I sink into the nearest chair and continue to chug the beer. Rosie scurries to get me another.
“I hope he skates headfirst into the boards,” Callie rants, and cracks a new beer of her own.
“He’s not playing right now,” I mumble. “He’s injured.”
Callie slams her beer on the table so hard I’m surprised the bottle doesn’t break. “Why do you know that?”
“Because it’s all over the damn news,” I explain defensively, and feel my cheeks getting red. “I live in freaking Seattle, remember?”
“Yeah, unfortunately, I do,” Callie retorts as she twists a lock of her light brown hair around her finger. “I still don’t know how the hell you two ended up in the same city.”
“Sea-Tac Sports Therapy offered me the best internship,” I remind her, and it’s a fact. I’d done my undergraduate degree in kinesiology at the University of Arizona and continued into a two-year graduate program in physical therapy. The final stage involved an internship at a rehab facility or hospital. The only paid one I was offered was in Seattle. Two weeks after I moved there, Jordan Garrison was traded from the Quebec City Royales to the Seattle Winterhawks. Life liked to shit on me like that.
“What’s got him sidelined?” Callie asks with an evil grin. “Chlamydia? Gonorrhea? Syphilis?”
I smirk at her dark humor. “Broken ankle.”
“Good. I’m glad he’s injured,” Rosie says hotly, but it’s forced. The girl doesn’t have a vindictive bone in her body. “I hope he doesn’t play for the whole season.”
“Can we just change the subject?” I beg, running my fingers through my long hair and tugging absently on a tangle.
“Fine,” Callie relents, and sags in her chair as if the fight has physically left her. “Rose, let’s make a voodoo doll with his face on it after she passes out.”
“Ha-ha.” I roll my eyes at her as Rosie chuckles.
It’s past midnight. We had all said good night and gone upstairs to our teenage bedrooms over an hour ago, but the room spun every time I tried to lie down. And so here I am in the dark, in the kitchen, staring at the goddamn countertop where it all began.
I wonder if he really told Donna he was thinking about me. I wonder, if he really said it, if he meant it. Is he just thinking about me because my cold, emotionally vacant grandmother died? Is that the first time he’s thought of me in a while? Years? Probably. God, I wish I could say this was the first time I had thought of him. Or of this countertop.
I run my hand over it again and feel that familiar sharp pain in my chest. I’m too drunk to fight it, so I let the memory take over.
Chapter 3
Jessie
Six years ago
So, have you lost it yet?”
I stare at Callie, horrified.
“First of all, shut up!” I hiss, and glance around to see if anyone heard her.
Luckily the party is a total rager. The music is loud, everyone is talking animatedly among themselves. Some drunk girls from my class are dancing on the Echolls’ dining room table, attracting the attention of most, and a boisterous game of quarters is going on in the kitchen. Thankfully, no one is paying attention to my sister’s blunt inquiry about my virginity.
“Second of all,” I continue, plopping down beside her on the couch. I lean toward her ear so I can be as quiet as possible. “You just saw me in the kitchen ten minutes ago. Of course we haven’t…yet.”
Callie shrugs and sips the vodka-infused pink lemonade in her red plastic cup. “Ten minutes is a long time for an eighteen-year-old boy. Trust me. I know.”
I have nothing to say to that. She does know. Callie lost her virginity four months ago to a guy who works at the Trinity Community College bookstore. She and our friend Amber liked to hang out there and pretend they were students.
Callie was very different from me. Where I had thought and rethought and over-thought every aspect of what I wanted my first time to be like, Callie had made the decision on a whim. She didn’t care if she ever saw the guy again. In fact, she didn’t want to see the guy again. Steve, the guy, had tried to see her again, calling the house a couple of times. but she always made me say she was out.
“He was nice and cute and it was sweet,” she had told me. “I don’t want to ruin that by getting to know him too well. Besides, he’s an education major at a community college. He’s going to end up teaching at our high school or something, and I am not staying in this craptastic town for the rest of my life.”
