by Serena Bell
He nods.
She releases her dad and, squealing, gives me a huge hug.
And right then, I decide I’m gonna be the kind of girl everyone but me already believes I am.
Chapter 38
Ty
I text Derek to ask if I can see him and he texts me his address, around the corner from Powell Barnett Park in the Central District.
He opens the door and lets me into his apartment. It’s nice inside, with furniture that looks like it came from some place other than Ikea, and woven rugs on the walls and floors.
“I’m still mad,” I say, before he can say anything.
“I know,” he says.
“I might be mad forever.” I cross my arms.
He nods. “I know. I’m not asking you not to be mad. I’m not even asking you to forgive me.”
“What are you asking?” To my surprise, my voice sounds like I’m asking a real question, not making an accusation.
“If you’ll have a beer with me now and again. If you’ll answer a text every now and again. If you’ll meet my eyes.”
Startled, I do. His are light brown like mine and surprisingly lonely. I don’t know much about how he lives these days, but I think he’s single. I feel regret. And remorse.
It’s like looking in a mirror. A slightly distorted mirror that adds weight. People used to sometimes think we were twins. We pretended we were.
We felt like we were.
I remember things I’d made myself forget. How we would dump the entire twenty-gallon tote of Legos out on the living room floor and play for hours in a kind of trance, building worlds together. How we played football for hours and hours, until my arm was stiff and locked and Mom had to make us come inside. How we lay in bed some nights when neither of us could sleep, fantasizing that one day we’d both be in the PFL, both be playing the big game under the truest, brightest lights.
“We could get a beer,” I say.
He exhales hard. “Thanks,” he says. Then, “Ty—I was scared. She was dying, and then it was gonna just be me and you, and—I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to be your father. I wanted to be your brother. I wanted—”
His voice splinters, but he pulls it together. He doesn’t finish the sentence, but I can guess. I wanted Mom to get better. That was what we’d both wanted, of course. Her. Our family, under one roof.
“Mom wanted me to go,” he says. “She knew you were going to make it to the PFL, but she didn’t think I was, and she was worried about what would happen to both of us if you got injured. She was so weak, and I didn’t want to say no to her. But Ty. I should’ve told her no. I should’ve told her that I was all you had left—”
This time, when his voice breaks, I feel it in my own chest, the way I did yesterday watching O and his brother grieve their father.
This—this is the real reason I kept Derek away for so long. Because his pain and my pain are the same, and I wanted to hold that pain at bay as long as I fucking could.
But it always comes back for you, this shit. You never leave it behind. No matter how hard you try to turn your back, no matter how fast you run away.
“You left.” My voice is oddly steady.
He nods. “Yeah. I left.”
“I asked you not to go, and you fucking left me.”
It rises to almost a roar, the closest I think I’ll ever come to releasing the anger and grief I’ve been carrying, and I wouldn’t say it’s some giant relief, but my chest and throat loosen just a little.
“Yeah. I did. And I’m so, so sorry.”
I clench both my hands in fists and look into the farthest corner, and with the deepest effort of will, I hold it together.
When I can talk again, I say, “I tried to talk Dad out of leaving.”
I was six and my father quit his warehouse job and took a long-haul trucking gig. He had explained to me how the job would take him away from us for long stretches, and I’d lost my mind.
“I didn’t know,” Derek says.
His eyes are full of pain. Reflecting mine.
I’d wrapped my arms around my father’s leg and tried to hold onto him so he couldn’t leave. I cried and begged and whined, while he explained that sometimes fathers have to go far away to do work for their families, that he’d always come back and things would be easier for all of us financially when he returned. He said he needed me to be strong and grown up. Derek and I would need to take care of Mom till he got back.
On his second route, he fell asleep at the wheel on the interstate.
I told him, I thought. I told him not to go.
“He went anyway.”
Derek doesn’t bother to say I know. We both know.
“And Mom—”
“Don’t,” he says. He turns away.
“I begged her to do the treatment.”
I hate the way the words sound, said out loud.
Derek was already gone when my mother told me she wasn’t going to do the experimental treatment.
She had a purple scarf tied around her head. Her skin was the color of a bruise on white flesh. Her eyes had sunk into her head. It hurt me to look at her.
I love you so much. And I don’t want to leave you. But I’m so, so tired.
Please, Mom. For me. Just this one more thing.
Now it’s my turn to look away. “She was so tired. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“You didn’t want her to leave you, too.”
His words make something like a scream rise up in my chest, and I have to battle it back so it doesn’t suffocate me.
Derek reaches out a hand but doesn’t quite touch me. I think he doesn’t know what I’ll do.
I’m not sure what I’ll do.
“We were just kids,” he says. “We did the best we could.”
I’d been just a kid, and everyone had left, and nothing I’d said had made the slightest goddamn difference, and my grief for that former self, that kid-self I’d tried so hard to leave behind, threatens to drown me.
“Everyone left. And it never helped to say I needed you, or I loved you, or I couldn’t do it without you—it never made a damn bit of difference—”
And suddenly I hear what that kid, that drowning kid, is trying to say to me through all the pain.
