mating again. They actually curtailed her life span! Meanwhile the darter carried on their own lineage, spreading sperm willy-nilly and guaranteeing genetic superiority.
Now here was Jason Isner, shooting his dart. I needed to rip that barb out, return to the me I was before I knew him.
Still holding the back of my coat, he pressed his lips to my ear. I waited for him to speak, but all he did was emit a breathy sigh, as if he had nothing to say. Or nothing that would make me see the sense he thought I was lacking. Sense was the only thing I had going for me right now.
I fumbled with the door and pulled it open, which set the alarm off.
Danger, danger, you’ve been darted by a player!
“I-I’m sorry,” I gasped as he input the code behind me. Then I ran, like the coward I was, the echo of the alarm ringing in my ears.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Jason
* * *
I had no idea why I was here.
Okay, I had a scintilla of one. A smidgen. A soupçon. A … fuck, my brain was showing off, trying to impress a woman who didn’t want to know.
“So, how does this work again?” I eyed the iPhone camera setup on the tripod. Connie was adjusting it, then checking the second camera setup, all focused on the sofa and armchair combo in his parents’ basement. Apparently, we were making a podcast.
This held zero interest for me, but Hatch had dragged me here after I refused his offer for drinks at the Empty Net for a fourth time. Or maybe a fifth. Basically, for the last month, I didn’t feel like hanging with my teammates or my family because I was still mad about the doc’s high-handedness.
Now we were on the league’s mandated holiday break, after a great start to the season—20-8—and I needed to make an effort to be sociable with my family.
“It goes like this,” Conor said. “One of us reads an AITD post?—”
“A what?”
“Am I the Dick?” Hatch said. “It’s where the internet goes to solicit the judgment of their peers on thorny moral, ethical, and relationship issues.”
“Then we discuss.” Conor finished his tweaking. “I’ve been doing this with my Motors teammates, and the fans love it.”
He took a seat and opened another phone. How many phones did the kid have?
“You okay?” Hatch asked me.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
He shared a glance with his brother. “Because of that response, right there. You’ve been a bear for the last month. I had kind of assumed that once you got laid, you’d be cuddly Uncle Jason again. Is there a woman problem?”
“Not everything is about women. Just because you’re all loved up and you—” I pointed at Conor. “Have more fan girls than you know what to do with, does not mean that everyone’s got similar problems.”