So, whereas my sister gave it up and moved on, I had been dating Chance Echolls for almost a year—ten months and eleven days to be precise—and had just recently decided it was time to take that ultimate step. It was a long time to wait, at least in Callie’s opinion. I’d thought Chance was cute ever since I first saw him, when I was nine, but if he had felt the same about me, he hadn’t shown it until ten months ago when he’d shown up at the local hockey arena where I was working at the concession booth and asked me on a date.
Callie said, if she were me, she would have done it with Chance on that very first date. But I needed more. Chance was special. He was different. And he wanted me. This shocked the entire town, I’m sure. On top of being a hockey phenom, which wasn’t uncommon in our small town, actually, because every boy played hockey, Chance was also the youngest son of the mayor and his prestigious lawyer wife. Unlike the handful of other local boys who were good enough hockey players to realistically entertain the idea of making a career out of it, the Echolls boys would not skip college and throw themselves into the NHL draft right out of high school. Scholarship or not, people like the Echollses went to college. Chance spent just about every weekend of this year, our senior year, visiting schools across the country. Michigan State, Bowling Green, Boston College, Vermont—every school in the US that had a first-rate hockey team. He would go to college wherever he wanted. His life was, and always would be, very different from mine.
My sisters and I were from a family that was also renowned in Silver Bay, but for very different reasons. My dad had grown up in Silver Bay. The city’s best hockey player and biggest troublemaker. No one was surprised when he was drafted first round, first pick by the Sacramento Storm. He left his high school girlfriend behind, and when he came home that summer, after scoring the winning goal in the Stanley Cup final, he met his firstborn—me. People who know my parents say my father had always loved my mother and that when he married her that summer, it was out of love, not duty. I guess my sisters could be seen as proof of that. Either that or he just kept repeating his mistakes.
My father’s fabulous NHL career ended prematurely when he celebrated too hard after a win and drove his car through a guardrail and into a ravine. He didn’t die, but he broke his leg in four places, and his career was over. Silver Bay’s golden boy was now its biggest disappointment. He continued to drink, never really held down a job and blew through any of the savings we’d had. Eventually my mom left him. I remember Rose cried about it, but Callie and I didn’t. We were old enough, even at six and seven, to realize that we’d all be happier without him. We started over in a one-bedroom apartment in San Diego. Mom worked as a waitress. No health benefits, so she ignored the cramps and pain…until I found her collapsed on the bathroom floor.
Three months later, the cervical cancer took my mom’s life. I felt like my heart was shattered, and for the first time in my young life, I knew what real fear was. We were alone. We had no one to protect us, no one to love us. The State of California was unable to find our father but did find our paternal grandmother, Lily. She showed up, got us out of foster care and flew us back to Silver Bay, Maine. Yeah, people in this town knew exactly where I had come from, and probably figured they knew where I would end up: nowhere. Especially not with Chance Echolls. So I took it slow. I wanted to make sure it was real and solid, so I didn’t add “tramp” to the list of adjectives people in this town could use to describe me.
“So, it’s almost midnight,” Callie says, looking at
her watch. “Are you going to make this happen or what?”
“I can’t find him,” I say, not afraid to show my frustration. “I thought he said he was going out to the driveway to play ball hockey with some of the guys, but he’s not there.”
“I saw him go upstairs a while ago,” Callie tells me, pointing to the staircase. “Maybe he’s in line for the bathroom.”
I take a deep breath and she smiles, giving me a shove. “Remember, no one is saying you have to do this. Not tonight and definitely not with him.”
I raise a warning eyebrow at her. “Don’t start.”
She sips her beer and shrugs her shoulders. “Look, I’m just saying, if he’s worth it, he’ll wait.”
“You’ve been telling me to go faster for months and now you’re saying slow down?!” I give her a hard stare, but she just shrugs. “Well, think what you want, but I can’t think of another person I would rather be with.”
“What about Jordy?”