“I always felt like I wasn’t enough—not worth staying for.”
Derek looks like he’s drowning in the same sea I am. “Ty, no. No. Not that. Never.”
And that’s when I think of Iona.
It might not be so bad for me to get away from this situation…
We both know this isn’t—I mean, Sally was just—
I’m thinking it might be the best…
All that stuff she said, she hadn’t made up her mind. She wasn’t determined to leave. She wasn’t all ready to follow her football dreams across the country because of her unstoppable passion for the game.
She didn’t want to go, and she’d wanted me to talk her out of leaving.
She’d wanted me to tell her she’d misunderstood the look on my face when Sally had mentioned marriage. She wanted me to call bullshit on the “player”-in-both-senses-of the-word line.
She’d wanted me to ask her to stay.
And somewhere in the terrified back of my brain, well hidden under layers of linebacker and alpha male, I’d seen all the people who’d stood in front of me and let me tell them how much I needed them and still walked away.
“Oh, shit,” I say. And then, “No, not oh, shit. No. It’s a good thing. I think. I think it’s a good thing. If I’m not too late. Derek—I am so in for the beer. But can we get it another time? I have something I have to do. Right now.”
Chapter 39
Ty
I drive like a cheetah on speed back to my apartment, run up the stairs, and—
“Oh,” I say.
She’s sitting on the floor against my door.
“I was—I was coming back here to pack. So I could come to Baltimore. So I could ask you—”
Oh, fu
ck it; if you are going to turn a lifetime’s habit upside down, you should do it right, which is to say, balls to the wall.
“So I could beg you to come back to Seattle. Not to take the D.C. job. To stay here. With me.”
Her eyes open wide. “You don’t need to beg me.”
“Yes, I do,” I say, all ready to explain about my childhood and how paralyzed I’d felt in the face of her leaving, how unwilling to ask for anything ever again and have it not granted, when she says, “No, you really don’t,” and suddenly we’re glaring at each other. She tilts her chin up, the same way she did in her office the very first time we squared off against each other, and just like that day, I want to sink my teeth into her skin.
Only this time I actually can, and without planning it, I have crowded her tight against the door to my apartment, and am whispering against her ear, “Fucking fuck, Iona, when you look at me like that I just want to bend you over something and show you who’s actually in charge here.”
All the breath gusts out of her, and her hands come up to my head, drawing it down, and our mouths collide so hard I taste blood, but I don’t give a crap because it feels so good to have her body pressed against mine and her tongue exploring me. I try not to stop kissing her while I grapple in my pocket for my key, then fumble with the key in the lock. I break the kiss only long enough to move her away from the door, and then I maneuver her through the door and into my apartment.
We leave a trail of clothing through my living room and into the bedroom, and when I get her naked I do exactly what I’d said I would and bend her over the edge of my bed. And then I take a minute to enjoy the view. Because I know Iona has this vision of herself as unfeminine or whatever, but she is dead fucking wrong. Her waist is small and flares to her beautiful ass, which is totally worthy of its own anthem, and in this position I can reach under her and tweak both her nipples, which makes her buck back against me. I barely have the presence of mind to dig in the nightstand for a condom, but I do it, and then I spread her and drive into her and—
“You see?” I demand.
I’m answered by a long moan.
“Who’s in charge now?”
“You are,” she whimpers.
I stroke into her, long, luxurious strokes that threaten to drive me out of my mind way too fast.
“I can make you come if I want to make you come.” I wrap my arm around her and slip one finger into her wet heat to find her clit.
“Ty,” she begs.
God, I like that way too much.
“Or I can make you wait, if I want to make you wait.”
I remove my hand and she whimpers.
“Ty, please.”
I could get used to this.
But I want more. I pull out. “Turn over.”
“Make me,” she whispers.
Adrenaline sings through my veins and my cock, which is already so hard it hurts, swells a little more. I grab her and lift her and flip her, and she lies on her back on my bed, looking up at me, pleased and meek, and oh, my fucking God.
I surge over her and into her, and I fuck her, big, deep strokes, and for a little while she lies there and takes it, which is hot, but then—even hotter—she starts fucking back, lifting her hips, whimpering as I thrust as deep as I can, wriggling and circling. Her eyes are on mine, challenging, demanding, hot and steady, our gazes locked just the way our bodies are locked into this shared rhythm, and we push each other up, up up, neither of us willing to give in until both of us are shouting and through it all, every spasm and aftershock, the earthquake of emotion and gratitude and relief and release I feel, neither of us looks away.
I collapse over her, just barely able to hold my weight off her, and love the feel of her heart racing against my chest, the sound of her breath rushed and rapid in my ear.
And then she starts laughing.
“What?” I demand.
“My point was just that you don’t have to beg because I’m not leaving Seattle and I’m not taking the D.C. job,” she says.
Iona
Ty does that thing he does, with the washcloth, which makes me want to cry. I mean, who does that? And here he is, this big, muscular football player, and he has this tender streak.
