Knock Me for a Loop (6 page)

All was silent from in the kitchen, Zack noticed. No doubt Magda had her head cocked and her ears primed, hanging on every word of the rather one-sided conversation taking place not twenty feet away.

Not that Gage’s raised voice could be missed. A couple decibels higher and he could probably be heard all the way down at the waterfront.

Moving more slowly and with less agitation than Gage, Dylan put his hands to his knees and stood to look down at Zack.

“I wish I could say he’s wrong or overreacting, but…” He shook his head. “What’s going on with you, man? What happened to the fun-loving guy who would do anything for a laugh, anything on a dare? The friend we used to like hanging out with because he never took anything too seriously and reminded us that no matter how tough things got, there was always some stupid story or joke he could pull out of his hat that could crack us up. And what about the star goalie who was always there for his teammates, always insisted on partying after a game, even if they’d taken a loss?”

Though Zack tried not to make eye contact with his friend, it would take a blind man not to see the confusion, the concern, and yes, the
pity
in Dylan’s expression. He locked his jaw and let his back teeth grind for a while.

It felt good. Took his mind off the throb in his knee and helped him block out the tune his friend was playing on the world’s smallest violin.

“We miss you,” Dylan said, finally bringing his speech to a close. “And I think Gage may be right—until you get your head on straight, figure out whether you want your life back or want to sit here feeling sorry for yourself…I don’t think we can come around anymore. You really are on your own.”

Skirting the glass-topped table with slow, deliberate steps, Dylan crossed the room and let himself out of the apartment. The click of the door, much softer and less emphatic than Gage’s angry slam, still managed to ring in Zack’s ears like the gong of a bell.

A low ache pulsed in his chest. Guilt? Regret?

Eh, they’d get over it. Give them a week and they’d be back, ready to watch the next big game on his fifty-two-inch plasma, peace offerings of pizza and beer in tow.

Maybe he’d even play hard-ass and insist on a few strange, hard-to-get toppings like papaya or crawfish.

Mmmm, sounded good. Maybe that pang in his gut wasn’t guilt or regret, after all. Maybe it was plain old hunger.

Glancing down at the front of his cheese-dusted T-shirt, he picked up a doodle and popped it in his mouth, savoring the sharp flavor and massive, ongoing crunch as he chewed.

Hiding away from the world. Feeling sorry for himself. Couldn’t take care of himself. Ha! He couldn’t wait for his friends to figure out just how wrong they were.

In the meantime, he’d be just fine by himself.

He always was.

Row 5

One week later…

If ever there was something Grace
did not
want to do, this would be it.

She stood outside the door to Zack’s apartment, trying to school her breathing, slow her pulse, and
not
either throw up or run away.

But she wouldn’t—throw up
or
run away, that was.

The first because it was messy and undignified, and there was nowhere to do it properly in the otherwise empty hallway.

The second because it would be proof that she was nervous about what she was about to do—which she would admit to only under threat of death…or having the fat sucked out of her ass with a bendy straw and no anesthesia—and because she suspected her presence was truly needed.

Not
deserved
, but needed.

Her friends had been bugging her for weeks to check in on Zack. To talk to him. To do
something
in an attempt to draw him out of his apparent funk.

Oh, they’d been subtle and even creative about it, but the pressure—and hints the size of cruise liners—had been there nonetheless.

Grace had done a pretty good job of ignoring them, too…until last Wednesday’s Knit Wits meeting, when she’d discovered through Jenna and Ronnie that things had apparently gotten so bad with Zack that even his very best friends, Dylan and Gage, had given up on him. They’d recapped the guys’ last visit, and each detail they’d shared had only made her stomach tighten and her heart sink lower than it had been before.

What they were saying, the man they were talking about, didn’t sound like her Zack. Or the Zack formerly known as hers, at any rate.

The man she had been engaged to had always been the life of the party, with a zest for life sometimes hard to keep up with. An injury on the ice—no matter how serious—would barely have made a dent in that level of gusto. He would have followed doctors’ instructions to the letter, plus some, and done whatever was necessary to heal, recover, and bounce back like a jai alai ball.

Hearing that he
wasn’t
bouncing back, was sitting around like a slug,
stagnating
in his own desolation, was just enough to push her feelings about Zack and his post-accident condition from apathetic to concerned. She suspected that was her friends’ goal in being so specific and dogged in their recounting of Dylan and Gage’s confrontation with Zack the week before.

So here she was. Palms sweating, stomach churning, reluctance pouring through her veins like toxic waste.

She raised her hand to knock, determined to get in, check on him—maybe kick his butt to get him moving in the right direction, if need be—and get the hell out. But before her knuckles connected with the thick wooden panel, she realized that Zack might still be in bed.

It was only eight in the morning, and he’d never been much of a morning person to begin with. Plus, if Zack really was as depressed and withdrawn as everyone implied, there was a chance he spent most of his time in bed or asleep.

