“Lost. Just talked to my dad.”
She nodded, looking sympathetic. “Sorry. I imagine he wasn’t happy.”
“Yeah.” I replayed his abundant criticisms in my head. That I was losing focus. Not showing my worth. Letting that girl get in my head again.
“You know you’re doing fine, right? You lost three games and one of those, you didn’t play in. You have what, fifty other games this season?”
“Seventy-nine,” I corrected. “But yeah, I guess you’re right.” Still, my mind continued to spin. I wasn’t ready to admit that I read the criticism not lodged by my dad, which was also abundant. I didn’t want her to go looking for it. If anything, Violet still had pure opinions of me. I didn’t need to give her any other reasons to want to stay away from me.
And I especially didn’t want her to worry about all the guys on the internet saying she was hot or all the women being jealous of her.
“Hey, I liked the pictures you posted,” she said. “We look cute.”
A smile finally curved my lips. “Yeah. We do.”
“You still didn’t send them to me,” she said. “I had to screenshot your post.”
My stomach dipped, and finally, I felt the cloud around me start to lift. “And what did you do with your screenshots, Dr. Gennari?”
Violet giggled and bit her lip. “Looked at ‘em.”
“Yeah?” I couldn’t stop smiling now. I wondered if we were her phone background. She was mine, where I’d zoomed into the picture of her laughing and looking at me.
Presently, she yawned and stretched, twisting to crack her back. My heart tugged at the familiarity of that habit of hers. “You need to go to bed, pretty girl.”
She closed her eyes but kept her smile on. “Probably. I’ve got a little bit of hockey romance to read before bed though. Want to stay on with me and read for a while? Or do you have somewhere to be?”
There’s nothing I could have chosen that would have been better than watching her read, those drowsy eyes and that messy hair the most beautiful sight at the end of a shitty couple of days.
“Nowhere to be. Let’s read.”
THIRTY-FOUR
VIOLET
OCTOBER | COLUMBUS, OHIO
“Hey, bestie.”
I groaned into the phone. “I swear, every time you say that, it means something worse than before.”
“No, nothing new. I’m just calling to check on you,” Kitty said. “We haven’t had a chance to talk since Picturegate.”
I poked a chopstick down into the takeout in front of me. I allowed myself an overpriced food delivery to congratulate myself for going out for a run for four whole days in a row. I sat on the floor with my food on my coffee table, having at least the dignity to not stain my couch with a greasy sauce.
“I mean, is it obvious that I’m just his fake girlfriend?”
Kitty gasped. “Violet. No. The fake gag?”
I lolled my head onto the couch cushion behind me. “It’s not a gag. I’m going all in on the ruse. I’m sleeping over at Jeanine Sorrento’s tonight so she, Mara, and I can have a girl party. I’m ingratiating myself with the WAGs.”
“Aww, I love that! I miss Jeanine. I wish I could come.”
“I wish you could too. I’m nervous.”
“I never got to know Mara that well, but you’ll be fine. Sheseemed cool. Jeannie’s great. But stop distracting! Fake dating, Violet? Come on. He’s way too obsessed with you to only want to fake date you.”
I puffed air out of my lips. “Well, okay. Let’s go through pace by pace. He called and said the team needed us to be together publicly. So I said, ‘Oh, like fake dating?’ And eventually, he said yes.”