Okay, I am crying.
“Don’t cry.”
“It’s the washcloth,” I say.
“The washcloth?”
“It’s just very—nice.”
He puts the washcloth away and comes and lies down beside me. “I do need to beg,” he says. “Not for you. For me. Because—”
And then he explains. Haltingly. In his simple, crazy-eloquent way. How he pleaded with his dad to stay. Lit into his brother, trying to get him to see why it would be wrong for him to go. Begged his mother not to give up and die.
He told me how no one listened. How no one stayed. How it felt, to be the guy that no one stayed for.
“You didn’t believe they loved you enough to stay.”
He turns away from me when I say that, doesn’t answer, but I know him well enough by now to know that’s a yes.
He takes my chin in his hand and turns my head so I’m forced to look straight into his eyes—not that it’s a hardship. “I want you to stay. I want you to stay more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. I want you to stay in Seattle and stay in my life and stay—fuck, I want you to stay in my apartment.”
I blink back a few stray tears. I should have known if anything would make me cry it would be Ty Williams. “I’m staying,” I say. “But here’s the thing. I shouldn’t have made you ask. Because I knew all along what I wanted, and I walked away from it. I was a coward, and I didn’t fight for you because I told myself I wasn’t enough, or I was too much—”
“Even though I told you you weren’t?”
“You looked so horrified when Sally Slaybourne said—”
“About that,” he interrupts. “I was shocked by her gall. And yes, I was a little freaked out by the idea. But I’ve had a fair amount of time to think about what I want, and I’ve realized that in the last few months, football has gone from being everything to me to being just one thing. An important thing, but not the most important thing.”
“Me too,” I whisper.
“You’re the most important thing.”
“You’re my most important thing.”
“God,” he says, and kisses me, forcing me open so he can show me, long and deep, how he feels.
We’re both breathless when he finishes.
“We don’t have to get married just because Sally Slaybourne wishes we would,” I say.
“No,” he says. “I don’t want us to get married for any other reason than because we want to fall asleep next to each other and wake up next to each other and get each other coffee and breakfast every morning and fuck like that—” He seems to have derailed himself.
“Like what? Like from behind, me over the bed?”
“That,” he says. “And the other way, too, with me bossing you with my dick and you bossing me with your eyes.”
For a football player, he has a way with words. Another busted stereotype.
“Actually, all the ways.” He has a distinct glint in his eyes now. “We shouldn’t get married unless we want to do it all the ways, every which way, multiple times a day.”
“That’s sounding pretty good to me,” I say. “Could we try that out for a bit? See how it works out for us?”
“Yes,” he says. “Let’s start now.”
Chapter 40
Iona
Ty tosses another bucket of ice into the enormous tin pail that we’re using for drinks, then fills the ice bucket and sets it down.
“Olives!” he says suddenly.
We bought so much food, stuffed his fridge so full, that we keep remembering things we forgot—mesquite smoked almonds, peanut butter–filled pretzels, Pocky sticks, Ty’s favorite treat from Uwagimaya, Seattle’s Asian market, where we spent several hours browsing last weekend.
We’re throwing a part
y that we’re calling a housewarming but that we’ve been privately referring to as our “coming out” party, as in our first party as a publicly recognized couple. We went public just a couple days after I showed up on Ty’s doorstep.
Sally Slaybourne strongly urged us to wait awhile (“In case you change your minds,” she said, watching Ty warily—I had a momentary pang of doubt, until Ty looked over at me, shook his head vehemently, and reached for my hand), but we agreed we were tired of sneaking around and ready to just be a couple, and Sally had to agree with us that it would be better to do it proactively than for the news to, inevitably, leak somehow.
Of course, it was hardly a perfect secret by that point—not only did several coaches and front office people know, but Zach and Calder apparently sussed it out on their own. Still, it’s been a lot of fun to go public.
We planned how we were going to break the news in the press and in social media—not that it would stay in our control for long, and for the last few weeks, it’s been more or less a full-time job, taking interviews, and replies to congratulations on social media. And ignoring the trolls. There’s always that. There’s plenty of ugliness—people wondering why, if Ty could have anyone he wanted, he’d choose plain old me, speculating about when the affair had begun and whether I’d actually slept with Ty to get the job, or just posting inappropriate commentary on what our sex life must be like.
But weirdly enough, most of it hasn’t bothered me. Haters gotta hate, I tell myself, and I try not to read stuff unless I absolutely have to.
And the thing is, Ty is amazing. Between replying to people who dis me by saying, “I’m a PFL linebacker and that’s my hot girlfriend you’re talking about” and replying to most of the congratulations himself with comments like, “Never been this happy,” or “I’m the luckiest guy I know,” he’s made me feel like he has my back one hundred percent in all of this. It’s hard for me to get too hurt by people slamming me online when I can barely sit down at the computer before my smoking hot linebacker boyfriend is kissing the back of my neck, cupping my breasts in his hands, and trying to convince me that it’s time to take another nookie break.