Even if he wasn’t, he still had a badly damaged leg—one he
hadn’t
been going to physical therapy for, the idiot—and was in no shape to rush around answering doors.

Letting her purse strap fall from her shoulder, she balanced the overstuffed bag on her knee and started digging. She
shouldn’t
still have a key to Zack’s apartment, but knew she did.

She’d used it to get in the night she’d discovered his infidelity and wanted to destroy him by destroying everything he owned. After recovering from the initial shock and feeling moderately regretful of her actions, she’d told her friends she flushed the key the same as she’d flushed the engagement ring he’d given her.

She hadn’t, though. She’d kept it—just in case. After all, one never knew when their ex-fiancé might once again do something stupid or the “woman scorned” rage might rear its ugly head and need to be vented by throwing more of his clothes off the balcony.

The loose key was, of course, floating around at the very bottom of the oversized bag, beneath her own ring of keys, a pack of gum, container of Tic Tacs, and a couple of wadded-up tissues. And she, of course, located it only after rummaging around for fifteen minutes, searching through every inside and outside pocket, and removing just about every large item first.

Finally, though, she had it in hand and slipped it into the lock. As she turned it, and simultaneously turned the knob, she caught herself murmuring a short prayer beneath her breath that he hadn’t also flipped the dead bolt or hooked the chain; otherwise she would end up banging on the door to wake him—and possibly a few of his neighbors—after all.

But just like the Zack she used to know, the current Zack hadn’t bothered to secure his apartment past the automatic lock installed within the doorknob mechanism.

Stepping inside, she closed the door behind her on a soft click, then turned to take in the silent, shadowed space surrounding her. Large windows lined the far wall, letting muted, early morning light spill halfway across the oaken floorboards, but the rest of the apartment was empty and as dark as it could get at this hour of the day.

The coffee maker in the kitchen wasn’t gurgling with fresh brew. There was no bread in the toaster, crisping to a golden brown. The TV wasn’t on in the living room, and the water wasn’t running in the bathroom.

It was eerily quiet when she was used to Zack’s place always humming, always being filled with noise. A television or radio playing almost twenty-four hours a day. Friends sprawled on the sofa, eating, drinking, laughing, and more often than not playing armchair referee to one sporting event or another. A foosball battle taking place in one corner of the room, a video game in the other.

Setting her purse on the credenza just inside the door, she tiptoed through the house, inspecting things as she went along. He’d put a giant, flat-screen television—even bigger than his old one, which had been mammoth—on the wall where she’d stabbed one of his beloved hockey trophies through the plaster. She wondered if he’d bothered to patch the hole first, or just slapped up the expensive new toy and forgotten about it.

In general, the apartment was clean, which meant Magda was still coming in once or twice a week to pick up after him. But there were still clothes strewn about, still open bags of chips, empty snack wrappers, and dirty dishes littering the place. Enough to let her know he probably hadn’t eaten a fruit or vegetable or anything outside of the junk food family in a good, long while.

Grace made her way to the bedroom, ignoring the wave of reluctance that swamped her, the tug of regret that pulled at her heart, and the hoard of memories her brain offered to let her relive.

No, thank you. Memories of other times she’d been in his room, in his bed, were something she definitely did not need. She didn’t even want to think about the last time she’d been there, bawling her eyes out and cursing Zack for being a cheating, lying prick while systematically cutting all of the keepsakes in his professional scrapbooks into teeny, tiny pieces.

Not her finest moment, but it had felt damn good at the time.

The bedroom door was slightly ajar, but she didn’t hear any signs of movement, so she pushed it open a little farther. Once again, darkness greeted her.

The blinds had been pulled to keep out even a hint of daylight, but she could still make out Zack’s tall, broad frame lying diagonally across the bed.

He was on his stomach, naked but for a pair of plaid flannel boxer shorts, his hair a long, straggling blond mess. The sheets were twisted and bunched around him, but not covering much more than his feet.

A trickle of attraction, of desire, snaked through her bloodstream, warming her from the inside out and causing a familiar ache to settle low in her belly and between her legs.

She wasn’t proud of it, but she’d missed him. God, the way they used to heat up those sheets together…It had made atomic bombs and spontaneous combustion look like the fizzling little sparks that came from a cheap plastic lighter when the flint wouldn’t catch.

Or maybe, she thought, narrowing her eyes and reminding herself of his infidelity, she missed men in general. She hadn’t slept with anyone since breaking up with Zack, so it wasn’t a stretch to realize she probably just needed to get laid. She should find herself some hot, willing stud and ride him like a Kawasaki KX450F at Motorcross. (So some of Zack’s sports fanaticism had sunk in—sue her.)

Lord knew she’d had opportunities. There were guys at work who flirted with her, dropped hints that they wouldn’t mind going home with her now that she was no longer attached to a professional hockey player who outweighed them by fifty pounds of pure muscle and would gleefully pummel them into human pancakes if they so much as looked at her cross-eyed. Maybe she should take one of them up on the offer.

