by G. K. Brady
Daisy tiptoed to her, eyes glued to the TV, and nodded. “He’s okay,” she whispered to Violet. Her concern made a puddle of Lily’s heart.
Ivy again. “Guy interviews well, not like a dumb jock at all.”
Lily did roll her eyes this time. “Because he’s not a dumb jock.” She couldn’t hold back the pride swelling in her chest or the tingle in her toes as she watched him handle the reporters with grace, poise, and humor.
Is Kathryn Tappen in the locker room with him? Would he want to ask her out? Would she want to ask him out? Did he have fresh condoms with him on the trip?
“Mommy, what’s a dumb jock?”
“Lil! You gotta jump that man. At least one more time. And take pics to share with your sister.”
“Ivy, stop! I am not—” She bit back the “jumping him” on the tip of her tongue.
Daisy’s wide gray eyes were on her. “What’s a dumb jock?”
“Well, he just might want you to,” Ivy cackled.
Lily ran her fingers through Daisy’s hair. “Hang on a minute, sweetie. Let me finish talking to Aunt Ivy. Aunt Ivy,” she sang, “what are you talking about?”
“Oh nothing,” she sang back innocently.
“Ivy—”
“Gotta go, Lil. Don’t forget to watch those highlights!”
“Mad World” queued up in Lily’s head.
After explaining what a jock was—he’s a sporty guy and Mommy shouldn’t have used the word “dumb”—and settling the girls, Lily returned to watch the highlights on TV. But her pinging phone interrupted her. She picked it up, and a smile twitched her lips.
Gage: Did you see the game, GL?
Lily: GL?
Gage: Goldilocks.
Lily: LOL. Only part. Are you OK?
Gage: So you saw the fight? What about the goal?
She laughed out loud. Though texted words didn’t convey tone, his excitement was easy to pick up. God, he was adorable. No, he’s a grown man. Grown men aren’t adorable. They’re masculine and sexy and they can do things … God, I want him to do things. No, no, no, I don’t! Once every five years is good. I’m a sex camel.
If only she could get the man out of her fantasies.
Lily: Didn’t see either. Was hoping to catch your Gordie Howe on the highlights.
Gage: That’s my first Gordie!
Lily: Congrats, Professor. Is your eye OK?
Gage: All good. Just another cut.
Lily: I’m glad, but you’re looking a little heavy on the purple eyeshadow. Got a big date tonight?
Yeah, she couldn’t help but slide that in.
Gage: You know it. A double date with room service and an ice pack. If you were here, though, I’d lose both and take you out, purple eyeshadow and all. If you could stand looking at my face, that is.
A fluttering sensation tickled Lily’s tummy. She held it in check and typed, Ivy says the fighting makes you look hot.
Gage: LOL. You should listen to your big sister.
Wait. Were they text-flirting now? How had that happened? No idea, but she was enjoying it. Too much. She conjured an image of the sea of cards—next to his bed—and the pretty brunette.
Lily: I should go tuck the girls in.
Gage: Tell them hi for me.
Lily: D was really worried about you BTW.
A selfie of Gage—sans shirt—reclining against his hotel headboard popped up on her screen. He had his infectious grin plastered on his face.
Gage: Show her this. Then call me when you’re done putting them to bed.
Lily: Call you why?
Gage: So you can sing me to sleep? It’s turning into a long week. He added a praying hands emoji.
Lily’s heart was thumping in her chest when she put the girls to bed, poured herself a glass of white wine, and returned to her phone. She tapped a quick text. It’s kinda late. Still want me to call? Her phone rang almost immediately.
“It’s never too late.” Gage’s voice was low and gravelly.
“So you want me to sing you to sleep?” she squeaked. Part of her brain registered that he wasn’t out with one of his many admirers if he was on the phone with her, right?
He rumbled a chuckle. “Yeah, but first I wanted to find out how my girls are doing.”
My girls? Oh, that sounded nice. “You mean Daisy and Hobbes?”
“Hobbes. Right,” he snorted. “I worry about you way more than I worry about that cat.”
