Page 97 of The Draft
“You’re not dead?” Scotty assessed the parts of me he could see as he strolled back, now chomping on a crisp, green apple. Where did he get that? He dropped his arm, looking disappointed. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”
“I was about to, but he got a phone call.”
“Convenient,” he said with a quirked lip.
“I’m going to tell him once he’s back.”
“Sure, you are,” he drawled out, taking a large bite of his apple.
“I will. I told you; I don’t care if I get beaten up. This has gone on too long. He needs to know.”
“Party tonight,” Cade hollered as he walked back in the room with an edacious grin on his face. People who didn’t know him as well as me would mistake that look for happiness, but it wasn’t. You didn’t grow up with someone for the better part of eleven years and not know when he was hiding something. Someone pissed him off on that phone call, and he was just masking the problem by partying.
There were a few grumbles, but since no one questioned him, I decided to. “We just finished a game. We’ve got another one in two days. We need to rest.”
With a smirk drawing across his face, Cade said, “We can rest when we’re dead.”
When he looked around the locker room, he realized there was alackluster response to his party idea, so he held up his phone. “Message has already been sent out. There’s a party at the hockey dorm tonight. If you don’t want to be part of it, then you don’t have to come home until we’re finished, which will be tomorrow morning.”
“Asshole,” I said under my breath and grabbed my foam roller, begrudgingly planning on doing my non-post-game stretches. “See you at the dorm when I’m done with this.”
“Wait, you’re going to the party?” Scotty asked, surprised. “I thought you’d be sneaking over to a certain someone’s dorm.”
“I think that certain someone is still sleeping. Besides, last time I wasn’t home for one of Cade’s parties, my door got a hole punched through it. I refuse to let that happen again.”
“You’re almost guaranteeing that outcome if you tell him about Madison tonight.”
I pursed my lips, pushing them out as I thought about it. “You’re right. I’ll feel him out, and if there is something going on with him, I’ll wait until the morning, but that’s it. He needs to know.”
“If you say so.” Scotty couldn’t hide his disbelief, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d been talking a big game for the last twenty minutes but still hadn’t made a move.
That was all going to change tonight.
Chapter 23
No new messages
I sighed because there was still no message from Madison. It’d been over six hours since I’d left her, and I was starting to get concerned. She couldn’t still be sleeping, could she? Gripping my water, I had an urge to go to her dorm and check, but there was no way I was leaving this party anytime soon.
Cade was drunk.
Living up to his party boy reputation, he was standing on the wooden coffee table, shirtless. Drinking a beer via a tube connected to a keg while random partygoers cheered him on, he looked ridiculous, and was far too drunk to think rationally, which was putting me off having to speak to him about anything rational.
I couldn’t leave him alone because I wasn’t sure what he’d do, and I was hoping there’d be a way that I could distract him enough tosomehow lock him in his room, but with every chug of his beer, the possibility was becoming less likely.
Taking a drink of my water, I contemplated whether I should call Madison and get her to come over. Maybe if we were both here together, and he saw how much we liked each other, he’d take it easy on me.
“Stop overthinking.” Scotty shunted my shoulder as he stood next to me. “It makes that wrinkle in the middle of your eyebrows more pronounced, and if it gets any bigger, people are going to start thinking you have a unibrow.”
“Why do you think Cade’s drinking so much tonight?”
Cade was sitting on the table now, and weirdly, Henry was by his side amongst the puck bunnies, looking like a kid brother that was finally getting to hang out with his sister’s friends at a pajama party. He was almost acting like he’d never touched a girl before.
“Are you using Cade’s drunkenness as a distraction to get out of talking to your best friend about the shitshow relationship the two of you now have?”
“What do you mean? Our friendship isn’t a shitshow.”
“You sure? Because Cade’s clearly going through something, but your head is too far up your own ass and your new secret relationship to ask. Gotta admit, if you were my best friend, I’d be hurt.”