Tomboy (The Hartigans #3)(69)

“What does that mean, but us?”

“In case you missed it, the team has your back,” Phillips said, walking in with a rolled-up rug. “We always have, even when you ignored us.”

Zach opened his mouth, shut it, then opened it again, but nothing came out. He couldn’t wrap his brain around what the hell was going on. Four of his teammates, whom he’d all but ignored or growled at for the past week and a half, were delivering furniture that he hadn’t ordered. And putting it together. He watched Phillips unroll a dark blue rug and center it in the room. They were even decorating. He had nothing. None of this computed.

Once all of them were back in the living room, Petrov and Christensen carrying in a huge couch, he turned to the group and asked, “Why?”

“Fuck if I know,” Stuckey said, flipping through the directions for the TV stand. “I’m kidding. Because you’re good people. The fact that you miss that half the time isn’t my problem.”

“So the furniture?” he asked.

“It’s our way of saying we lurve you,” Christensen said in a mocking voice. “No, really it’s so we have a place to sit while we watch the playoffs, since it looks like we won’t be making it. We voted this as the team gathering house.”

“I’m so lucky.” He said it in his best I’m-an-asshole voice, but it didn’t seem to have an impact on the other men in the room, who went on with what they were doing as if he hadn’t said anything.

“I’d say so,” Phillips said. “I wish I had someone who’d go to the mat for me like Fallon did for you.”

Now, that did stop them. That same heavy silence from the locker room hit Zach like a gut-punch. “She wasn’t supposed to do that.”

“Stick up for you?” Stuckey asked, his upper lip curled into a sneer. “Yeah, I totally see how that would be a problem. Get your head out of your ass, Blackburn. She went after the people who’d taken a million cheap shots on you just like you nailed Hendrix after he checked Phillips from behind in the last game.”

His shoulders tensed. “It’s not the same.” It wasn’t. He was doing his job. Fallon was spilling secrets she wasn’t supposed to share.

“Whatever, dude.” Stuckey rolled his eyes. “Now, where’s the beer.”

He crossed his arms and gave his teammates the stink eye. “All out.”

“Don’t worry,” Petrov said. “I’ll text Svoboda to pick some up on his way here with the Xbox. Hope you’re ready to get your ass kicked in Hockey All Stars. I call playing as Gretzky.”

An hour later, he walked out of his now fully furnished living room with half the Ice Knights roster eating pizza and drinking beer while talking shit about the video game hockey being played on his TV, now sitting on the stand Stuckey had put together. No one mentioned why he hadn’t had any furniture in the first place, or any more about what had happened with his parents or Fallon.

“I still don’t get it,” he said to Stuckey when they both were in the kitchen getting beers. “Why are you here? Is it just to get me playing better on the ice?”

“We’re a team.” Stuckey shrugged. “It’s what we do—on and off the ice.”

They both stood at the island, drinking their beers and watching the others in the living room where there were enough people and enough chaos to remind Zach of the Hartigans’ house, Fallon, and everything that had changed since she’d marched into his life. Even as pissed as he was, he wasn’t ready to lose her.

He twisted the top off his beer bottle. “She fucked up.”

“Maybe.” Stuckey nodded, not needing any explanation of who she was. “But didn’t she do it for the right reason? That might not excuse everything, but don’t you think it’s a reason to give her another chance?”

“She let everyone in the world see what a chump I was.” The words came out sounding the same as they had the million times he’d said them in his head, but something was off.

“Welcome to the real world.” Stuckey rolled his eyes. “We’re all chumps at one time or another. Only those asshole MRA types think having a set of balls makes someone always infallible. You need to wake up and see past the bullshit so you’ll realize that Fallon may not have been all right but she sure as hell wasn’t all wrong, either. Everybody’s fallible, man.”

And fuck him if that didn’t make some kind of sense, unraveling some of the anger that had wrapped around his middle like a python and squeezed him just about to death. She’d told him his reasons for wanting to keep it quiet were bullshit. He’d told her she was wrong. She’d taken matters into her own hands to defend him. It was an act so opposed to his normal worldview that he didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe it was past time he stopped with all the crap thinking about how a man should react, and instead did things the way his gut advised because they were the right things to do. Maybe it was time to be better. And when he did that, he wanted Fallon by his side.

“What are you, some kind of love doctor?” he asked the younger defenseman, who seemed to have his head on straight—well, mostly.

“That’s what all the ladies say before I love them and leave them, never to be tied down because that shit is so not for me.” He laughed. “Anyway, I’m just a guy on the trading block.”