Ghost Dance (Tulsa Thunderbirds Book 3) (22 page)

I knew she could see straight through me. And I knew she wouldn’t put up with me constantly pushing her away and telling her to stop asking me questions.

But I also knew I’d been a mess the last couple of days without her.

Her job, though? I wanted to ask Miller what he meant by that, but he’d turned and collected Evan, and they were heading out with the rest of the crowd. How the hell had I spent so much time alone with London without finding out a damned thing about her? I didn’t know where she worked or what she did. For that matter, I didn’t know she’d had a relationship with Miller at some point, or that he’d broken her heart. I didn’t know anything that mattered.

All I knew was that I wanted to be with her, and that the wanting had only continued to grow the longer we were apart. And being separated from her left all sorts of parts of me aching. Parts I’d been ignoring for years.

I didn’t like it.

I might dislike it more than being with her drove me crazy.

Fucking hell.

AROUND MIDMORNING ON
Friday, my phone rang with a call from an unfamiliar number. It had to be Dima. Wade and Evan had let me know they’d given him my number that night after the game.

For a moment, I debated not answering. After all, I wasn’t in the mood to be called a bitch or told to shut up, or any of the other things he tended to do to start a fight with me, and since we weren’t together in person, things wouldn’t turn physical between us.

I didn’t make up my mind until the last ring before the call would go to voice mail, but I finally swiped my thumb over the screen and answered.

“Hello?”

Silence met me on the other end.

“Dima? Is it a bad connection or something?”

“Thought you would be at work,” he muttered.

“Or hoped I would be, at least.”

“Maybe.”

“So you wanted to leave me a message but not actually talk to me, is that it?” I wheeled myself into the kitchen and started fixing myself a snack, holding the phone between my cheek and my shoulder.

“Why you’re not working?” he asked in lieu of answering me, which shouldn’t be a surprise since that was how we always were with each other.

“My office is closed until after the New Year. I’ve got time off to do whatever I want.”

“So you’re with your family?”

“I’m back at my house now. I had all the family time I could stand for the time being.”

“You should be with your family.”

My ire already getting the best of me, I ripped open the refrigerator door and let the cool air wash over me. “And you should stop telling me what to do.”

“Family is important.” The way he said it reminded me that he didn’t have any family of his own anymore, unless you counted Sergei.

“I know that.” I grabbed a fruit-filled Greek yogurt and a spoon after staring in the open door of the fridge so long that half the cold air must be in the kitchen now instead of the machine. “My parents are coming over for dinner tonight. And I’m going with Gray to take the kids to the movies this weekend.” Somehow, I’d let my brother con me into it, but I couldn’t really say I minded. It gave me a good excuse to go see the latest animated flick. I always felt awkward when I went to see a kid movie alone.

“You have your car back yet?” he asked.

“Did you really call me to ask about my car and why I’m not spending every waking moment with my family?” I grumbled, wheeling back into the living room. I peeled back the foil cover and dug my spoon into the yogurt with so much force that some of it plopped over the edge of the cup. “Please tell me that’s not why you harassed my teammates until one of them finally gave in.”

“You can’t answer a fucking question?”

“I don’t know why I should answer your fucking questions when you won’t ever answer mine.”

Dima let out a string of Russian words, most of which I couldn’t understand, but it didn’t take much imagination to come up with numerous colorful possibilities for interpretation.

“Yes, I’m still a fucking bitch,” I bit off, homing in on the one thing I
had
understood out of all that he’d said. “And you’re not here to shove your dick in my mouth to shut me up, so you’re going to have to either listen or hang up on me.”

“Trying to get to know you,” he shouted. “All you want to do is fight.”

“I don’t want to fight with you, Dima. I’m sick to death of fighting with you. I’d thought we were done with that when I left your house. Hell, I’d thought
we
were done, but now you want to call me and fight over the phone?”

“Not trying to fight with you. I want to get to know you.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Hell if I know.”