Lily lowered her drawbridge a few inches. “You worry about me?” A warm, sticky feeling enveloped her from her toes to her neck.
“Yeah. Not that you can’t take care of yourself, but I worry when I’m not around. So what’ve you been up to?”
Words caught in her throat. She cleared them out. “Getting Paige’s social media campaign up and running.”
Another warm chuckle. “I guess this means I’m second fiddle to Paige now, despite how much I value twittering out to the world.”
Lily let out a laugh. “It’s tweeting, not twittering. Speaking of which, have you checked Twitter in the last half hour, Professor?”
“No, why?”
“I might’ve posted your selfie.”
“What? Shit! That was strictly for you and Daisy.” Laughter lingered in his voice. “That’s the last time I send you a racy picture.”
“That’s racy?” She sipped her wine. “Don’t worry. I cropped it so your bare chest isn’t showing.” Although I’m enjoying the uncropped version.
He dropped his voice. “Well, maybe you should reciprocate.”
“Meaning?”
“I sent you a picture of my bare chest, so …”
If she hadn’t swallowed her wine, she would’ve sprayed it everywhere. “Have you been drinking?”
“I take it that’s a no? Damn.” His laugh rolled through the phone, long and low and sexed-up. A delicious flutter waved its way through her body before she could rein it in.
Okay. Now I’m talking to Sexy Gage. Yet another side of the same man. Did he flirt with other women this way? Maybe this was the Gage who got all the cards. The thought unsettled her. “Do you do this a lot?”
“What?”
“Ask women to send you pictures?”
A loud, decidedly unsexy sputtering noise was her answer. “No! Shit! I was only kidding.” He raced on. “Lily, it was a joke. A bad joke, obviously. I mean, if you wanted to send me a picture, any kind of picture, I’d totally be on board.” A noisy exhale. “Damn it. You’re not going to sing me to sleep now, are you? I could’ve used it too.”
The playfulness disappeared from his voice, and worry grabbed hold of her. “Why? What’s going on?”
Her heart squeezed when he sighed on the other end. “Grandma fell today.”
“Oh no! How?”
“Shit, I didn’t mean to bring this up and kill our fun conversation.”
“Gage, what happened? Please tell me.”
He told her how he’d gotten a call from his mother right before his pre-game nap. His grandmother had either lost her balance or tripped over something in her apartment and landed on her face. Nothing broken, but she looked as though she’d been hit by a car.
“Mom says they spent nearly eight hours in emergency,” he continued, his voice quiet. “My little scratch pales in comparison to what she looks like.”
Oh, how Lily wished she could bring his teasing tone back. Help him get his mind off a situation he was powerless to change. How well she understood that helpless feeling.
“Grandma was freaking out because she didn’t know where she was and she wanted to go home—her old home, where she lived when she was a girl. God, Lily, I should have been there.”
“There’s nothing you could’ve done, Gage.”
“I could’ve kept Grandma calm! I could’ve helped my mom. It all fell on her.” He followed this up quickly with, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”
The regret and blame in his voice chiseled a little chink out of her hea
rt.
“You’re not. You’re taking it out on you. Gage, you’re the best son I know, and you’re doing all you can, but you can’t control everything that happens. Your grandma could’ve fallen from a simple twist as she was sitting down or getting out of bed.”
When he didn’t respond, she went on. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Some things are just inescapable. I should know. I’ve spent the last five years telling myself the same thing.” The words slid out so easily it took a moment for her surprise she’d uttered them to catch up.
“You’re talking about Jack,” he said softly.
She tugged out her necklace. “Yes.”
“Lily, can you … Will you tell me what happened?”
God, this man was making her feel things she wasn’t ready to feel … like the urge to climb into the warmth and safety of his strong arms and cling to him for dear life.
Chapter 16
Spectral Visions
Gage settled more deeply into the mattress and folded an arm behind his head, trying to get as comfortable as possible. Though he’d grown up around women’s tears, they still flustered him. Hearing Lily cry would shake him up even more, so he braced himself for the potential storm. But beneath his concern, unease bristled. Though he was curious about Jack, he was also jealous. Hearing about Jack would only remind him Jack was first in Lily’s life. The anticipation inside him, prickly like sea urchin spikes, was akin to meeting someone you disliked face-to-face.
