Page 3

Chapter Three

Jackson

“Whiskey, neat.” I pull out a twenty-dollar bill from my pocket. “Actually, best make it a double.”

“You got it.” The bartender makes quick work of pouring definitely more than a double into a glass tumbler and slides it across the surface.

“Thanks,” I say, stuffing the twenty in the glass jar. Turning on my heel, I head toward the edge of the patio so I’m out of the way. With it being an open bar and a bunch of hockey players in attendance, it’s very busy and only getting more rowdy as the night goes on. The liquid burns my throat when I swallow it down, but I revel in it. It gives me something else to focus on other than my heart beating hard in my chest.

Whiskey isn’t my typical drink of choice, but it was always Hayden’s. For weeks after we broke up, it became my crutch. Loving how it tasted on my lips because it reminded me of him. But then the heartbreak turned into anger, and I haven’t touched a drop since .

Until now.

It wasn’t my intention to be rude and walk away from my teammates like a grumpy teenager, but fuck, I needed some air. Which is ironic, considering we’re already outside, but being in close proximity to Hayden again is too much.

It’s been fourteen years, damnit. Fourteen . Surely I should be immune to him by now. I shouldn’t want to simultaneously punch him in the face and stick my tongue down his throat. I shouldn’t want to bury my face in his neck, inhaling his scent until it’s ingrained in my soul. I shouldn’t care about him in any way whatsoever. He made his bed and lay in it when he threw what we had away without so much as a second thought. We both moved on, married our respective wives—albeit we both got divorced from those wives, but that’s neither here nor there.

I’m struggling to understand why I’m still affected by him after all this time. It’s like the Hayden Cassidy homing beacon that’s been dormant inside me for over a decade has kick-started, and every single one of my senses has been programmed to focus on him.

It’s stifling.

Throughout dinner, the only sound I could hear over the music and chatter was his deep, husky laughter. The smell of his spicy cologne has stayed with me all day, torturing me because he smells as good as I remember. And every time I looked in his direction, his eyes were zeroed in on me. Paying no attention to whoever he was talking to at the time, simply watching me with those intense gray eyes.

There was one thing I noticed, however, and that was whenever he laughed or smiled, it never quite reached his eyes .

What was he hiding behind that confident exterior? Was he using his charm like a shield, preventing anyone from seeing what was behind his three-piece suit of armor?

Then, I circle back to the same question that’s been troubling me all night. Why do I care so much about Hayden fucking Cassidy?

Placing my empty glass down on the bar top, I take advantage of everyone being engaged in conversation or busy dancing, allowing me to slip out of sight unnoticed. I walk along the side of the villa until I get to a waist-high stone wall overlooking the vineyard. I rest my forearms against the wall and stare out into the distance.

My insides feel all cut up. Confusion mixed with age-old hurt. After we broke up, I managed to separate my feelings while he was still playing. It helped being on the other side of the country and only having to see him twice a season on the ice; then it was just a case of time. Because time is supposed to fix everything, right?

After he retired, we hadn’t been in the same place for almost nine years until I saw him a few months ago in Zach’s apartment, and it threw me off-kilter. All of the feelings I thought I had buried came rushing to the surface like metal to a magnet. Drawing me to him like no time had passed at all.

There was a time when I thought he was the one. That we would grow old and gray together. He would paint the picture of how our life would look after hockey while we were lying in his bed back in Boston. He wanted us to buy a cabin in upstate New York, or maybe even Vermont, where we could cook together before making love in front of the fire—his words, not mine. But looking back, all he did was feed me with empty promises he was never planning to fulfill. Because the moment I got the call telling me I was heading to Los Angeles, I saw something shutter in his eyes. But I ignored it. I was young and na?ve enough to believe we would survive. That we’d smash the whole long-distance thing because I was convinced our love was real and strong and could withstand anything the world wanted to throw at us.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. And fourteen years later, those words still cut through me like a knife.

I was never in love with you, Jackson.

The sound of shoes crunching on the loose stones pulls me out of the daze I was in, but I don’t turn around. My body is so acutely aware of him I know who it is before he speaks.

“You didn’t need to leave on my behalf.”

Hayden’s lips are tipped in a lopsided smile when I look over my shoulder. His hands are stuffed deep in the pockets of his pants, his suit jacket draped across his forearm. His body language is almost boyish, but there’s nothing boyish about him. He juts his chin to the stone wall, a silent request to join me.

I nod once and turn back to look out at the vineyard. He places his jacket on the wall, then mirrors my position, forearms resting on the wall, and fixes his gaze on something in the distance. Every atom inside of me wants to turn to look at him. To take him in up close. To look at him now he doesn’t have his sunglasses shielding his eyes or other people’s attention on us.

I swallow hard as a heavy ball of emotion coats the back of my throat down to my stomach. It’s a strange sensation to be standing next to someone who was once a constant. We went from being inseparable to becoming strangers, and sometimes you don’t truly know the significance of that loss until they’re standing right in front of you again. Like a mirage of someone you once knew.