“What?!” I say this so loud our friend Leah and Jordan’s younger brother, Cole, stop playing tonsil hockey on the couch across from us stop and look over.
Callie politely waits for them to go back to making out before she responds.
“I’m just saying, you and Jordan are really close,” she laments, refusing to look me at me. She doesn’t want to see the complete disdain in my eyes. “You guys really care about each other.”
“He’s with Hannah,” I remind her flatly.
“Hannah is a waste of viable organs,” Callie replies bluntly.
I can’t argue with that so I just shrug. I’ve come to accept Jordan’s relationship with Hannah even if she hasn’t accepted my friendship with him. It was a big bone of contention between us for the first few months they were together. Jordy and I even stopped talking for almost a week. But I couldn’t take how it felt to be without him in my life. It was too painful. And he must have felt the same way because he showed up in the middle of the night one night and we talked it out. He promised to try not to let Hannah keep us from being friends, and I promised to stop bitching about her. It was incredibly hard though, especially lately. The two of them were in this dramatic, ridiculous on-again, off-again phase right now. Well, Jordan called it a phase. I thought it was just Hannah being her true, high-maintenance, melodramatic self.
To be honest, not that I would ever admit it, I had developed a crush on Jordan years ago. I’d known him since I was eight but suddenly, around fourteen, I began to wonder what it would be like to kiss him. By sixteen, my wonder was turning into a full-on crush. I thought about him all the time, and the way I acted around him began to change. I giggled more and I made up reasons to call him and even took the long route to my math class just so I could walk by his locker. And it felt like the way he acted around me was changing too. He stopped teasing me the way he used to about my skinny legs and sometimes I would catch him looking at me in English class instead of sleeping or doodling in his notebook, like he usually did.
But then my grandmother retired and announced she was leaving my sisters and me alone while she stayed at her trailer home in Florida, and I had to grow up, fast. My life became about taking care of my sisters and keeping our secret from the school so no one called the state and put us in foster care. I confided in Jordan, because he was my best friend, and he helped us keep the secret, which made me feel even more strongly about him. He helped my sisters and me any and every way we needed it—fixing the water heater when it broke, shoveling our driveway after snowstorms, even staying over on the couch when the power was out and we were scared to death. And I knew I couldn’t risk altering that friendship so I purposely ignored my feelings. There were other, less risky boys to crush on, like Chance Echolls. And when Jordan began seeing Hannah, it stung because I realized the crush was probably one-sided anyway.
“I’m going to find Chance,” I tell my sister, and she nods, looking resigned.
I stand up and she grabs my hand, giving it a squeeze. “Love you, dumbass.”
“Love you too, jackass.”
I start climbing the stairs and see Jordan bounding down toward me. He smiles brightly, creating that adorable dimple on his cheek.
“The line for the bathroom is brutal,” he warns.
“Oh, well,” I say, not bothering to fill him in on my real mission. “Going to play ball hockey?”
He nods. “See ya later!”
When I get to the top of the stairs, the butterflies in my stomach start fluttering wildly. I have no hesitation about this…well, nothing I can’t talk myself out of, anyway. Chance is so sweet and so hot and he cares about me. When I told him I wasn’t ready—when he first tried to “go there” a few months ago—he didn’t even blink. He promised to wait with me so we could have our first time together.
It was hard dating him and hiding our secret. I was constantly lying to him about little things so he wouldn’t know that my grandmother didn’t live at home with us anymore. I wanted to tell him the truth, but I knew that the fewer people who knew, the better off we were. I’d been eighteen for five weeks now, but Lily was still Callie and Rose’s legal guardian so we didn’t feel comfortable telling more than just the Garrison family about our situation. And we didn’t willingly tell Donna and Wyatt Garrison, they’d become suspicious because Jordan was spending so much time at our place and kept borrowing tools and asking his mom to have us over for dinner. Donna figured it out, but she vowed not to tell anyone as long as we let her check on us regularly and we promised to come to her if we needed anything. Jordan’s mom had been my mother’s best friend in high school so she had a soft spot for us and treated us like we were her own.
