“Yup, okay. Point taken.”
He chuckled and screwed the lid back on the jar as I reached for my water bottle on the nightstand. Empty. Damn it. I always did this—drained it completely in the morning, then forgot to refill it before bed, paying for it at three o’clock in the morning when I woke up parched and had to stumble downstairs in the freezing cold to refill it.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and pushed to my feet. “I’m going to run downstairs. You need a refill?”
He glanced at his half-filled bottle and shook his head. “I’m good.”
The kitchen was lit by the glow of the light above the stove. I filled my bottle at the fridge, the old house completely quiet and still around me.
I was halfway to the stairs when I remembered my phone still in my bag.
I detoured to the front hall, crouching down to unzip the front pocket and fish it out.
The screen showed two missed calls from Carl.
I pushed to standing slowly.
Carl wasn’t the type of guy who called twice and didn’t leave a message.
Shit.
It was one day before the holiday roster freeze. The Marauders had already made some moves. Rhys Tomlinson’s signing two days ago had been the biggest. He was a twenty-eight-year-old offensive defenseman who skated like a berserker with a point to prove who’d been having the best season of his career in Atlanta until he’d gotten into a bar fight with a fan.
He was the kind of player that made someone a handful of years old with an expiring contract start doing math he maybe didn’t want to do.
I tried to talk myself off the ledge. Told myself not to read into the missed calls and mostly succeeded.Until a text message lit up my screen.
Carl
I don’t care when you get this. Call me.
I started to panic.
I didn’t want to get traded.
I knew the drill by now. Lord knew I’d been through it enough times. And I’d gotten good at it. Well, as good as you could get when everything felt like it’d been ripped out from underneath you.
But that was before.
Before I had a house I loved coming home to. Before I had teammates who I loved like brothers. Before I’d kissed Sebastian in the friends and family room tonight, the same way those same teammates kissed their wives and girlfriends. Before I’d spent hours at dinner holding his hand across a table in public because I could do that now.
He was planning on calling a realtor this week. Earlier, we’d joked about which side of the closet would be his, and what furniture he was going to bring up from D.C. He’d taken a job here. For me. He’d chosen Portland, chosen this, and I was about to repay him for that by having to go somewhere else.
My shoulders dropped. I didn’t want to go back upstairs there and tell him. Not after the night we’d just had.
But I couldn’t not tell him either.
I turned toward the stairs, the phone heavy in my hand.
When I stepped back inside the bedroom, Sebastian was still propped against the headboard, but his glasses were off, and his eyes were closed, a book resting in his lap.
“You awake?” I whispered, hoping like hell that he wasn’t.
“Yeah.” He opened his eyes slowly. “What’s wrong?” he asked a second later, his eyes widening as he pushed himself up into a sitting position.
I held up my phone. “Two missed calls from Carl. And a text that came in a couple of minutes ago.”
Sebastian’s gaze dropped to my phone and then moved back to my face. He tried to keep his expression neutral, but his eyes tightened almost imperceptibly, and the muscle in his jaw ticked. “What did he say?”
