Page 31 of Crazy Pucking Love
Maybe—especially now. But she wasn’t better off without me.
“You kept her out of trouble as long as you could,” Hudson said. “At some point, she needed to make her own decisions, and she did.”
“Bro, she lost her mom. And you know hard it is back home.” You could say that addicts moved to the rough neighborhood Hudson and I came from, but I’d make an argument that living there also turned people into addicts, because they needed the escape. Maybe it was an excuse, but it was also the truth.
Back when I was with Jazmine, I kept her from getting too deep into all that shit. Her mom’s boyfriends were a lot like the boyfriends Hudson’s mom had—alcoholic, junkie losers who turned violent on a dime.
I first met her in junior high, and she lived close enough to us that we started to walk home together. One afternoon she confessed she was scared to go home because of her mom’s boyfriend, so I told her to come home with me. We became friends after that, and I did my best to protect her from everything I could.
At the beginning of junior year, when I couldn’t stop thinking about kissing her, I decided to just do it, and we crossed over from friends to boyfriend and girlfriend. Hudson jokingly referred to her as my ball and chain—not that she’d found it particularly funny—but I’d never felt that being with her was a burden. We were each other’s firsts, we went to prom together, and she spent so many nights at our dinner table that my mom automatically set a plate for her.
When I told Jazmine I was considering applying to colleges with the hopes of getting a hockey scholarship, she told me to go for it. She sat in my bedroom, rewarding me by losing a piece of her clothing with every page of the application I filled out.
I had a few offers, but Boston was the best, and she said that meant I had to go there. But she made me promise that we’d make it work, and I did, because I couldn’t imagine anything could tear us apart.
Long distance was hell, and we barely survived the first year, but by the end of the summer, things were good again. For the most part. Her friends were worse than they were when I left, and arguing about them caused some friction. By the time the summer came to a close, I felt guilty about how excited I was to escape the crap that went down in our neighborhood and get back to Boston, especially when she cried and made me promise again that we’d make it work, and that we’d schedule more visits.
My sophomore year of college was different. Instead of watching the game from the sidelines with little game time, I played as much as I sat the bench. Partway through the season, Jazmine’s mom was struck by a car on her walk home from work.
Jaz begged me to come home, but I’d committed to hockey, and I could sense I was a few great games away from being bumped to a starter. So I told her I’d be there as soon as I could.
After a few days in the hospital, her mom died. And I couldn’t make it back to the Bronx until spring break, three whole weeks after her mom passed away. Well, I told myself I couldn’t have made it sooner, but I’d stayed because of hockey.
When I got home, she was a mess. Instead of being happy I finally made it, she was angry, not to mention completely wasted every waking minute. I thought it’d pass in time—that it was the grief.
I couldn’t even try to fix it, because I had to go back to school. Back to hockey. When I called to check in, we had that last ugly fight, and I couldn’t believe we’d gone from two people in love to two people who shouted at each other.
And as her sobs had been tearing me up inside, her voice so raw with pain that it echoed deep in my chest, she delivered those last parting lines that ended us for good. “You promised we’d work, no matter what, but when I really needed you, you weren’t there for me. You broke my heart, Dane. You brokeme.”
That next summer, I saw how true that was. She was so strung out all the time that she didn’t even seem like the same person. Love had been replaced with hate, and she’d spiraled, hard.
“Are you getting out of the car?” Hudson asked.
I jerked myself out of the past, but the self-loathing burning its way through me remained. And it only made me more determined to keep from making all the same mistakes with Megan. Because if I hurt her the way I’d hurt Jazmine, I’d never forgive myself.
Chapter Fifteen
Dane
I stared at the text from Megan as the rest of the guys moved around the locker room, packing up after another hard practice that left my legs and arms feeling like noodles—Coach hit us extra hard today before giving the team tomorrow off to prepare for Sunday’s big game.
Suddenly I had this image of me standing up on one of the benches, clearing my throat and asking, “How many days does it take to forget how amazing it feels to have a sexy girl straddling you first thing in the morning? Asking for a friend…”
Yeah, that’d go over well, especially with sexy girl’s brother a few lockers away.
Thanks to my class load threatening to bury me this week, I had to cancel our Monday plans and settle for having Ox help me study in the weight room. He was ruthless, too, not stepping up to spot me until I gave him the right answer. I’d nearly dropped the barbell on my chest.
My insomnia was back with a vengeance, like the fact that I actually slept the night Megan stayed over pissed it off, and I missed the hell out of my study buddy. I wanted the explore-Boston-together buddy, too. I was trying not to think about adding kissing into the mix—putting our outing off for five days was at least supposed to help that desire fade.
It hadn’t.
Tapping on the screen of my phone illuminated her text.
Megan:I was in a comic book shop today and waved because I thought I saw you.
At first I was confused, but then I saw the picture of theThorcomic right above her words. The hammer-wielding God was about to be devoured by some giant green snake thing.
How could I not want to kiss her when she sent me messages like that? Maybe if I actually was a superhero, I could resist her.
