Rebound (Seattle Steelheads #1)(12)

As soon as I hit the pillow—a free man for the first time in four years—a profoundly liberating relief took over.

And I slept harder than I had in ages.





Chapter 3


Geoff



This time of night, there wasn’t much in the way of traffic. The I-90 bridge was clear on the way back into Seattle, and I-5 wasn’t so bad as I headed north through the city.

Autopilot took me most of the way home. All the way through downtown and north Seattle and into Lake City, my mind stayed firmly on Mercer Island. The two areas couldn’t be more different. The highway from I-5 to Lake City was lined with bars, shady-looking car dealerships, and marijuana dispensaries. I had no issue with the dispensaries or with weed being legal, but the forest of neon-lit hemp leaves along either side of the road was a startling contrast to the island of gated communities and multimillion-dollar houses. Here, between fast food joints and strip malls, there were the crumbling remains of shops and restaurants that hadn’t survived the skyrocketing cost of existing in this region. Mercer Island probably didn’t even allow fast food, never mind a dispensary, and there was plenty of money on that island to keep any establishment afloat.

Mercer Island was gleaming and flourishing. Lake City was flickering out, one small business at a time.

Yeah, it was safe to say that Asher Crowe and I came from two very, very different worlds.

Which was kind of weird to think about now. When I’d been in his living room, drinking coffee and commiserating over exes who were abusive to differing degrees, we’d just been two guys with some things we really wanted to put in the past. The couch we’d been sitting on had undoubtedly cost as much as my car, but for a little while, we’d been on equal footing. It was probably the only common ground we had.

It was kind of surreal, thinking that I’d just spent part of an evening on Asher Crowe’s couch. My kids and I were hardcore Steelheads fans. My ex had even gotten his nose out of joint a few times when I’d apparently worn my Crowe crush on my sleeve. I didn’t see why it was a problem for me to check out the hottest hockey player in the league when he had no shame about pointing out actors and musicians he found attractive. In some warped part of Marcus’s brain, it was okay to check out people he never had a chance of meeting, but since Asher was local and I sometimes went to hockey games, that was different somehow. It never made sense to me. I wasn’t a cheater, and anyway, the odds of Asher and me ever actually crossing paths, never mind him giving me the time of day, were about a billion to one.

Yeah. About that.

I laughed quietly as I turned down the side street I lived on, but the humor didn’t last. Asher Crowe and I had crossed paths, but these weren’t exactly the circumstances I’d fantasized about.

I wondered how he was doing now. If he’d manage to sleep tonight. I’d smelled booze on him when I’d arrived, though he hadn’t seemed all that intoxicated. Had he drunk more after I’d left? The Steelheads as a group were largely health nuts—they were pro athletes, after all—but they were also pretty notorious party animals. I had no doubt, then, that Asher could handle his liquor, but I hoped he went easy on the booze. I hoped he went easy on himself. At least easier than I had since leaving Marcus.

But I knew how stubborn the past could be about falling back. A day didn’t go by that my brain didn’t spend some time on the should I have just stayed with him?/why the fuck did I ever move in with him in the first place? spin cycle. And I still needed Xanax and the odd Valium to cope with PTSD from a literal warzone I hadn’t been to in almost a decade. When Asher worried about how long it would take to move on, I got it.

Sighing, suddenly feeling the weight of the day and especially the call where I’d met Asher, I pulled into the parking lot below my apartment. I parked, gave the interior of my car a quick sweep to make sure there was nothing in sight to tempt a break-in, and got out.

I’d heard that some of the younger cops got off work and went out partying. Hell, that was what I’d done in my early years in the Marines: work a long shift, then go drink my paycheck until it was time to go back to work. At twenty-one or so, that had been easy. At forty-four? I was wincing and grimacing all the way up the stairs to my third-floor apartment.

And Marcus was worried something might happen if I ever met Asher Crowe?

That was rich. I could still hold my own at the gym, on the force, and in the bedroom, but I was not a twenty-five-year-old hockey player in peak physical condition. Not that I would ever object to at least trying to keep up with a twenty-five-year-old hockey player in peak physical condition.

Okay maybe Laura was on to something. Maybe it was time to bite the bullet and sign up for Tinder.

Just…not tonight. I was way too tired.

I let myself into the apartment. It was quiet and deserted, as I’d expected. The kids were at their mom’s tonight, and even if they’d been here, they would have been asleep by now. If they’d been awake, well… The whole place would still be silent.

I’d floated the idea to Valerie of changing our custody agreement so they stayed with her more than with me. Not because I wanted them gone—it just wasn’t doing any of us any good to wallow in all the frosty resentment over me leaving Marcus. Was it good for any of us to force them to stay with me between now and whenever I figured out how to fix things? I didn’t even know.