As Lily began to talk, he sucked in a breath.
“Daisy was six months old when she came down with her first cold. Nothing unusual, though the symptoms always seem amplified in a baby. Jack got sick about a week later. We’d been on an exhausting tour through Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma, so it didn’t seem strange that one of us came down with something, especially with a sick baby in the mix.”
“Daisy went on tour with you?” Why this surprised him, he had little idea.
“Yes. She was a good little baby and could sleep anywhere. If it had come down to it, I’d have given up the band and stayed home. But we were one big family, and someone was always there to take care of her when I was onstage. Not your typical nine-to-five, but it worked for us.
“Jack and I decided to keep it going as long as we could. We knew one day she’d have to go to school, and that those were precious times, so we took full advantage.” She paused on a shaky breath. “Anyway, Jack got sick. We thought he’d caught Daisy’s cold, and maybe he had at first, but he wasn’t getting better. In fact, he got worse, so I took him to a doctor when we reached Missouri. They gave him flu medicine and sent him on his way. He felt a little better and made it through the rest of the trip. But when we got back to Colorado, it seemed to come back and bite him hard.” Her voice hitched.
“Lily,” Gage made his voice as gentle as he could, “you don’t need to keep going.” He plucked a water bottle from the nightstand and downed a big gulp.
“No, I do. I haven’t really talked to anyone besides Ivy like this, and not for a long time. I need to get it out. If you’re still willing to listen to me ramble, that is.”
Knowing she wanted him as her sounding board was a score that lifted him more than netting a game-winning goal. “Always. And you’re not rambling.”
“Thank you.” Her voice was small, and it tugged at him. After a thorough throat clearing, she continued. “I took him in when we got home, and they ran a battery of tests. They couldn’t find anything and said he hadn’t gotten enough rest and was still fighting the flu. He wound up in the hospital for a night, and the doctor there ran a few more tests. He called us in when he got the results.”
She paused. A long, eerily silent pause.
“I’m here,” he offered, “whenever you’re ready to talk. And if you want to stop, that’s okay too. Whatever you need, Lily.”
“I’ll never forget sitting in the doctor’s office that day.” Her voice shuddered with tears that ripped into him. “He, um, he told us Jack had stage four lung cancer. It had already spread to his vital organs and was in his bones. It was everywhere.”
Gage was stunned speechless.
“The strange thing was,” she continued, “he didn’t smoke. Never had. The doctor said it didn’t matter, that not all lung cancer comes from smoking. Anyway, he told us Jack could undergo chemo, but it wouldn’t do much good because the cancer was too far along. We stumbled out of there that day in a fog. Funny, though. I can still recall a blue Dodge parked next to us; I remember what the clouds looked like that day and that a small flight of geese lifted off from a pond. It’s all crystal clear, almost frozen in time.” Another pause and a sniffle. “We went to a Village Inn, of all places, and talked like we were having a business discussion. What we’d do in the next few weeks, what kind of funeral he wanted, what Daisy and I would do after … after … um …”
“Lily,” Gage whispered. God, this was killing him. He couldn’t fathom what it was doing to her. Frustrated that he couldn’t do anything to chase her pain away, he took another long pull of his water. The cool liquid flowed around the lump in his throat.
She rallied. “No, I’m okay.” He could practically hear her shaking off her sorrow. “At first, he seemed okay. He coughed a lot, but his color was good. He still ate like a horse, cracked jokes, and he was, you know, the Jack I knew. He worked on songs with Derek, practiced with the band, spent time with us. For a short while, I kidded myself that he’d beat this thing. That they’d been looking at the wrong test results, that Jack’s were switched with someone else’s. Or that a miracle had happened. But that didn’t last long.
“It’s devastating to watch someone deteriorate—you’ve seen it firsthand, watching your grandma. Jack’s decline seemed to pick up, like someone flipped a switch or sped up the film, and we couldn’t stop it.”
