I couldn’t hide the sigh that slipped out of my mouth.
“You’ve gotta be ruthless,” he said. “And if you can’t, think back to the night when you knocked Zane cold. You did what you had to do in the moment, right?”
Though I hated to admit it, Levi had a point. The difference was, I hadn’t really met Zane before, outside of the occasional body check and slapping hands during a game.
In those situations, he wasn’t the guy who I’d knocked cold in a bar brawl or the guy who I’d slept with countless times. He certainly wasn’t the man who’d surprised me with his personality and ability to love.
And he wasn’t the guy I could spend my life with.
Yeah, I said that. I’m just being honest about what I thought in the moment. I didn’t say it helped, though. If anything, it would only make the situation that much more complicated.
35
ZANE
Ispent the return flight from Boston trapped in a whirlwind of thoughts. What to tell Jakob, what not to tell Jakob. My boyfriend consumed my every thought while my teammates carried on like the hooligans that they were.
Maybe I should say nothing at all, I thought. Doing zilch had served me just fine up until now. But I’m a realist, not a dreamer. The laws of common sense say you can’t keep up that charade forever. We could pretend the game didn’t matter when in truth it meant everything.
When we reached Buffalo, I headed straight to Jakob’s place and, you know…
Look, we’d both exercised a crazy level of restraint lately and had to let loose sometime. Besides, it allowed me to work off the nervous tension that’d mounted during the flight.
After, we ordered a pizza from La Nova, despite knowing that neither of us needed anything so heavy in our stomachs.
I watched my boyfriend from the corner of my eye, unable to deny how insanely sexy he looked just sitting there, for God’s sake. Even when devouring a slice of pizza, Jakob Martin looked like a god. The sex we’d just had couldn’t quench the fire for himthat burned within me. But I couldn’t let myself keep thinking that way. I needed to focus on the task at hand, which was beating the Larkin Lions in the championship game… which meant beating Jakob Martin, sex god extraordinaire.
“Jakob?” I asked.
My boyfriend kept his eyes glued to the television on which we were streamingWho’s the Boss?. He acted like I wasn’t even in the room.
“Jakob?”
Nothing. Just the sounds of Tony Danza paired with the disgusting noises Jakob made when he ate.
I didn’t have to put up with this, you know. I might’ve made some concession to that lunkhead in the bedroom, but I meant to stay in control of everything else, thank you very much.
I reached over and pinched Jakob’s nipple, giving it a good, hard twist. My boyfriend scrambled out of his seat, nearly dropping his pizza slice on the floor, before punching my arm.
“That get your attention?” I asked.
“What the hell did you do that for?”
“What do you think? If you’d answered the first time, I wouldn’t have had to do that.”
My boyfriend scowled at me like I’d committed an act of treason. Then he fell back onto the couch as if finally ready to hear me out.
“We’ve really got to talk.”
“About what?”
My hands lunged forth, ready to strangle him, greasy fingers be damned. Worse than that, I felt seriously stupid. Like, had I spent months fucking someone this dense?
“The big win,” I said. “We’re going to the championship game. The Riptides, I mean.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Silence settled over us. I waited for him to congratulate me on my accomplishment, but he didn’t. Fair, I guess, considering I hadn’t showered him with praise over the Lions’ advancing to the big game.
