Page 4 of Thunderstruck
My steps pause. While I’m glad to hear her voice, there’s something strange in what she just said. “You’re in California.”
“And sitting on your couch. The match ended almost an hour ago.”
I smile, which is a rare occurrence lately, and pick up my pace. I live too far from the stadium to actually walk the whole way, but I have a new pep in my step. “If I had known you were coming to the States, I would have headed out sooner.”
“Are you making friends with your team?”
“I’m not seven.” But I know she won’t take my deflection, so I reluctantly add, “And no. I’m not.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not having this conversation with you, Peach. I’m going to hang up so I can…” My words drop off when a sleek black car pulls up to the curb next to me. A door opens and closes, then the driver, dressed in a fitted suit and wearing a chauffeur’s cap, moves to open the back door for me and fixes me with a steely-eyed stare. “I’m guessing this is you?” I say into the phone.
“If you refuse to use your vehicle,” Freya replies, “the least I can do is offer mine.”
I sigh, but I can’t argue. I tend to get in trouble if I’m behind a wheel, so I avoid it whenever I can. “Thanks,” I murmur, speaking both to Freya and to her driver. “See you in a bit.”
By the time I reach my house, my excitement at seeing my friend has been dimmed by the exhaustion that always sets in after a match. When I made the switch from football to rugby, I figured the wear on my body would be similar outside of the fact that there’s no padding in rugby. Quarterback to scrum-half is a relatively even trade role-wise, but it turns out rugby doesn’t have the same ebb and flow as football. I’m on the field pretty much from the first second to the last with only a fifteen-minute break in between halves. It can be a brutal eighty minutes of gameplay, but I love it.
At this point, rugby is one of the few good things I have.
Nodding to Freya’s latest bodyguard standing on my porch, a stony looking man with a bushy mustache, I step inside my front door only to be mauled by a blonde in heels. I grunt, but Freya weighs next to nothing so she’s easy to hold as she embraces me, arms around my neck.
“Congratulations on your win,” she says.
I didn’t miss the wrinkled card she’s holding before she hid it from my sight.
…celebrate the marriage of Sage Morrow to Javier Gonzales on Sunday, June Second…
Grimacing, I pry her off of me and keep working my way into the house so I can dump my bag in my room. “You know it’s not nice to snoop, Peach.”
“You put it on your refrigerator. I would hardly call that snooping.” Freya sounds like she was born and raised in upper class London but spent her teenage years on the Scandinavian Peninsula, which makes sense given the location of her island country in the North Sea. But it makes it weirdly difficult to take her seriously when she says informal words likesnoopingin her royal way. “And besides,” she continues, “your vulgar tabloid,Hot Scoop, shared about it half an hour ago.”
I tend to ignore the stupid website, hoping they’ll leave me alone, but I should have known better. Dropping my bag on the floor at the foot of my bed, I return to the front room and join Freya on the couch. “I’m glad you’re here,” I tell her, closing my eyes as I let my body settle.
“I told Derek about Sage’s wedding.”
“I’m less glad you’re here,” I grumble.
Laughing in her ridiculous, goose-like way—the only time she is not prim and proper—Freya rests her head against my shoulder and moves in close. I have no idea why she chose to look out for me after we first met, but I’m not complaining. No matter how busy she is, I can always count on her advice.
“Your friends should know that you are hurting, Cole,” she says as she cradles my arm.
“I’m not hurting.”
But my argument falls flat even before she murmurs, “Lies.”
My friends are all famous in their own ways, and each of us has good reason to hide as much from the public eye as we can. But we don’t like to hide from each other, even if it’s difficult to open up sometimes. Freya knows I don’t mean it when I say Sage didn’t hurt me, and I’m sure the rest of my friends would agree.
I sigh and settle lower in my seat. I’m more tired than I thought. “When did you get here?”
“A few hours ago.”
“You should have gone to Derek’s and gotten some sleep.” Derek Riley, the friend I’ve known the longest and the unofficial ringleader of our group, has a mansion in Malibu with space for all of us, though most of us like our own space when we can get it. Freya, however, usually stays there when she visits, and I doubt she slept on the plane ride over.
She mumbles something, half asleep already, then says, “You needed a friend.”
As much as I don’t want to admit it, she’s right. Now that Sage is for sure moving on and leaving me in the dust, I feel more alone than ever, and that’s not going to change.
