Hooking Nash

Hockey Players

KENNEDY

Baxter and Sammy had started to talk about his upcoming wedding to Tasha. I tried to pay attention in the beginning, but my thoughts ended up drifting away, since I knew nothing about weddings. My thoughts went to Nash and back to our childhood. To us growing up together.

My brother, Jackson, was a year older than Nash's brother, Isaac, and three years older than Nash and me. It became natural for all of us to play sports together. I wasn't very talented at it, but I tried. My brother used to hate to be on the same team as me. It was his opinion that I was the reason we always lost, and that was probably true.

Nash on the other hand never really seemed to care. He was always encouraging and quick to praise me regardless if we won or not. Luckily for me, Nash was good enough for both of us. So most of the time it was Nash and me against my brother, Jackson, and Isaac. As we got older it somehow became the rule. Not just when we played sports, but other games as well. It was always Nash and me as a team. We would even study together. We became so close that we called each other's parents by their first names and walked in and out of each other's homes like we belonged there.

The trouble started during my and Nash's freshman year of high school. Jackson drove us all to school in his old beat-up Ford Explorer. Nash and I were always assigned the backseat as we were the youngest. Up until that point, I had never considered that it was considered weird for me to hang out with just guys because that was how it had always been for me. It had always been just Nash and me, or the two of us with our brothers, doing things together.

Once the high school girls realized who my brother was and that I was friends with the Reed brothers, things started to change. The older girls would alternate giving me dirty looks with pretending to be sweet and acting like they were my friend, but only when the boys were around. I never realized back then that they were jealous.

Now when I look back it is clear that the girls who acted like they wanted to be my friend, in reality just wanted a chance to get invited to my house so they could get close to either Jackson or the Reeds. They forgot about me the minute they got inside the door. As a result, I ended up spending a lot of time on my own in high school. I became withdrawn and preferred to be by myself in either the library or in my room. I had hoped that things would change once Jackson graduated, but it didn't.

When Jackson moved to college out of state, Isaac became the designated driver back and forth to high school. Nash and I were sophomores, and that was the year when things really started to change for the worse. Nash grew a lot that year and suddenly he wasn't a boy any longer, but a young man, full of hormones. He became as interested in girls as he was in hockey. And I don't mean interested in girls like me. No, the older girls. The kind that had fully developed bodies and wore tight skirts and tops and flung their perfectly styled hair over their shoulders. He still spent some time with me but treated me like one of the guys.

By our junior year, Nash was already over 6 feet tall and 200 pounds of solid muscle. He quickly became the most popular guy, not just in our school, but the entire area. Driving to school with him became awkward. I, like all the other high school girls, was infatuated with Nash Reed. His incredible body, dark tousled hair, and mesmerizing green eyes made us all swoon. I didn't admit it though. Not to anyone, and barely to myself. The fact that I knew that he was a good person added to my attraction to him. I also knew that I would have never had a chance. The other girls that Nash spent time with were just too gorgeous. They didn't have big glasses, frizzy hair, and baggy clothes like I did.

Once Nash started to pick up his flavors of the week to drive them to school in the mornings, I began to take my own car.

When senior year came around, Nash played hockey almost every day. As much as I loved to watch him play, I started to distance myself from him. It just hurt too much to watch him hook up with girls left and right all the time.