Flint’s voice breaks, and his beautiful eyes begin to water again. His heartbreak is like a gaping, jagged wound, and I want to hunt down whoever this asshole is who didn’t recognize how amazing Flint is and kick his ass. Twice. Instead, I do the only thing I can do: I slide over and wrap my arms around Flint’s waist and give him another hug. “He doesn’t deserve you.”
His big arms tighten around me. “Probably not.”
“I say focus on the person who sees you for who you really are, and if you love him with all your heart, you can never go wrong.” I squeeze him again.
“I’m sorry,” Flint says, wiping his eyes in that “I’m not crying, just got dirt in my eye” sort of way. “I never meant to start this now. We have a game… But he’s asked if he can come watch, cheer for us, for me, and, well, yeah. I had to shed some weight first.”
He breaks off, his focus snagged by something across the field. And even before I turn to look, I know who I’m going to see.
Jaxon. Of course. Walking across the field with the rest of our team, all of them decked out in the colorful, cheerful jerseys that feel really out of place right now.
I figure I should probably disengage from the hot dragon before Jaxon gets jealous, and I glance up at Flint to share the joke, but his gaze isn’t on mine.
And suddenly I see everything I was too determined not to see before.
Seconds later, when Flint has his trademark goofy grin in place, I wonder how it’s taken me this long to catch on to three very important facts: One, Flint uses that grin as a shield. Two, he lets real emotion break through that shield only when he can no longer contain it—namely when one certain person is around. And three… I swallow the lump in my throat, rub at the sudden ache in my chest. And three, the emotionally unavailable guy he’s giving up on, the one he’s waited so long for, is Jaxon.
74
A Whole New Kind
of March Madness
My newfound knowledge is reverberating in my brain like a gong that’s been hit way too hard as I walk over to Jaxon, a fake smile on my face. I’m focused on him, and on everything I just learned, but the building noise in the stadium makes me realize that while I was talking to Flint, the whole arena has filled up. It’s not time for the tournament to start, but teams are warming up and orders are being picked.
“It works the same way the human March Madness does,” Jaxon tells me as we line up to sign in. “But on a smaller scale. We start with sixteen teams randomly assigned to play each other, and the winners of those games go on to play one of the other winning teams, and we keep doing that until we win or get eliminated. Which means—”
“If we want to claim the bloodstone, then we need to win four games today,” I finish for him, even though I’m only half listening. Most of my brain is still focused on Flint and how just my existence is breaking his heart wide open right.
It kills me, makes me feel helpless in a way that scrapes me raw on the inside. And having to hide what I know from Jaxon somehow only makes it worse.
Especially as he grins down at me. “Exactly. Easy, right?”
I roll my eyes and try to focus on him, for no other reason than to give Flint an extra layer of protection for his feelings. “Sooooo easy.” Yeah, right.
“Not even a little bit,” I answer as my stomach churns with nerves. About the game, about Flint, about everything I’ve learned and everything I still don’t have a clue about.
Jaxon laughs and hugs me close, but that doesn’t stop the nerves. In fact, it only makes them worse because I can see Flint looking at me out of the corner of his eye. But when I try to catch his attention or smile, he ducks his head or pretends to be looking somewhere else.
Eventually, I stop trying, but when Jaxon gets busy talking to Mekhi and Luca, who is on the team behind ours, I bump my shoulder against Flint’s. He looks startled at first, but eventually he grins and bumps me back just as gently.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I’m good,” he answers, and since he isn’t wearing that grin of his—and is instead looking as sincere as I have ever seen him look—I decide to believe him. Or at least not to keep poking at what I can imagine is an unbelievably painful subject.
When we finally get to the front of the line, I realize it’s Uncle Finn who’s checking us in. He gives us a huge smile and hands each one of us a plastic bracelet we immediately slide on our wrists. Macy explained to me last night that these bracelets are charmed to prevent serious injury during an otherwise intensely rough game, so I tug on mine a couple of times, just to make sure there’s no chance it will fall off during the tournament.