Page 90 of Hard to Handle

Me: Fuck you.

I STARE AT THE TEXT. At those two hostile words. At the cursor flashing. The pressure is mounting. I feel the exhaustion everywhere. Just. Fucking. Everywhere.

The suicide drills and the endless shooting challenges he made me perform until late into the night.

No breaks.

No sympathy.

Only the weight of the world on my shoulders. Only the knowledge that I’m the reason Jonah left that night. I was the catalyst who put him in the car and robbed them of his spectacular career.

I’m the mediocre brother forced to live out the dream Jonah no longer could.

Because living for Jonah is the only other thing they have. Even though I’m still alive and have dreams of my own.

And living for someone else is so exhausting, so daunting, so goddamn frustrating.

The cursor blinks.

The same two words I’ve wanted to respond with after every game I’ve ever played professionally.

Two words.

They say so much.

I’ll never fill his shoes.

I’ll never be as good as he would have been.

But I’m me. Fucking me. A man who rose to the challenge and have lived my every moment so that Jonah knows I’m sorry. That I’m so goddamn sorry for what I did that night. For how I lied. For not being responsible. For not being the one who took the keys.

The guilt is why I’ve always deleted those two words.

The guilt is why I’ve never thought I deserved anything—the praise, the accolades, the love.

The guilt is why I punish myself.

But hell if walking away from Dekker yesterday didn’t shoot that all to shit.

Fuck if looking up in the owner’s box and not seeing her there—as I have the past three weeks—wasn’t a blow to my concentration. I thought of the ten other things I should have said to her instead of the one sentence I did.

The hurt in her eyes when I didn’t acknowledge a fucking thing she said.

“You good, Mad Dog?” Callum asks as he walks by. I lean back against my locker, dropping my phone in my lap.

“Yeah. Just . . . that was a brutal fucking game.” I glance at the bag of ice Saran-wrapped to my knee and shake my head.

“It always is. The Bandoliers are fucking thugs.”

“Not going to argue.”

“You were an animal out there.”

I nod and replay the game in my head in the flash of time. All I can see are the shots I missed, the times I was stripped, the bullshit fouls called.

“Meh. I beg to differ, but it’s not worth the argument.”

He checks the bottom of his skates and busies himself before turning to look at me, eyes intense. “She leave?”