“Mhm.”
“And he took it harder than me,” Caleb went on.
I fought the urge to laugh. “Sure. Okay.”
“Just, hear me out, eh?” I was silent, and after a second, he went on. “Something’s going on with Micah. I’m worried. He’s been such an asshole lately?—”
“He’s always an asshole. Literally, that is his whole thing,” I reminded him. The car was rolling to a stop, and I felt on the seat for my cane.
“This is different. Just…if you run into him, can you talk to him? Try and figure out what the hell is going on?”
I groaned. “I have so much on my plate right now. You don’t want to hear about Dad, and that’s fine. But I don’t think you know what I’m dealing with.”
“God, you can be so selfish sometimes,” Caleb snapped. “Who fucking cares about Dad!”
I said nothing. What could I say? That should have been my attitude, but then Niko’s words rang in my head. My dad was a person, and he was dying. He deserved some kind of dignity, even if Caleb and Micah were too stubborn to accept that.
“Micah is a grown-ass man. If he needs help, he knows where to find me. Now, I have to go. I’m at the arena.”
He hung up before I could, which irritated the fuck out of me, but I put my phone in my pocket, then stepped out onto the curb and waited for someone to fetch me.
“Matty,” came a voice before he touched my wrist. His voice was so damn soft, which was wild because from what I knew, he used to be one of those Alaskan oil rig dudes before he was drafted by Seattle.
I was pretty sure you couldn’t be a soft-spoken marshmallow on one of those rigs.
“Hey, bud. How’s it going?”
“Nervous.” He was always nervous. I heard him tap his cane tip on the sidewalk, an anxious tic he’d developed whenever we hit the road. “Salem’s going to be a breeze though, right?”
I snorted. “Yeah. Well, Micah’s a fucking beast in the net, but they haven’t made playoffs in about three years. From their stats so far, they’re not making it this year either.”
“New York though…”
“Just breathe,” I told him as he began to walk us toward the bus. I could hear the engines hissing and groaning just above the chatter of the guys. “It’s early in the season. No one’s going to be aggressive right now.”
“No. I get it. Sorry.”
I wanted to be a better friend. To comfort him more. To try and understand his anxiety, even though it had never been my own lived experience. But I was distracted and stressed. Nikos and Killian were managing my dad, but I hated being away.
Right now, they were on a mission to find any and all medical documentation so when I got back, I had some idea of who to speak to and where to go to handle my dad’s case because the man had to have been in treatment at some point.
But I didn’t know my way around my dad’s place, and even if I did, I still wouldn’t have been able to read any of the shit my mom left behind.
“Fuck. I should check her house,” I muttered to myself.
Matty froze. “Huh?”
“Ignore me. Thinking out loud.”
I shoved my thoughts aside. I needed to get my head in the game. This was no time to fuck off and worry about other shit. Everything would be waiting on my doorstep for me when I got home.
“Fucking finally,” came Tucker’s voice as we approached. “I was in a half panic and calling up Metzger to gear up.”
“Oh, fuck you,” I snarled. We didn’t have a farm team goalie, so right now, the PPHL was pulling from their community leagues, and fucking Metzger was the dickhead they called whenever our backup goalie was out.
I hated that douche.
Every goddamn roadie we went on, the fucker ended up getting kicked out of the post-game bar for groping a server and pretending like it was an accident because he couldn’t see. The shithead had one fully functional eye and played in the net blindfolded.