I took a moment to stir my yogurt, waiting impatiently for the pulse that was pounding through my veins to slow down. But maybe he had a point. Maybe he
was
trying to get to know me, not start a fight. We were both too volatile by half. I swallowed a spoonful along with a bit of my pride before speaking again.

“The police found my car about a hundred miles away,” I said once I’d calmed down enough to think clearly. “All the hand controls had been ripped out, along with the navigation system and the stereo. It’d been wrecked, too, so it looks like they took everything of value to sell on the black market.”

“So you have no car now.”

“No, but my insurance is paying for it to be replaced.” Or some of it, but I didn’t want Dima to know I was going to have to dip into my savings to pay for what the insurance wouldn’t cover. He still hadn’t admitted that he was the one behind the pro players who’d banded together and paid for my car to begin with. I wasn’t about to let him get some other crazy idea like that in his head. This was my mess, and I needed to be the one to get myself out of it. “Wade took me car shopping yesterday. I bought one, and I’ve got it in the shop now, being fitted with the modifications I need.”

“Wade said he hurt you.”

“Wade said
what
?” I spluttered, nearly choking on my yogurt. I don’t know what I’d been expecting Dima to say next, but it sure as hell hadn’t been anything like that.

“He said he hurt you. You used to date him?”

“A long time ago, yeah.”

“Think he still loves you.”

“Not like that, he doesn’t. We’re friends now. We’re much better as friends.”

“What about us?” Dima asked. “Are we friends?”

“To be honest, I don’t know what we are.” And I knew even less about what I wanted us to be. “What do you think we are?”

“Fucked up.”

I burst out laughing. “Yeah, you could say that.”

“Tell me about your job.”

“What do you want to know about my job?” I asked, taking another bite and letting the burst of flavor explode on my tongue. Maybe I was starting to calm down, after all.

“Anything. Everything.”

“I coordinate programming at the Brookside Community Center,” I said. “I’ve got a degree in social work, and this is how I decided to put it to use. I schedule events for seniors, kids, support groups, and all sorts of other things. That’s where I met Evan, actually. He came in for some support group meetings for teens with disabilities. I told him about the Para-Pythons when I found out he was into hockey.”

“You go to lots of support groups?” he asked.

“I coordinate them. There are some I attend, but I’ve got a group of counselors who run the meetings for me, and some of them offer private counseling sessions from our facility.”

“What kind of meetings?”

“Everything you can think of. We’ve got groups for addicts, for families of addicts, for people with HIV, people with disabilities, people dealing with loss and grief… You name it, we probably have a support group for it.”

“Have any support groups for grumpy hockey players?”

“Hmm,” I said, tapping my finger on my chin even though he couldn’t see me. “I don’t know if I’ve got any support groups specifically for that, but I do have a couple you might think about.”

“What’s that?” he drawled, clearly not as amused by my sarcasm as I was.

“There’s one monthly for people dealing with grief. But I also have a meeting a couple of times a week for people to talk about their guilt and survivor’s remorse.”

He fell silent for so long I thought he might have hung up on me, once again running away. But then he said, “You go to the meetings?”

“Not those,” I replied, carefully weighing my words. “I leave it to my counselors to run the groups that don’t have any relevance for me. I usually go to the ones that have other people who’ve suffered traumatic injuries or who’re dealing with different sorts of disabilities, though.”

“Does it help?” he asked.

“It can, if you let it. Or it can be a complete waste of your time if all you want to do is push people away so you can run off alone to hide. You can do that on your own time without bothering with a support group.”

“When does group meet?” he asked, and I almost fell out of my chair. “The one for guilt.”

“Wednesday afternoons at two,” I said once I’d pulled myself back together. “Or Saturday evenings, if that would work better for you.”

“Team comes home on Tuesday. I’ll come Wednesday.”

“ONE LAST THING
before everyone heads home,” our head coach, Doug Spurrier, said. Earlier this morning, we’d flown back from our abysmally bad road trip, but we’d had a film session and team meeting before they let us leave.