He blew out a heavy sigh. “I have feelings for her, okay? It’s not that simple.”
“You’re an accomplice to a crime,” I snapped, placing my glass in the dishwasher.
I had always suspected he had a crush on Jill. But this ran deep. So deep that he was compromising his morals and ethics, and potentially hurting one of his friends—and teammates—for her.
As for Jill, she’d always been self-centered. But this was low, even for her.
“What about you?” Derek’s expression turned harsh. “Carter?”
“I didn’t know he had a girlfriend.” I cocked my head. “What’s her name?”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
My skin prickled at his tone. Of course I knew. I just didn’t care.
He added, “Carter is one of our worst enemies, B. Me, the whole team.”
“Oh, grow up,” I said. “It’s just hockey.”
“Hockey is one of the most important things in my life. You don’t even respect that anymore.”
“You’re literally screwing your friend’s girlfriend, and you’re giving me grief about a consensual relationship between two single people?” I asserted, throwing a hand in the air. “And for what it’s worth, Chase has been ten times nicer to me than your best buddy Luke ever was. Or you lately, for that matter.”
“I know I’ve been a shit.” He sighed again, shaking his head. “I’ve been so preoccupied with this Jill stuff that my head has been up my ass.”
I crossed my arms over my pink pajama top, leveling him with an icy glare. “I’m glad we can agree on something.”
“I’ve been avoiding everyone because I’m scared it’ll come out.” His tone was forlorn, like he wanted me to feel sorry for him, but he was the creator of his own problems. It wasn’t like him to play the victim like this.
“As you should be,” I said. “Why doesn’t Jill break up with Eddie? Are you scared it’ll mess up his game?”
As ridiculous as it was, hockey came before everything else for the team, even personal relationships. It was totally within the realm of possibility that they’d cover this up to preserve their goalie.
“It’s more complicated than that.”
I arched an eyebrow.
Derek glanced over at the stairs again, leaning in closer and lowering his voice. “Last time she tried to end things with him, he threatened to kill himself.”
My stomach lurched. I blinked, trying to process the details. “That’s messed up.”
“I know,” he muttered.
Though as terrible as it was of me to think, part of me wondered if it was true. If this intel came from Jill, it likely couldn’t be trusted. She was playing puppeteer with my brother like a pro.
“If that’s true, he needs help.” I wiped at the countertop in front of me. “Her staying with him is only fueling the problem.”
“I know,” he said again, defeated.
I studied his face in the shadowy light. Our mother’s eyes, our father’s nose, hair the same color as mine. Never once did I think he would be capable of this.
“I don’t even know what to say to you right now,” I told him. “I’m beyond disappointed. This is wrong and you know it.”
“You aren’t going to tell anyone, are you?”
“No.” I shook my head. “But I hope you wise up and do the right thing. I’m going to bed. Lock the door behind you, please.”
After we texted Monday evening, Chase sent me a copy of his essay and scammed me into coming over to help him with it the following day. And by scammed, I mean he was both incredibly charming and insufferably persistent until I relented. In other words, impeccably on-brand for him.
That’s not to say I minded. But that was a whole other ball of hockey stick wax.
Plus, it was a nice distraction from my rapidly disintegrating social life and the new Derek-Jill revelation.
That’s how I found myself in Chase’s bedroom for the second time, albeit under dramatically different circumstances. A bedroom that smelled of the delicious lingering leather-vanilla scent of his cologne. Had he applied said cologne before leaving to pick me up?
Combined with my three outfit changes while waiting for him and the sparkly pink lip gloss I swiped over my lips on my way out the door, there were some major questions as to what, exactly, we were doing.
But I wasn’t ready to unpack that yet.
I perched on the end of the bed across from the computer desk, rifling through my backpack for the printout I’d marked up with my suggestions. Chase faced me, straddling the computer chair, and turned his red Falcons baseball cap backward, then rested his arms on the seatback.
“I made a few edits.” I handed him a copy of his paper with my corrections and suggestions marked in red ink. Using track changes within Word would have been less work for both of us, but this way he had to do more heavy lifting by inputting the changes manually, rather than accepting them all with one click of a mouse button. While I didn’t mind helping him, I wouldn’t enable him, either.
Chase scanned the front page, then glanced back up at me with his dark eyes wide, like a deer in headlights. “Holy shit. I didn’t think it was that bad.”
“It’s not. You’ve got some good insights, and the conclusions are well-supported. It’s just a little…jumbled.”
“That sounds like a candy-coated way of saying it sucks.”
I shrugged. “My rough drafts are messy too. You have to revise and rewrite to polish a piece.”
“Ugh.” He folded his arms over the back of his chair again and hung his head, sighing dramatically. His forearms flexed, veins tracing their length. I watched, mesmerized, for a split second. Since when had I developed a thing for forearms? And had his hands always been that big?
“That sounds like so much work.”
“That’s sort of the point of schoolwork, Carter.”
Chase was a top-notch grinder—one of the grittiest players on the Falcons, known for his physical gameplay. He made life hell for our defense, cleared bodies out of the way for snipers to score, and won puck battles more often than not. For someone who was a powerhouse on the ice, he was awfully lazy when it came to school. He was intelligent, that was obvious; he just needed to apply himself.
“Not gonna lie; it’s incredibly hard to give a fuck about any of this knowing it won’t matter down the road.”
“It matters now,” I said. “I thought you were on probation.”
“I am. Dicks.” Chase rolled his eyes.
“What if you need to finish your degree later? You never know. You could get injured or something.”
“If that happens, I’ll have bigger problems than the lack of a degree. I’m basically unemployable in any other capacity.” Chase raised his dark eyebrows. “Can you picture me wearing khakis and working in a cubicle, James?”
“No,” I admitted. It was so ill-suited to him that it was almost comical.
“And let’s face it,” he said. “I’m way too corruptible to be a cop. So, for the greater good of society, help me polish this turd of a paper and keep my grades up enough to stay on the team. I have to get signed. It’s that or homelessness for me. There is no in-between.”