Her sniffles were coming hard and fast, her voice breaking. “I’m sorry,” she whimpered.
“There’s nothing to apologize for.” His whole body vibrated with wanting to reach through the damn phone and wrap her up. He realized he was seated upright on the bed, his knees bent, his elbows resting on them. His core was tight, his muscles taut, as though he prepared to take a stick check to the gut.
On the other end, she seemed to recover. “I stayed with him. In the hospital. I’d get up and take walks through the hallway or get coffee, and by the time I’d get back his complexion would have turned grayer and his body seemed more shriveled. It was as though he was wasting away right in front of me. And oh my God, then the pain took over.” Now her voice took on an angry, gritty quality, as though her teeth were clenching. “It got worse and worse. It was excruciating, no matter how much they upped his meds. And there was absolutely. Nothing. I. Could. Do. Just curl up beside him and watch.”
Gage dug the heel of his hand into his eyes, wiping moisture from them as Lily pulled in a long breath on the other end and released it. And again.
Her voice quavered. “Finally, they had him so doped up that he … I don’t know how much he was aware of at the end, whether he knew we were there with him—I hope he knew.”
“He knew, Lily. He did,” was all he could muster.
A little soul-tearing sob escaped her. “I’ll never forget when he stopped breathing. The lines on the monitor went flat, there was no pulse blipping. It was 10:44 in the morning, six weeks from the day he was diagnosed. But I swear—and no one will ever talk me out of this—even though the machines had gone quiet, his fingers squeezed mine. Then he was gone.”
They sat for a long time without talking, the only sound her soft sobs and her sniffles mingling with his. When Gage had enough presence of mind to look around for his empty water bottle, he discovered he’d crushed it.
“Are you still with me?” she said with a humorless laugh. “Or did I scare you off?”
He steadied his voice. “Never. I don’t scare that easily, Goldilocks, and I’m not going anywhere.”
She pulled in a breath. “No, I don’t believ
e you would. You’re a good man, Gage Nelson. Your family’s lucky to have you.”
“Would you please tell my mom that?”
“I’m sure she thinks you’re perfect.” She laughed, and it uncoiled his bunched muscles. He laughed too, and, God, it felt good.
“Something I’ve been wondering about, and if I’m overstepping, tell me to shut up,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Does social media consulting bring in enough to support you and Daisy?” Crap, the question didn’t come out the way he intended. “I’m sorry,” he backpedaled. “None of my business.”
“No, it’s fine. Jack took out a hefty life insurance policy when we got married. Neither of us ever imagined I’d have to use it.” Her voice seemed to catch. A beat later, she’d recovered. “I live off the interest from the policy. As for the social media, it brings in extra money for little splurges. Mostly, I do it because it keeps me sharp, it’s flexible, and I enjoy it. It gives me something to do now that Daisy’s in school.”
A silent sigh of relief whooshed out of him. At least he could rid himself of the worry she was struggling to make ends meet. “Well, you’re damn good at it.” He sounded clumsy, even to his own ears.
“Thank you.” A few beats later, she said, “So I don’t think I’ve ever known a fighting professor before, and I’m curious. What started it?”
Gage was grateful for the distraction. “I’m not sure I remember. Some gutterance.”
“Gutterance?” She sounded highly amused.
“Guttural utterance. He disparaged my family. And I think my manhood. Doesn’t matter.” Truth was, he really couldn’t remember the exact remark, only that it had been about his sister and had come from a douchebag he didn’t like, and he’d exploded. Nothing to be proud of, but sometimes shit happened on the ice.
“Were you on edge about your grandmother at the time?”
Yes. “No. Maybe. I don’t know, but it didn’t take much to set me off.”
“You don’t strike me as someone who loses his cool, so you must have been really upset to let whatever it was get to you.” Another pause, then her voice took on a lilting, soothing tone that seemed to stroke his overstretched nerves into submission. “I’m so sorry about your grandmother’s accident. Is there anything I can do?”