And those weren’t the only men sending out signals. With a face as high-profile as hers—and frankly, a body that rocked, thank you very much—she was the recipient of long, lusty looks just about everywhere she went. She could crook a finger in the middle of Ninth Street and lead a string of drooling males straight into Lake Erie in the dead of winter, if she liked.

Whether she wanted straight-up, no-strings sex or another ring on her finger with the promise of forever, it wouldn’t take much on her part to get them.

The problem was that ever since she’d kicked Zack to the curb, she couldn’t seem to work up an interest in either of those things. Indiscriminate, anonymous sex didn’t appeal—as fun as that might be, and as much as it would serve Zack right for cheating on her with God knew how many puck-bunny bimbos.

And she was in no hurry to jump into another serious relationship, either. As gun-shy as she was from Zack’s betrayal, she might never again trust a man enough to get within six football fields of walking down the aisle.

But she wasn’t here to rehash her relationship with Zack or bemoan her nonexistent relationships with other males of the species. She was here to kick a little sense into her jackass ex-fiancé so her friends would get off her back and stop trying to guilt her into caring how he spent his days or whether his knee was healing properly.

Flipping the wall switch just inside the bedroom door, she stalked across the plush eggshell carpeting and threw open the thick drapes hiding a set of French doors that led to the balcony. Sunlight that was growing brighter with each passing minute streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windowpanes and across the unmoving figure taking up three-fourths of the king-size mattress.

Okay, that didn’t work quite as well as she’d expected. Used to be the merest hint of daylight would rouse Zack even from the deepest of sleeps. He might wake up growling like a lion, but he always woke up.

Moving closer to the bed and scanning the area around Zack, Grace noticed for the first time the open prescription bottle on the nightstand. A couple of stray pills rested on the oak tabletop beside a glass with about half an inch of amber liquid at the bottom.

She lifted the glass to her nose and sniffed, at the same time picking up the pill bottle to read the pharmacy label.

Nice. Mixing Vicodin with Jack Daniel’s. Things were even worse than she’d thought.

Returning the loose pills to their bottle, she did a quick search of both nightstands and their drawers, the area surrounding the bed, and the bathroom medicine cabinet to see if she could find any more drugs—prescription or otherwise. Then she took the glass of whiskey and the pill bottle and headed back to the kitchen.

She pulled her cell phone from her purse, replacing it with the Vicodin, and hit the button to speed-dial Ronnie. Her friend answered on the third ring.

“I’m here, and you’re right,” Grace said without preamble. “He’s a mess.”

“What are you going to do?” Ronnie wanted to know. Given the background noises, she was obviously at work.

“I need the name and number of his orthopedic surgeon so I can call and make an appointment. Do you think Dylan would have that information?”

Her friend hesitated for a second, but then answered, “I think so. At the very least, he’ll probably remember who was in charge of Zack’s case at the hospital. He could probably even call the team’s coach and find out who Zack is supposed to be seeing about his knee.”

“Good. Can you take care of that and call me right back? I think he should get in to see somebody today, if I can swing it.”

“All right.”

Again, the words were hesitant, and Grace rolled her eyes, tempted to slap her phone closed before Ronnie could start on the concerned friend/Twenty Questions routine.

“What?” she bit out instead. “Go ahead, whatever it is, just spit it out.”

“Are you okay? Being there, I mean? How did Zack react when you showed up?”

“I’m fine. The sooner I can deal with this and be done with it, the better,” she added flatly, “but I’m not going to have a nervous breakdown or throw any more of his belongings off the balcony, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

At least not yet, and unless Zack really pissed her off.

“And he’s still passed out in bed, so he doesn’t even know I’m here.”

A couple of seconds passed while her friend seemed to absorb that, then Ronnie said, “If you need anything, promise you’ll let me know. I can be there in ten minutes, tops. Jenna, too …I’m sure she’d be happy to drop by and help you out if you needed it.”

“If I need backup, you mean?” Grace asked, a hint of humor slipping into her tone and making her smile. “You guys should have thought of that before you started laying on the guilt-trip shit so thick. But I promise to send up smoke signals if I get into trouble, Cagney.”

Ronnie chuckled. “Roger that, Lacey.”

Who that left Jenna to be, Grace had no idea, but she hung up with her friend and moved on to the kitchen, where she dumped the last swallow of whiskey down the sink and stuck the glass in the otherwise empty dishwasher. She did a little search-and-destroy mission while she was in there, seeking out other sources of alcohol.

The open bottle of whiskey she emptied, then tossed in the recycle bin. The beer in the fridge she removed and stuffed to the back of a high cupboard shelf where Zack wouldn’t be able to reach it with his injured leg, even if he tried. First chance she got, she’d pass it off to one of their friends who could put it to good use.