“What the hell, Aubrey?” she exclaimed before she got a look at my face. “Holy shit. C’mon.”
She dragged me to her car and shoved me in the passenger’s seat as my cell began to ring. I glanced down and wasn’t surprised to see that it was Luka. The temptation to answer was incredibly strong. I stuffed my fist into my mouth and bit down on my knuckles in the hopes that it would help me from picking up.
“Jesus Christ,” Lexi muttered as she grabbed my phone from my other hand. The voicemail message alert went off, quickly followed by one letting me know that I’d received a new text. “Motherfucker.”
I watched with tears rolling down my cheeks as Lexi powered my phone down and started the engine. She looked towards the building’s door and shook her head before pulling out of the parking lot. We drove around town for about an hour before she seemed to make her mind up and we headed towards her dad’s house. Lexi drove her car into the garage, something she almost never did since she preferred to park in the driveway. She pulled her phone from her pocket and punched in some numbers, staring me in the eyes while she did it.
“Hey, Dad. I wanted to let you know I’m at home with Aubrey. I’m not sure what went down with her and Luka today, but she needs somewhere safe to go. I didn’t want you to worry in case you came home tonight to find us passed out upstairs,” she explained.
I couldn’t hear her dad’s response.
“No, that’s actually perfect. We’ll be fine with the place to ourselves.” There was another moment of silence before she said anything else. “Yeah, I’ll make sure her parents know she’s okay, too. I learned my lesson when Drake and I had our fight last year. I won’t let them worry about her like you did me back then.”
I sighed deeply, relieved at the knowledge that Lexi had everything covered and I could just be.
“Love you too, Dad,” she said before ending the call.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“No,” she growled. “You don’t thank me for this. You’ve got my back and I’ve got yours. This is just us. No thanks needed. Now, let’s get you inside and you can tell me what happened.”
We made our way into the house and up to her room. I absentmindedly noticed that Lexi left all the lights off downstairs and made sure the door was locked. Her room faced the back, so if anyone drove by, it would look like nobody was home. I couldn’t help but think that she had done that in case Luka came here looking for me. I didn’t think he would, but I guess stranger things happened.
Lexi tossed me some pajamas from her dresser so I changed out of my clothes and climbed into her bed, pulling the covers over my head.
“Here. Drink this,” I heard a few minutes later. I’d tuned everything out and hadn’t even realized that Lexi had gone downstairs, but here she was now, handing me a glass of wine.
“Thanks,” I whispered before I gulped down about half the glass.
When I raised my eyes, Lexi was staring at me, sitting cross-legged on the edge of her bed, dressed in pajamas while sipping her wine. We sat in silence for a bit, long enough for me to finish mine and for Lexi to fill my glass back up.
“You ready to tell me what happened?” she asked.
“Not really, but I’ll try anyway,” I started. “I got a bit of a nasty surprise when I made it up to Luka’s apartment. Another girl answered the door. One I recognized from the building before. And when I looked for Luka, he was in the shower.”
“Maybe she was there for Jason?” Lexi said, voicing the same thing I’d first thought upon seeing Josie there.
“The thought crossed my mind too, except she’s the one who told me I’d find him in the shower. Plus, I haven’t been able to shake this feeling that he’s been hiding something from me recently. And the only times I’ve ever seen her in the building coincide with when Luka damn well knew I wouldn’t be there too,” I explained further before chugging back my second glass of wine and gesturing for her to fill it up again.
“Shit,” Lexi sighed. “That doesn’t sound very good, but there could be another explanation other than the obvious.”
I thought about it for a few more minutes. Now that I was gone and in a safe place, I could see that she was right. In fact, I highly doubted that Luka was cheating on me after what had gone down with his ex. Plus, I’d just listened to him tell his own mother that his future was with me. Luka wasn’t the kind of guy to say something like that if he didn’t mean it.
“I really don’t think he has it in him to cheat on me,” I admitted. “Even if it looked exactly like that was what was happening, I don’t think he was.”
“Then why did you run?” she asked.
“Because even if he isn’t cheating, he’s still keeping something from me and that’s not good for us as a couple.”
“I agree that it’s not good to keep secrets from your significant other, but you know that sometimes there are things you don’t really intend to hide or are too scared to share. Like, say, flying mile high club flights,” she reminded me, since she’d been hiding something from Drake that had caused their big fight last year.
“I hear what you’re saying, but this is a little different,” I countered. “Whatever he’s hiding from me involves someone else. Someone cute and female. Who he is spending time with alone on what appears to be a fairly regular basis. When he goes batshit crazy if another guy even looks at me. If our roles were reversed right now, I’d be in so much trouble with him that it wouldn’t be funny. Especially since he’s the one who asked for that rule about us not spending time alone with other people so that they won’t get the wrong idea.”
“That’s true,” Lexi admitted, knowing very well how Luka could be with me.
“So how the hell could he have thought this situation was okay?” I asked. “What the literal fuck could he possibly be thinking?”
“I don’t know. The only one who does is Luka,” Lexi answered.