Minutes pass by in silence, and I fight to keep my eyes off Hayden. I try to focus on how the sky is so clear, allowing the stars to shine brightly against the dark canvas. The music is still loud enough to hear but quiet enough to think. I manage to resist the pull up until he shifts and laces his fingers together. A flash of color catches my eye, and I snap like a weak piece of string. I take in the tattoos covering both of his arms. They travel from his wrist up past the fabric of his rolled-up sleeves. Not one inch of skin has been left untouched. One arm is black and gray; the other is vibrant color.

“They’re new,” I point out, then internally roll my eyes.

Seriously, Wilde? Of course they’re fucking new. He didn’t have one drop of ink on his skin when we were together. I would know, because I knew every inch of him intimately.

“Yeah. There’s a lot of things that are new for us, Jax.”

I frown at his tone, and I don’t miss how my heart rate picks up at the sound of my old nickname. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean—” He cuts himself off, sighing heavily. He raises his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose, then drops it again to look at me. “Fuck. I didn’t want to do this here.”

Those gray eyes lock on to mine, rooting me in place. They flash with an emotion I’m unable to decipher when he speaks again, “I understand why you hate me. In fact, I probably hate myself just as much as you do, if not more, but I’m not that person anymore, Jax. If I could go back and do things differently, I would do it in a heartbeat, but I can’t. I have to live with the consequences of my actions.”

Wait, what ? He thinks I hate him?

Yeah, I’m mad at him. Infuriated, maybe. But hate is such a strong word. Even when he broke my heart and my hurt morphed into anger, I never hated him. I don’t think I could ever hate him.

“I don’t hate you, Hayden,” I tell him, standing upright and turning my body to face him. “But you broke my heart. You threw away the years we spent together just like that.” I snap my fingers. “Like we meant nothing. I’m sorry I’m not going to be happy to see you or be around you. Especially considering this is only the second time I’ve seen you that hasn’t been during a game. But I don’t hate you.”

“You did mean something.” He drops his gaze to the ground. His voice is quiet, almost pained.

“You could’ve fooled me,” I laugh humorlessly. “I was sent to this brand-new city, all alone. I didn’t know a fucking soul, and the one person who I thought had my back was nowhere to be seen.”

My heart thunders in my chest, blood ringing in my ears as that wound I thought was healed reopens, exposing the hurt that I thought was dead and buried. But the words don’t stop. They tumble out of me after years of being locked up.

“You dropped me so fast, Hayden. I didn’t know what the fuck I did or whether our relationship was even real because next thing I know, you were posting you were engaged! You can’t blame me for not greeting you with open arms. I spent so fucking long second-guessing whether our connection was genuine. Whether your feelings for me were genuine or whether you were just using me because it was convenient.”

He squeezes his eyes shut, and his teeth dig into his rosy bottom lip so hard it turns white. “I wasn’t using you, and it wasn’t because it was convenient.”

My body is trembling as I stare at him. I pump my shaking hands into fists, tensing and releasing to try and calm myself down.

I want to yell at him and shake him, make him know exactly what he put me through, but what use is it? It’s in the past. I need to think of this as the closure I needed. To put a lid on the box that was us and never open it again.

We both remain silent, staring at each other for a few minutes. I can’t help but take him in. His five-o’clock shadow is speckled with a silver tint, matching the silver strands appearing at his temples. His face is as handsome as I’ve always remembered, only now he has fine lines around his eyes, and he looks tired. The low lighting emphasizes the shadows beneath his eyes. Being back in Hayden’s orbit is causing a lot of confusing emotions to war inside my chest because I shouldn’t want to ask him if he’s okay. I shouldn’t care .

But there’s the saying that you don’t forget your first love. That they leave an imprint on your soul. And maybe it’s true, but that also goes for emotional scars, and they can run just as deep.

A car pulls up and parks on the round driveway, the bright headlights causing me to squint. Hayden pushes himself off the wall and picks up his jacket .

He turns toward the idling car, and I find myself blurting out, “You’re leaving?”

“Yeah, this is my ride.” He glances longingly in the direction of the party going on behind before focusing his eyes back on me. “They’re your crowd, Jackson. I’m sorry if me being here made things uncomfortable for you.”

I open my mouth to tell him he didn’t make things uncomfortable, not in the way he’s thinking, anyway. Yeah, so it turns out I’m still fucking pissed at him, but that’s my problem to deal with. The only thing I’m uncomfortable with is the whole heap of fucking mixed feelings going on inside of me.

“It was really good to see you again,” he says after a beat because I still haven’t spoken. This time when he smiles, it does reach his eyes, but it’s full of sadness. “Take care of yourself.”

I don’t know why I want to ask him to stay. I want him to tell me why he’s now covered in tattoos and the stories behind them. I want him to tell me what’s going on in his mind and what happened to make his eyes become stormy. Like the flame that used to burn so bright has been snuffed out.

But I can’t.

I can’t do anything except watch as he gets into the back of the car and closes the door behind him. I stand there, a heaviness weighing on my chest, watching the taillights disappear into the distance.

I might not know what’s going on inside of my head and heart right now, but there’s one thought that’s clear in my mind. When he walked away, he was limping, favoring his other leg that didn’t end his career with a torn ACL .

His words come back to me like a quick-fire reel in my mind as I stare out at the now dark driveway.

There’s a lot of things that are new between us, Jax.

I probably hate myself just as much as you do, if not more.

I’m not that person anymore, Jax.

Fuck. What does that mean? And why do I want to know who he is now?