Page 69 of Trick Shot

I don’t say shit. I don’t even remember the faces of the girls I said no to. Not even sure I looked them in the eye. It was all just a blur of fake lashes and baby-voice desperation that felt like a fucking zoo.

“You okay?” Dominic jogs up beside me, chest heaving and glistening.

“Just resting. You really need to learn the definition of a vacation,” I scoff, wiping the sweat from my brow.

“Not talking about that.” He tosses me a sideways look. “We’ve been here for two days, and you already passed up a half-dozen girls throwing themselves at you.”

“Wasn’t feelin’ it,” I shrug, flicking off some sand from my chest, which only makes it stick to my sweaty palm.

“What?” he says, brows raised.

“None of them were my type.”

“Since when do you have a type?” That makes him slow his stride. “If it’s got a pulse and lip gloss, you’re usually upstairs by midnight.”

I shrug again, glancing at the waves, watching them roll in, violent and restless.

Since I met your little sister.

And suddenly, I’m not on the beach anymore. I’m back in a memory I never asked for. My mother, standing by the door with her suitcase, lipstick perfect, eyes colder than hell.

He makes me happy. I deserve to be happy, Bryan.

Then she walked out on us and didn’t look back. Not when my father cried, not when I did too. I was thirteen. My dad crumbled.

I learned right then and there that love doesn’t just leave—it destroys. I took a shot at it during my senior year. It was my first relationship, and boy, did I fall hard.

She cheated too—said I was “too busy” with hockey, that I was already married to the game, that I didn’t make her feel like a priority. I was seventeen, playing for a shot at the NHL. I thought I was doing everything right. Turns out I was just setting myself up to lose again.

So yeah, since then, I stopped fucking trying. The girls that followed the team around became easier and safer. They didn’t want my soul—just my body and a few pretty lies—and I gave it to them every damn time. I built a reputation on it. The hotshot winger with the stamina of a god and the emotional availability of a brick wall.

I’m so fucking sick of it. Sick of fucking girls whose names I forget the moment they say it. Sick of being touched by hands that only want the jersey, not the man beneath it. Sick of feeling like a circus act.

I didn’t even want it in the first place. I was just young, dumb, and trying to fill a hole no one saw.

But now, after Dom’s little sister came into my life, everything feels worse. Because I’ve tasted real. I’ve tasted what it truly is for someone to listen, to talk to you, to be your peace when the world feels like chaos. And now nothing else is good enough. Not the girls, the fame, or the casual, empty bullshit I used to swallow like pills just to feel okay.

I want something real. And fuck me, I want it with her. Even though I know better. Because the truth is, I don’t believe in happy endings. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting it.

“You good?” Dom’s voice cuts through my head.

I blink, shaking the thought off.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “Just spacing.”

He stretches his arms behind his head, chest rising slowly with every breath like he’s not just spent the last hour sprinting. Show-off.

We keep walking down the beach, cooling down as the others laugh and roughhouse behind us. Dom sighs one of those deep, weighted sighs that tells me we’re about to have amoment.

“I’ve been thinking about Mel,” he says, eyes locked on the ocean.

I stay quiet, even though my heart kicks up at the mention of her name.

“I don’t know if bringing her here was the right call.” He continues.

“Leaving her in Miami by herself was better?” I shoot him a sideways glance.

“I mean here in general. I know she needed out—from our parents, the rules, all the bullshit. But… Miami’s chaos, man. You’ve seen the girls who hang around the team. The parties. The fucking—”