“And I’ll ask him to explain this to me. Later. After I’ve pulled myself back together and am ready to hear his explanation. Because even though I don’t think he’s cheating on me physically with that girl, he trusted her with his secret when he didn’t trust me. And that hurts so damn much,” I admitted before I started to cry again.
“I’m sorry, Aubrey,” Lexi whispered into my hair as she took my wine glass and pulled the blankets up.
I powered up my phone and sent Luka a quick text. I didn’t read any of the ones he sent me and I didn’t listen to his voicemail messages. If I did, I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t be able to resist calling him right now. And I wasn’t ready to talk yet. I didn’t want to lash out at him in anger, but I was so fucking mad right now. Deep inside, I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell that he was cheating on me and that there was an explanation of some kind. But it was pretty damn clear something was going on in his life and had been for a while. Something he had chosen to not share with me and instead had gone to someone else for help. I needed just a little bit of time to wrap my head around that before I would be ready to talk.
“Me too, Lexi. Me too,” I sighed back before closing my eyes tight in an attempt to shut out the whole world. I didn’t want to face this problem tonight. There would be plenty of time for that tomorrow.
Chapter 14
Luka
“Aubrey, please call me back. Josie told me you were here while I was in the shower. I know it looks bad, but I swear to God it is not what you think,” I said, leaving Aubrey yet another voicemail message.
I hadn’t heard a peep from her in the hour since she’d left, and it was killing me to know that she was somewhere out there hurting and it was my fault. Looking back now, I felt so fucking stupid for not coming clean with her about what was going on. If she’d pulled this shit with me, I would be so fucking pissed. Why would I have ever even thought the same wouldn’t be true for her too?
My text alert beeped and I checked my messages, hoping it was Aubrey telling me where to find her.
Aubrey: I’m okay. Not ready
to talk about it tonight. Meet u 2morrow morning?
Things couldn’t be all that bad if she was letting me know that she was all right. That was just like her, too. She was hurt and angry but still took the time to let me know that we would talk about this. I wasn’t happy that she hadn’t waited to talk to me or charged into the bathroom to confront me, but that was because I didn’t want to spend the night with this between us. I was the one who’d caused this problem, and if this was the way she wanted to play it then, that was up to her. Although it still kinda pissed me off.
By the time morning had rolled around, I’d spent the night tossing and turning with all kinds of worst-case scenarios spinning in my head. What if she doesn’t come over this morning? What if she is so angry that she did something stupid last night? What if she tells me that our relationship is over? If Aubrey had been looking for a way to punish me for keeping a secret from her, then she had found a great way to do it. Not knowing what was going on in her mind was driving me crazy.
I got up and made a pot of coffee before sending Jason a quick text to make sure he wasn’t going to be back in town until later today. The very last thing I needed to add to this mess was him showing up in the middle of my talk with Aubrey. Especially since he knew what was going on and had told me that I should talk to her about it. Hell, he thought I was overreacting to the whole thing anyway and that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but I just hadn’t been willing to listen to reason. I just wanted to make it through the next six weeks unscathed, but now, that didn’t look like it was going to happen.
There was a knock on the door right at eight o’clock and I ran to answer it. There she was, carrying a box of donuts.
“Hey,” she whispered, looking at me with tears welling in her eyes as she pushed the box into my hands and walked past me inside. “I didn’t eat anything last night, and sugar sounded good this morning.”
“I can make you some breakfast instead if you’d like,” I offered, hating the thought that she was hungry because I’d made her upset.
She shook her head no in response and my expression fell. “Maybe we can go get lunch later instead?” she asked. “The donuts sound pretty good.”
“Whatever you want,” I promised, relieved that she had suggested lunch because that meant things weren’t as bad as I had imagined them to be.
“I’d love a cup of coffee and for us to sit down and talk,” she replied. “You have some explaining to do.”
I waved her towards the living room and grabbed coffee for both of us. After handing her the cup made just the way she liked it, I sat on the couch across from her since she’d chosen to sit on the chair where we wouldn’t fit together. I considered pulling her up and in my lap for this conversation, but the fire in her eyes let me know that, even though she was here, I wasn’t off the hook yet. Her eyes were rimmed in red, and I knew she’d spent at least part of the night crying. That knowledge killed me.
“Do you want to tell me what the hell is going on, Luka?” she asked before I even had the chance to say anything.
“Yes. Let me start by saying that nothing was going on between Josie and me. She was just helping me out with something—” I started.
“I know you aren’t cheating on me with her,” she interrupted me to say. “But you still broke our rule about being around other people. The one you asked me for because it drives you nuts when I’m near other guys. And I don’t know Josie, so there’s no way she counts as an exception the way that someone like Lexi would.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “I should have introduced you to Josie and explained what was going on weeks ago.”
“So why didn’t you?” Aubrey asked.
I took a deep breath and started at the beginning. “You know I’m here on a hockey scholarship, right?”
Aubrey nodded her head and looked at me questioningly, having no idea where I was going with this. “Yes,” she answered.