Despite Callie’s complaining, when I was thinking about applying for guardianship of my sisters and staying in Silver Bay until Rose was eighteen. Callie wanted to keep the secret going and keep living off the meager checks Grandma Lily sent so that I could go away to college. She swore she and Rose would be fine. Even Mr. and Mrs. Garrison thought I should apply to colleges other than the local community college, so I had. But I only applied to schools with full scholarships in sports therapy, which made getting in an even bigger long shot.
No matter what happened with my future, Chance would go away—but we’d stay together. He told me that. He’d promised me. I believed him. If he was willing to stay with me, I had to give him something that made it worth it, didn’t I?
There’s a line for the bathroom, but Chance isn’t in it. So, I wait and twist my hands nervously. I smooth the tiny pale pink cotton sundress I’m wearing. I’m normally not a pink girl—or a dress girl—but Chance said he likes girly girls so I’ve been trying to make an effort to dress more feminine.
I had noticed a lot of the girls at the Silver Bay Bucks hockey games wore high heels and low-cut shirts and lots of makeup. I wanted to show him I could be that way too—minus the makeup. Anything more than mascara and lip gloss made my face itch. And I had opted for flip-flops tonight because Callie, Rose and I had walked here from our house about a mile away.
The bathroom door opens and I smile expectantly, but it’s Luc Richard, not Chance Echolls. I blink, surprised, and wonder where he could be. If he’d been playing ball hockey, maybe he had worked up a sweat. Maybe he’d gone to his room to change.
That would be perfect since I figured that’s where we would end up tonight, anyway. We could go back to my place, since I had already lied and said Grandma Lily was in Boston, but with Chance’s parents gone to Montreal, we didn’t have to.
I walk down the hall to his room. His door is closed so I knock.
“Busy!” he calls out gruffly.
“Chance?” I call tentatively, and put my hand on the door handle. “It’s just me.”
The knob twists in my hand and I push the door open and slip in. The room is dark. I stupidly wonder if his lightbulb burned out. Why else would he be in here in the dark? I reach for the switch and that’s when I hear the swearing.
A girl swearing.
And someone is moving haphazardly through the room.
I flip the switch and the room floods with light.
Chance is standing beside his desk, he’s got underwear on, barely covering his ass, and one foot in the leg of his jeans. In his bed, wrapped in his navy blue comforter, is Amber Maloney—one of my closest friends.
She’s peering at me with wide, terrified brown eyes. The sundress she wore tonight is in a heap next to the bed, and there’s an empty silver condom wrapper on top of it.
I turn to Chance, my eyes flooding with tears.
“Jessica…”
That’s all he says—my name. Because what the hell else can he say? There is no way to lie his way out of this.
I fling the door open and run down the hall, almost knocking over Jordan’s girlfriend, Hannah, in line for the bathroom. She swears at me, perturbed, but I keep moving. When I realize Chance isn’t even trying to chase me, my heart breaks completely in half.
I hear Callie call my name as I land at the bottom of the stairs and run through the living room. I can hear her footsteps behind me, but I don’t stop. I head through the kitchen past Luc and Rose, who are sitting at the table playing cards. Out of the corner of my tear-blurred vision I see Rose jump up and reach for me, but I keep running out the side door.
My flip-flops smack wildly on the driveway as I dodge teenage boys, hockey sticks and a net, and continue for the road. Jordan calls my name and I almost stop. I want to tell him what happened. I want to cry on his shoulder like I have about every other completely devastating event in my life, but I can’t. Not here. Not with everyone around to mock me.
So I keep running. I run the entire way back to my house and then collapse on the porch, sweating, my lungs burning and tears streaking down my face. I lie there on my back in the middle of the porch floor and choke back sobs as I struggle for breath.
One More Shot (Hometown Players #1) Page 3