Page 77 of The Hanukkah Hoax
“No, but I’ll not wait around for it. I need to go back, get out of the States. I can finish recovering at home, perhaps even faster once I’m away from all this chaos. Hopefully rejoin the lads for the January leg and start to make arrangements to sell my flat come the spring. Finish out the farewell tour of the season Great Britain says they want to throw me and whatnot.”
It was the only course of action left. Start the transition to coaching so he wouldn’t have to think about all he was leaving behind, both on the pitch and in Jersey.
“You are such a fucking coward.” Cal shook his head and brought his beer to his lips, not bothering to meet Alec’s eyes.
“I ruined Marisa’s life, her goddamn livelihood. My face was the one plastered all over her golden ticket, and it all came crumbling down because I thought she’d be ashamed if I confided in her about Phoebe, and then my stupid words hit the Internet and torched the rest of her good reputation. I humiliated her, Cal. What right do I have to stick around? Just so I can cause her more pain? I’m doing the right thing here. The honorable thing. I’m giving her the space she requires to rebuild what I ruined. The last thing she needs is seeing the likes of me showing up to remind her of what she lost and why.”
Cal took his measure with a long, hard stare, then shrugged his shoulder and took another sip of his beer. “Like I said. Coward.”
A fresh coating of rage painted his vision. Was he serious with this coward shit?
Alec shot to his feet, but Cal was already there, his beefy arms a bulwark against whatever aggression his brother saw in Alec’s eyes.
“The reason I say you’re a coward is because you’re allergic to teamwork.”
Alec’s ire paused its trembling assault. He blinked. “What?”
“You heard me.”
He blinked again. “I’m a bloody rugby player. A team captain!”
“And when it comes to your personal life, you’re shit at relationships because you think everyone should exist in a vacuum. That each person has a job, and that job should be executed accordingly. One person kicks, while the other tackles. And that may work on the pitch, where the integrity of the win is determined by roles and responsibilities, but none of that matters when it comes to who you care about. Relationships are not transactional. You either love someone or you don’t, but if you can’t communicate that, how the hell do you expect them to behave? They can’t read your bloody mind.”
Alec was about to say . . . Well, he wasn’t quite sure what, because Cal’s words had wormed their way into the spaces between his simmering emotions.
He hadn’t been in love with Phoebe. He’d always known that, but had he ever really communicated that to her?
No. Instead, he’d strung her on for two years because the illusion of happiness for both of them seemed a fair imitation of the real thing.
But with Marisa . . . Their entire short time together had been nothing but a transaction, a fabricated sort of teamwork based on mutual goals and methods of achieving them.
Except then he’d gone and fallen in love with her, and he’d had no earthly clue how to handle it.
Alec plopped his arse down into the armchair and scraped his hand across his scalp in frustration. “Fuck.”
He’d never bothered to parse out their roles and responsibilities, because for him, he’d do anything just to see her smile again. No transaction. No stipulations. No expectations. Just . . . joy. Every kind look and gesture she gave him had turned into a precious gift, and he’d gone and showed his compensatory gratitude by assuming that he needed to keep the unpleasantness of his life away from her as much as possible.
He’d assumed she couldn’t handle it or that she shouldn’t need to, but that had never been Marisa. That glorious woman had shown him nothing but courage, and if he could ever hope to see her again, even for one moment, he’d need to show her the same.
“I’ve got to, um . . . Shit.” His mind sprinted in a thousand different directions, desperately searching for the right one that would lead him back to her. Anything. He’d say anything, do anything, to show her what she meant to him, to show her that?—
“Ow! Hugh! Goddammit!”
The beast, lost in the joy of tearing something to shreds, backed his big arse right into Alec’s calf, knocking his knee into the coffee table. Cal already had the right of things, as he’d had the foresight to lift his beer in the air and back out of the wrecking zone, all the while laughing at Alec’s misfortune, the bastard.
Alec rubbed his aching knee and leaned down to Hugh, who had an assortment of not-rope-toys in his muzzle. “Give it here. Whatever you’re destroying deserves a proper burial.”
But what Alec plucked from Hugh’s jowls instead were several sheets of his contract that had fallen on the floor, along with a small bit of paper that was thicker than the rest and still hanging on for dear life on the dog’s fang.
Alec extricated the discovery from the canine tooth it was hooked on and stared at the punctured paper.
It was a business card. The one Martin Penhaus had slipped him at the Crystal Christmas Ball. The one he’d planned to pass to Brennan as a simple courtesy, but hadn’t thought anything more of.
But as he fingered the jagged edges of the unassuming scrap, the ripples of an idea began to take shape.
One that would only work if he got his arse in gear right the fuck now.
Alec tossed Cal his phone. “Pull up flights to England for me, will you? Whatever the soonest feasible one is.”
