“Tell me about it.” Marti stepped in close and lowered her voice. “So you and Zach, huh? What’s going on there? Wait.” She held up her hand and shook her head. “Don’t tell me. It’s none of my business. Sorry, bad habit. My family is a little in everyone’s business, which is really annoying when your boyfriend of the moment works for your dad. That’s not awkward at all.”
Fallon was laughing for real now. Just the idea of dating one of the probies in her dad’s firehouse made her want to hurl. And the questions from her mom would be intense, to put it mildly.
“Now that, I can totally understand,” she said once she caught her breath. “My mom is like a one-woman Spanish Inquisition.”
“We must be related somewhere along the family tree, and as such, you need to take this.” Marti reached into her bag and pulled out a small card. “Good for one mani-pedi and a personal styling session at Dylan’s Department Store.”
Her stomach, still a little sore from laughing, sank like a lead weight. Here, female human who obviously doesn’t understand this whole how-to-be-a-real-woman thing, let me fix that mistake, the card practically screamed at her.
“Thanks, I’m not really…”
“Oh no, take it.” Marti waved the card in her direction. “It’s the friends and family card, and I have a ton of them because Dylan’s is an Ice Knights sponsor and they give a ton of these freebie cards to the team. It’s not like my dad is going to go do a mani/pedi, even though he could totally use one, so they end up with me. You never know when you’ll want a fun girls’ day and—” Her face fell, and she crumpled the card in her hand. “Oh my God. I just realized what I did.” She closed her eyes, tilted her chin skyward, and let out a sigh before focusing on Fallon again. “I am the queen of saying the wrong thing the absolute worst way. I did not mean that you needed a makeover. Shit. After all of the comments you’ve been getting online.” She paused and seemed to register what must have been a look of total confusion on Fallon’s face because that was what she had swirling about inside her head.
Comments?
Marti grimaced. “And I did it again. Because you haven’t seen today’s comments. And now you’ll go looking for them, or at least wonder about them, and it’s all because I’m a giant dumbass with six toes on my right foot. Thanks, Dad.”
Something clicked in Fallon’s head as she looked at the dark-haired woman with the sixty-mile-an-hour mouth. “Dad as in Coach Peppers?”
“Yep.” Marti nodded. “Of all the creepy things to pass down to your kid, six toes has to be the weirdest. I don’t know. Maybe a third nipple. But I’m off track. Please forgive me. I didn’t mean to be a bitch about the whole makeover thing. Sometimes—okay, most times—my mouth moves way faster than my brain. I’m sorry.” She grabbed Fallon’s hands between hers. “Really, I am.”
In the emergency room, a person got used to reading people on the quick and discerning the lies—from the embarrassing, like I don’t know how that action figure got there, to the awful, like it wasn’t my husband, I walked into a door—in ten words or less. So she didn’t need the billion-and-half that had come out of Marti’s mouth in one long, run-on sentence to realize the other woman was being sincere.
“It’s okay,” Fallon said. Because what was she gonna do? Scream about the tyranny of pink lipstick and false eyelashes? “That whole girlie-girl thing is really not my thing, but my friends and I do a Paint and Sip night once a week or so. You should come.”
“Oh, I am in.” She dropped Fallon’s hands and gave her a quick hug. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go sink Blackburn for the fifth time today.”
“You don’t want a signed puck, do you?” She was the coach’s daughter and dating—sorta—a player, so getting a signed puck should be the equivalent of Fallon getting a signed Waterbury Fire Department calendar (not that she wanted one, because ewwwwwwww).
“Nah.” Marti plucked a softball from the bucket of three she must have gotten when she’d bought her dunk tank ticket. “I promised Cole I’d dunk Zach as often as I could today. I was a fast-pitch champion in college, so my arm is wicked good.” She let out an ornery laugh as she waggled her eyebrows. “That man is going down a lot.”
Giggling, Fallon looked over at the dunk tank, where Zach was climbing back up on the chair that collapsed every time someone hit the bullseye. “I almost feel bad for him.”
He sat down in the chair, and his gaze locked
with hers, and a shiver went through her that had nothing to do with the fall temperatures and everything to do with the man who she definitely should not be thinking about every third second, let alone fucking in the bathroom.
“Oh, girl.” Marti shook her head. “You’ve got it bad.”
“We’re just sorta friends.” Which didn’t sound like a lame lie at all.
Marti looked from Zach, who was doing his best badass smolder that made Fallon’s nipples pucker, which was pretty impressive considering he was in a wet suit sitting on a collapsible platform, and back to Fallon. Whatever she saw, it put a sympathetic smile on her face.
“Whatever you say, Fallon.” Then she turned and walked up to the chalked throwing line and let loose with a hard pitch that landed against the bullseye with a thwack.
And as the platform collapsed and Zach went down into the water, Fallon couldn’t help but wonder if she was falling just as hard and fast.
Chapter Eighteen
Zach’s house was empty and quiet after how loud and crowded the locker room had been after the latest Ice Knights’ win.
People had been laughing, music blared, and some asshole had put a bobblehead doll of him in a plastic bin of water. A few months ago, he would have snarled at the perpetrator. Now, though, things felt different. He’d, instead, dumped the water over Petrov’s head in retaliation. Of course, the reporters in the room got a cell phone shot of it, and the scene of all of them laughing at Petrov looking half drowned made Sports Center before Stuckey even dropped him off at home.
Now, he was walking around his empty house with his post-game cheat of a pint of mint chocolate chip. The ice cream was delicious as usual, but he didn’t get his usual thought-quieting buzz. Why? Because instead of Fallon in her usual seat on the other side of the glass at the Ice Knights Arena, it had been a guy who looked like a retired accountant wearing a Lady Luck sash. Yeah, the view was definitely not as good as when Fallon was there.
He glanced at the clock on the microwave as he wound his way through the kitchen on his fourth lap around the house. Her shift had ended forty minutes ago, according to the info he’d gleaned from Lucy, who had greeted him with a hug and a don’t-fuck-with-my-girl talking-to outside the locker room.
Stopping in front of the island, he stared at his phone sitting right in the middle of it. He hadn’t talked to Fallon beyond a few hurried texts since they’d had sex in the bathroom at the clinic—right before she’d left the fundraiser early for a shift at the hospital. The urge to call her had only grown in the past two days, to the point where he’d left his phone on the island so he wouldn’t start texting. If she wanted to talk, she’d reach out to him. That was how it usually worked. Someone wanted something from him, they called or texted or waited outside a locker room to flush his day down the toilet.