Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 163209 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 816(@200wpm)___ 653(@250wpm)___ 544(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 163209 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 816(@200wpm)___ 653(@250wpm)___ 544(@300wpm)
An easy question with no easy answers. Jeremy chased his ragged thoughts down their twisting paths, but they all dead-ended at a crossroads.
“It’s my last year.” Jeremy wouldn’t think if he meant as a Trojan or ever. “I should go. I mean, I want to go. I want to be there with and for my team.” Cat hesitated, but then her cell phone gave the pewpewpew alert she’d given Cody. Jeremy smiled away her lingering concerns and insisted, “Thank you for worrying, but I’m good, I promise. Go enjoy your star thing.”
“Celestial Nights,” Cat supplied. “We’re writing haikus. Cody’s are so bad.”
“Read us some at dinner,” Jeremy invited her. “Speaking of, I’ll go ahead and get it ordered. Jean should be wrapping up any minute now, so the timing should be perfect.”
“Okay,” Cat said. “Make sure they send us extra chopsticks? Laila broke another set in the dishwasher. I don’t know how many times I can tell her to turn them upside-down first.”
“Will do,” Jeremy promised, and Cat slipped out of view.
He ordered enough food to feed a small army, texted Laila with the estimated delivery time, and sent a weary look toward his guidebook. He couldn’t think of a better way to spend the time, so he carried it down the hall to the living room.
Ten minutes later he’d made no progress whatsoever. He went to chuck it, saw Barkbark watching him from across the room, and said, “Okay. Osmosis it is.” The standee had no opinion on the matter, so Jeremy draped the book across his face and dozed until Laila and Jean finally made it home.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jeremy
Lucas returned on Monday morning. Jeremy privately thought it too early to be back on the court, but this had to be Lucas’s decision; the lineup was large enough Rhemann could’ve approved just about any amount of time to grieve. Jeremy attempted just once to catch him alone, but Lucas refused to hear anything he wanted to say. The junior put a hand up as soon as Jeremy said his name and said, “Not you, cap. I can’t hear it from you.”
Maybe he should have pushed, with all the trite words that only worked on perfect days, but Jeremy mutely relinquished Lucas into Cody’s care. If Lucas didn’t want his help, Jeremy would focus instead on Jean. Jeremy wasn’t sure anyone else noticed, as they were busy smothering Lucas with careful, gentle attention, but Jean didn’t once get within ten feet of Lucas. How he pulled it off when they had only a few lockers between them, Jeremy didn’t know. He wanted to ask Jean at break, but there was no good lull in Cat’s chatter.
When practice ended, Lucas didn’t even stick around long enough to shower. He peeled off his gear, yanked on his day clothes, and was out the door with Travis and Haoyu chasing him. The awkwardness of it all made the showers quieter than usual, and Jeremy wasn’t surprised when his teammates were in and out faster than normal. Cody and Xavier hung back, but Xavier waited until it was just the three of them before finally cranking his shower head off.
“He say anything to you?” Xavier asked.
“He didn’t want to talk to me,” Jeremy admitted.
“Do you blame him?” Cody raked both hands through their brutally short hair. When they noticed Jeremy watching them, they gave an uncomfortable shrug and said, “How can you understand what he’s dealing with? Maybe if it’d been Bryson—”
“What the hell, Cody?” Xavier interjected. “That’s enough.”
Cody winced but persisted. “I just mean it’s not the same kind of loss. What Lucas needs to cope and grieve is going to be completely different from what worked for Jeremy. Remembering Grayson in his heyday won’t help him when Lucas is so desperate to figure out the why and who he became while he was gone. It’s not you he needs to hear from,” they said again, with a glance at Jeremy to gauge his reaction. “It’s Jean.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Jeremy said. Cody frowned, so Jeremy put a bit more force in his words: “That’s final, Cody.”
Jean wouldn’t even talk about Grayson with them; there was no way Jeremy was asking him to have a heart-to-heart with the man’s grieving brother. Jeremy would never make Jean spell it out, but he knew what Grayson had done at Evermore. The truth was in Jean’s fierce avoidance, in the way he dug at his own throat when Grayson came up in conversation, in the hideous bites Grayson had left on his skin when he hunted him down at the court.
That Laila put it together felt inevitable; that she’d done it so quickly made his heart ache. They’d barely made it into June when she cornered him for confirmation, and Jeremy couldn’t lie to her when she spelled it out first. He assumed Cat found out while Laila was processing this horrific news, but the rest of the floozies didn’t have the same easy access to Jean’s life. Maybe if they’d seen Jean’s injuries, they would figure it out, but Jean was careful to keep his neck covered at practice.