Page 87 of Played
I’m done.
Moments later, I hear the door to the hospital room open and close.
Only then do I let the tears stinging my eyes fall.
Chapter Seventeen
SOLOMON
With a sigh, I sink down into the airplane seat next to the window. I shift, buckling my seat belt, then stretch. My ribs protest from the hit I took earlier in the game against Dallas. I barely feel it. I’ve had worse, and this won’t even be a twinge in a few days.
What hurts more is my shitty playing.
Overshooting passes. Missing goals. Fighting.
It’s been two weeks of this, and, fed up, Coach tore into my ass tonight. I’m not saying it’s all my fault, but I definitely contributed to our winning streak ending in our last game. And again tonight. I haven’t stepped up for my team, for Coach, for me. And it’s killing me.
When I lost Kendra, I found temporary solace in hockey. Being on the ice, immersed in the game I love? It offered me a haven, a place where I could forget my grief, my anger, my pain. I channeled it all into the game.
I haven’t been able to do that this time around.
Which doesn’t make sense. It’s not like Adina passed. It’s not like she doesn’t live and work a half hour from me and Khalil. But for all intents and purposes, she might as well be gone. That’s how distant she is, how far away.
Not from Khalil, though. Just me.
She’s mailed cards, games, and other gifts to my son, staying in contact with him. Even as anger and this heaviness that feels a little too close to grief weigh down my chest, I’m thankful to her for not cutting off my son. She might not want anything to do with me, but she hasn’t disappeared from his life. But that hasn’t stopped Khalil from asking about her. Demanding to know when she’s coming back over to the house to see him, spend time with him.
It chips at another piece of my soul when I have to tell him I don’t know.
I turn in my seat, staring down at the tarmac of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. But I’m not really seeing the wing of the plane, the lights in the air traffic control tower, or the staff loading the last of the team’s luggage.
Images of Adina as she lay in that hospital bed, the resolution and sadness in her pretty brown eyes drowning out the pain from her injury as she held up my phone with the message to leave and not come back.
I can’t lie; I felt like shit. I still do.
Because the truth is when I got Malcolm’s call about her being injured and taken to the hospital, I lost my shit. Terror, agony, and a horror so profound, so deep, I lost the ability to breathe for several seconds. Thought I was having a damn heart attack.
Not again. Not fucking again.
Those words ricocheted off my skull. When I got myself together and left Nate and Caroline’s house at a dead run and jumped into the car, another thought took its place.
I can’t do this again. Ican’t.
After making sure Adina was okay, I planned to break off our ... relationship. Because against my best intentions it became that. When you get excited about seeing someone. When a person trusts you with their body, their pleasure. When you share private thoughts you’ve only confided in very few people. When you allow someone around your child.
It’s a relationship.
And that scared me.
No, I didn’t understand true fear until I got that call from her brother. And I intended to run, like a fucking coward.
But Adina beat me to it, sending me away.
And it’s nothing but what I deserve.
My smart ass called myself setting boundaries before becoming involved with her. As if those boundaries would protect me from getting in too deep. From feeling more for her than a hard dick.
I’ve heard people call me a cocky bastard, and they couldn’t be more right. The hubris of me believing I could police her emotions.
