It was nearly midnight now. We’d been there for just over an hour. The place was packed with a dozen guys from the roster, loud, and smelled of deep-dish pizza, wet wool, and stale beer. The heat inside was suffocating, a stark contrast to the freezing alleyway outside.
I stood at a sticky high top table near the back, nursing a club soda with a lime that I had been babysitting for forty minutes.
“You boys are boring,” Rockwell grunted, walking past with a whiskey sour in hand. He looked different out of his gear, older, tired, but still built like a tank. “Don’t you drink?”
“Not during the season,” I said automatically. It was the polite lie. The truth was simpler and uglier: I had spent my childhood dragging my father out of bars just like this one. I knew what alcohol did to a Reed, and I wasn’t ever going to let it do that to me.
“Not ever,” Cal corrected from beside me, raising his own glass of soda water in a mock toast.
Rockwell stopped, looking between us. He laughed, a gravelly sound, shaking his head. “Straight edge. God, you kids and your discipline. It’s unnatural.”
He wandered off toward the pool tables where Dante Andrews was losing twenty bucks to Carlos Manta, leaving us alone in the crowd. With so many loud personalities filling the room, nobody was paying attention to the two rookies in the corner.
Well, mostly nobody.
Cal had walked up to the bar, leaning against the counter, looking entirely too comfortable. He was wearing a leather jacket over a grey hoodie, looking like the kind of trouble parents warned their daughters about. And apparently, the warning signs were working.
A woman, a redhead with wild, curly hair that reminded me faintly of the ring announcer, was leaning into his space. She was laughing at something he said, her hand resting casually on his forearm. Her fingers were pale against the black leather, tapping a rhythm that made my teeth ache.
Cal wasn’t pulling away. He wasn’t giving the polite nod. He was smiling. A real one.
My hand tightened around my glass until I felt the plastic warp under my grip.
She’s touching an asset,I told myself, the logic center of my brain scrambling for a professional excuse.It’s unprofessional. We have an early call time.
But I knew that wasn’t it.
I knew nothing about Cal’s life before this, not really. I knew he had a dad he hated. I knew he had adopted sisters. I knew he was good in a ring. But I didn’t know what he looked like when he was actually interested in someone.
She whispered something in his ear. Cal tilted his head, listening, his eyes dropping to her lips.
That was it. The fuse lit.
I moved before I thought. I slammed my half full soda onto the table, splashing water over the rim, and cut through the crowd. I ignored the glare of a guy I bumped into. I didn’t care. I walked right up to them, looming like a thunderhead.
I didn’t look at the girl. I looked directly at Cal.
“We’re leaving,” I said.
Cal blinked, looking at me with lazy amusement. He didn’t look startled. He looked like he’d been waiting for this.
“We’re leaving? Rockwell just ordered wings.”
“Flight’s early,” I lied. Our flight wasn’t until noon. “Let’s go.”
I grabbed his arm, hard, my fingers digging into the leather of his jacket. I dragged him toward the back exit, not waiting for him to say goodbye to his new friend.
He didn’t fight me, but he didn’t hurry either. He let me shove him out into the freezing alleyway, the heavy metal door slamming shut behind us and cutting off the music instantly.
The silence was ringing. The cold air burned my lungs, shocking my system, but it didn’t cool the heat raging under my skin.
“What was that?” I snapped, pacing a tight circle in the snow-dusted alley.
“Socializing,” Cal said, leaning back against the brick wall, completely unfazed. He crossed his arms, watching me unravel. “You should try it sometime.”
“You seemed pretty interested,” I accused, the words tasting bitter on my tongue. “I didn’t know redheads were your type.”
Cal tilted his head, studying me. The single streetlight above the door cast shadows over his sharp features, making his eyes look black.