“That’s why I picked Blythe in the first place. Because between playing hockey and my grades, they offered me a full ride, which meant my parents could use my college savings to help out my brothers and sisters instead,” I explained. “And then, this summer, I put all that at risk by pushing myself too hard and hurting my knee.”
“I thought it was better now though,” Aubrey said.
I sighed deeply, dropping my head to stare at the floor for a moment before looking back up and into her eyes. “It was better at the start of the season. Or at least I thought it was. Lately, it’s been bothering me again. A lot,” I admitted.
“What does the team doctor say?” she asked me with a concerned expression on her face.
“Nothing, Aubrey. I haven’t told Coach about it, so the team doctor hasn’t checked out my knee since the start of the season when he released me to play,” I answered softly.
She gasped at my response. “Oh, Luka. Tell me you didn’t. You’ve been playing injured? Don’t you know how much damage you could do to your knee?”
“That’s where Josie comes in. One of my friends from back home knows her and suggested I ask her for help,” I said.
“What kind of help?” Aubrey wanted to know.
“She’s in the physical therapy doctorate program and has been doing some sports therapy on my knee. Trying to help me rebuild the muscle and improve my range of motion so it doesn’t bother me so much,” I replied. “She grew up skating so she knows a lot about the sport, and she’s done a really good job with my knee.”
“But couldn’t you have gotten physical therapy if you’d talked to your coach about the problem too?” Aubrey retorted. “Why go to a student when you could have been getting proper care this whole time?”
“At first, I was worried that, if I went to Coach, I’d be placed on the injured reserve list or bumped off the team, and I wasn’t sure what that would do to my scholarship,” I admitted. “I didn’t want to have to make the call home to tell my parents that I’d messed up and needed them to pay for this year.”
Aubrey got up and walked over to sit down next to me. She grabbed my hand and held it in hers. “Your health is more important than anything else.”
“I guess I wasn’t thinking that clearly. Jason tried telling me that it wouldn’t be a problem because it’s my senior year, but I didn’t listen,” I said. “Because the other part of it was that we have a really good chance to make it far in the NCAA Championship Tournament this season. And I don’t want to be on the reserve list because of my knee. I want to be on the ice with my team, doing what I can to get us to the Frozen Four.”
“Jesus, you’re so fucking stubborn,” she growled. “So you decided to keep playing while your coach had no idea your knee was bothering you. Letting a student help you stay in good condition instead of seeing a doctor. But why in the world did you not tell me what was going on so I could be there for you through all of this?”
“Because even though I talked to Josie about my knee and Jason knew what was going on, I was still able to pretend like it wasn’t real in some way if I didn’t talk to you about it,” I confessed. “And I know you, Aubrey. If you knew, there’s no way you wouldn’t have pestered me to death until I gave in and told Coach what was going on.”
She seemed to consider my words for a moment before agreeing with me. “Of course I would have! I still think it’s the right thing to do, but it’s your decision to make. Just please tell me you’re sure that you aren’t risking huge knee problems in the future.”
“I’m actually doing much better now. The exercises I’ve been doing with Josie are really paying off,” I promised. “Does that mean you understand and aren’t angry with me?”
Aubrey rolled her eyes at that. “Yes, I understand. But no, it does not mean that I’m not angry with you.”
“Because I didn’t talk to you about everything?” I asked for clarification. Aubrey nodded her head and made a circular motion with her hand to let me know that there was more to it. “And because of Josie?”
“Ding, ding, ding,” she said sarcastically. “Yes, Luka. I’m hurt that you didn’t choose to share this with me, and I hope, in the future, that you stop and think about it before making the same decision ever again. But I’m royally pissed that you broke the damn rule that you insisted on in the first place, because when we agreed to it, I didn’t even see the need for it. You’re the one who wanted the damn rule and then you turn around and trample all over it.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I agreed. “And I know it doesn’t help, but in my defense, I don’t even see Josie as a girl like that. She’s a few years older than we are, never treated me as anything other than a patient, and the bottom line is she just isn’t you.”
“She’s still cute,” Aubrey grumbled.
“She’s also nice and smart, but she’s not the girl I’m head over heels in love with,” I admitted, shocking the hell out of Aubrey since I’d never said the words aloud before – at least not in English so she could understand what they meant.
“The girl you’re head over heels in love with?” Aubrey repeated back blankly.
I’d finally done what I’d been dying to do since she’d knocked on the door. I pulled Aubrey onto my lap and kissed her on the lips. “I. Love. You,” I told her, punctuating each word with another kiss because I just couldn’t resist.
“You waited until now to tell me that?” she wailed, crying and hugging me at the same time. “In the middle of our first major argument?”
“I’ve actually told you before,” I admitted. “Only I was too much of a chicken and said it in Russian.”
Aubrey pulled away from me and stared into my eyes. “You did?” she gasped. “When?”
“Friday night,” I replied.
A big grin crossed her face. “So that’s what you said right before you carried me off to your bedroom to have your wicked way with me. It sounded awfully sexy, but I had no idea.”
The Blythe College Complete Series Box Set Page 56
