Page 34 of Married to Number 22
“Are you okay?”
“My stomach hurts,” I manage to push out as the celebration begins to die. “Too much junk food today. Will you tell your mom that I’ll catch up with you all tomorrow?”
“Yes, but,” she adds as she stands, starts letting me step over her and into the aisle, “are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”
“I’m fine.”
But I’mnotfine—I don’t sound it and she can see that much.
So, when she opens her mouth, I force myself to take a moment, to keep holding those tears back, for my voice to be steady when I say, “I’ll talk to you guys tomorrow, okay?”
And only when she nods do I hurry up the stairs, the sounds of the hockey game below chasing me the entire way.
Thirteen
Aiden
All I haveof her is the contract.
And the knowledge that she lives close.
Because she was staying with her Grams.
But I can’t lie—driving an hour just to see the house with the overgrown bushes leading up the walk and the front lawn looking like it needs a serious watering doesn’t bode well for solving the perplexing problem of the tornado that is Luna Maybelle.
Evie Maybelle took great pride in her garden.
And Luna spent hours in the yard helping her tend the planter boxes, pull the weeds, trim the edge of the grass to almost laser perfection.
Now it seems…not unloved exactly. An afterthought? A burden that’s become too much for one person? Forgotten?
I’m not one hundred percent sure.
I just know it doesn’t feel right. So much of this shit doesn’t feel right.
Which is almost comical considering the high I was riding last night—we won by three goals—one of which I scored myself and two others that I had an assist on.
And Luna saw…
One of those assists before she left like the hounds of hell were chasing her, nipping at her heels.
At least according to Carrie.
And now my mom is beside herself, thinking that it’s something she did—for example, force-feeding Luna pastries in order to put meat on her bones—so she’s been blowing up my phone with ever more fretful texts.
Until, I lied to her and said that Luna had called and she wanted to meet up.
That calmed the worst of the stress, gave me time to Google map the shit out of Rockfield, trying to remember the exact street that Luna’s grandma used to live on.
It’s been a decade since I was here, and that was only a couple of times.
Occasionally we hung at my house, but mostly, Luna and I hung at the rink.
Considering that she and I lived and breathed our sports.
Which begs the question—why did she stop skating?
Once, it was everything to her.
