I smiled. I’d never envied the teammates who had families to balance. But these dinners at the Delgados since his accident, it wrenched something wide open under my ribs. It was small offhand comments, his wife calling the owner a dumbass, his daughter clambering up on his lap while we ate the tamales that Rebecca knew I loved.
Those were the things I wanted.
The things I couldn’t have yet.
Normally, I cleared my plate two or three times. But something about the passage of another month had my appetite hiding. My phone stayed quiet. And enough time had gone by since my disaster of a meeting with the dumbass in question that it became harder and harder to know whether I should be reaching out to her.
If it would help.
Or if I’d make things worse.
For how aware I’d been of the risk I was taking in Oregon, my position with Adaline felt just as precarious as it had before I showed up at the masquerade.
Malcolm cleared his throat, and I blinked out of my thoughts.
Right.
He’d asked if Ned was my problem.
Sort of. But not really.
“He’s not making my life easier,” I answered. “Let’s just say that.”
Malcolm studied my expression and gave a slow nod. “Anything you want to talk about, man?”
There was nothing he could do.
Nothing he could fix or change, and talking about how much I missed her didn’t seem like it would help either.
“Not yet.”
He took that answer with a slow nod. “Should I be worried about you?”
I managed a smile. “Nah. You just worry about getting stronger. I’ll figure it out.”
But as May faded, and June began, I wasn’t sure I believed that anymore.
Adaline
Emmett had his own ringer on my phone.
Just in case. A hundred times a week, I wondered about the chokehold he had on my thought process after so long.
I wondered why it was so hard to send him a message to let him know I was thinking about him.
And I wondered if he was having the same conversations with himself.
It was surprisingly easy to set up my day to be full of distractions.
Work was the most convenient place to throw all my energy. I hired someone new, and after her first week on the job, she asked if it was normal for me to work sixty hours a week.
I ate an entire row of Oreos that night and kept my phone on the opposite side of my apartment where I wouldn’t be tempted by it.
I went home to Oregon as much as I could.
In the middle of June, my brother Erik and his wife Lydia gathered us all together in the kitchen at my parents’。
Tucked against my brother’s side, my sister-in-law cried happy tears as he told us they were expecting their first child.
My mom burst into loud tears. Hell … we all cried. Even Cameron conspicuously cleared his throat and said he had something in his eye when Tim and Erik embraced in that man-back-thumping hug thing.
Emmett was a regular fixture on SportsCenter as the teams started mini camps and ramped up their training. Sometimes, I turned it off. Most of the time, I tortured myself by dissecting what they had to say.
For the first time in my life, I had a horrible sense of disquiet spreading through my days. Even stranger was the violently stubborn refusal to dig into why. Like something would fracture irreparably if I forced myself to look too hard in the mirror.
A good-looking single dad—a professor at UDub with nice hazel eyes and a deep-dimpled smile—asked me out after we finished cleaning up his daughter’s tenth birthday party. I said no and refused to pinpoint why my entire body recoiled at the way he looked at me all day.