“Ben.” Her voice threads through the rush of thoughts in my head. “Wait.”
I nod like I heard her. My feet take one step toward the door anyway.
“Ben.” She catches my wrist, not hard, just enough. “Please.”
That word breaks through. My focus snaps back to the room. To her. She looks pale and fierce all at once, mouth set, eyes shiny but holding. She’s shaking. I didn’t see it with Jason in thedoorway and the blood starting in my mouth, but I see it now. She’s trying not to fold.
“Okay,” I say, nodding. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Stay here a second,” she says, already turning. “Don’t move.”
I almost tell her not to worry about me. I almost go anyway. Instead, I stand there with my hands useless at my sides and listen to her footsteps fade down the hall, the bar noise muffled and wrong out front.
Should I go? If he gets in the truck like this… No, he’ll pace. He’s a pacer when he’s angry. He’ll put his hands on his head and breathe like he’s trying not to break his own teeth. He’ll find an empty stretch of sidewalk and wear a groove in it.
The look on his face. I’ve never seen it before, even aimed at someone else. I press my knuckles to the desk until my vision clears.
The door clicks. Paige comes back with a zip-top bag wrapped in a clean bar towel, a handful of napkins tucked under her arm. “Sit,” she says, nudging the chair with her knee.
I sit automatically. The leather squeaks. She folds the towel over twice and presses the cold to my cheekbone. The shock of it startles me initially, then my skin adjusts to it, relieving the pain.
“Hold that,” she says softly.
I do. The numb creeps in and clears my head a little. She wets a napkin at the little sink, wrings it out, and dabs at the corner of my mouth where the split is. “You’re bleeding,” she murmurs.
“It’s nothing,” I say, and this time it’s not bravado; it’s math. Compared to the crater between me and Jason, a little blood is pocket change.
She makes a face that says she knows exactly what I’m doing. “You can think about him in five minutes. Right now, breathe.”
I look at her. Really look. Her hands are steady, even if the rest of her isn’t. Her jaw is set. Her lashes are clumped a little from the way she forced back tears.
The woman pregnant with my kid is patching me up in my own office because my best friend put his fist in my face, and something in me just… loosens.
Not the knot of panic; that stays. Something deeper. The part that wants to blow the hell out of here, find Jason, and force him to talk. It disappears because I have someone else to take care of right now.
I don’t get to make this worse for her. Not after what she just went through with her own brother.
“Are you okay?” I ask. It comes out surprisingly soft.
She huffs a breath that’s almost a laugh. “Define okay.”
“Did he scare you?” I ask, and my grip tightens, making the ice pack creak.
“He wouldn’t hurt me,” she murmurs. “Not like that anyway. I’ll live.” Her mouth wobbles once, and she firms it. “I hate that he looked at you like that.”
“I hate what he said to you,” I say. “He’s wrong, you know.”
She nods, pressing the wet napkin a little closer to the cut, frowning when I flinch. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“Stop saying that,” she mutters, and there’s the smallest spark of her usual heat. It does more good for me than the ice.
Chapter Thirty Three
Paige
Riverton Athletics looks exactly like the kind of place Jason would build—clean lines, glass and steel, a big airy lobby with sunlight pouring through a wall of windows. The doors whoosh when I pull them open, and cool air hits my face, fresh with a faint scent of refreshing eucalyptus.
