by Zoe Lee
“His lung is fully recovered and his air cast is off his wrist, right?” Dunk asked with that knowledgeability that surprised her every time, even though she knew he had studied physical therapy in college. “His leg cast won’t be a problem. Tristan has a patio, only two shallow steps, plus a ton of Adirondack chairs on the lawn. He can prop his leg up, no problem.”
“But he’s still tired all of the time.”
Dunk pursed his lips and pressed, as if he were questioning her judgment, “Tired? Or pissed off that he can’t walk around yet?”
“Both,” Daisy snapped, rubbing her temple where a headache brewed. “Listen, Dunk,” she sighed, “it’s not just Conor. I’m tired, too, and Saturdays Conor usually goes to my parent’s house. It’s the only time I get.”
“And you don’t want to spend it with me,” he stated.
With Dunk McCoy, his face was an open book, and if you couldn’t see his face, you could hear everything in his voice, too. If you could see and hear, it was about as subtle as a brick to the face. Daisy was amazed he was ever able to keep a secret in his life, he was so open and honest.
Daisy had never heard his voice so flat, or seen his face so closed off.
“You know that’s not true,” she protested, her heart speeding up in distress. “But I’ve been living with Conor. I don’t get any time to myself. I take seven-minute showers and I sleep on a fold-out couch in his living room. If I do go out, it’s to see you or Karen and Stephanie or the grocery store. Everyone wants to talk to me, find out how Conor’s doing.”
“So now I’m included in everyone.”
“Dunk, I…” She gulped, feeling traitorous tears fill up her wide eyes. “I’m just so tired and stressed out,” she whispered.
She knew it hurt him, she knew that he missed her. She knew how much he cared about her; she felt it and was enveloped by it every time he spoke her name or hugged her or made love with her.
But she had made the mistake of ignoring her own needs when she was with Tyler, choosing to take care of him even when it was burning her out. So she couldn’t give in, no matter how much she wanted to.
She reached out and smoothed his hair aside and shook her head softly. “I need you to be patient, Dunk,” she pleaded, because she couldn’t be a cold bitch about it either. “Conor’s cast should come off in three weeks and then he’ll have crutches and I’ll be able to move home.”
Dunk was stiff under her touch, his face painfully neutral and all of his muscles bunched big and tight. “I have been patient, Daisy Rhys,” he replied, gently taking her hand and placing it back on the table. “I’ve done my damn best to give you space and do things the way you need. But your brother isn’t on death’s doorstep, Daisy. He’s a grown man who could hire a nurse and call taxis to take him to physio and appointments.”
“But—”
“I understand you want to take care of him by yourself, and I understand that it means something to you,” he went on, still in that mature, flat way that had dread pooling in her guts, making her sweat. “I know I’m usually a laid-back guy. But I have limits. You’re my girlfriend, and I’m your boyfriend. I deserve to get some time, too.”
He took a quick breath and Daisy froze, because while it was so special and rare for him to vocalize what he needed, she knew what he was about to say. It was all slow-motion, but it didn’t matter how slowly time was passing in those seconds for Daisy, because she was still frozen. A million years could have passed by for her in that one second, and she still wouldn’t have been able to open her mouth and say something before he did.
“And you deserve more too. I can’t be a good boyfriend if I can’t be there with you. So if you can’t do this right now, I under… I understand.”
With the break in his voice, she unfroze.
“Oh, Dunk,” she whispered.
He shook his head hard, his dirty blond hair swaying around his ears. He pushed up from the table, but left his hands splayed wide and pressed down hard onto its surface once he was on his feet. His head hung low, and the full weight of his hurt and disappointment was etched into him.
“It’s okay, Daisy. Like my friends tried to tell me the morning after Jamie and Leda’s wedding, great sex doesn’t make a great love story.”
“But it’s just a month—”
His eyes snapped up to hers. “Please respect my decision,” he ground out softly. “It took me ten years to find a woman I wanted to be my girlfriend, and now that I know what it’s supposed to be like, I’m not going back to what I was before. Happy to let you call me. Happy to let you set the rules. We were supposed to be co-captains, but you’re the Princess.”
With one more shake of his head, he shoved away from the table.
Stunned, Daisy sat there, staring at nothing.
She’d never expected Dunk to be so… adamant.
She’d never expected that he would run out of patience with her.
She’d never expected that Duncan McCoy could break her heart.
Chapter 14
Dunk
Dunk was sprawled out on his couch watching baseball when someone knocked on the door to the upstairs, where his parents lived.
He grunted and muted the tv, then called out, “Yeah? Come in.”
“Hey, son,” his mom said in her loud smoker’s voice as she came into his apartment with a big laundry basket braced on her hip.
“Hey, Mom,” he replied. “How’s it going?”
She dropped the basket with a clunk onto his coffee table and propped her hands on her hips, blowing her bangs out of her face. “Don’t give me that casual ‘how’s it going,’ Duncan Paul McCoy,” she said in her no-nonsense, don’t you bullshit me, child of mine tone.
Wincing, Dunk looked up at her reluctantly.
He hadn’t talked to her since he’d broken up with Daisy.
He’d been expecting this. His mom wasn’t a busybody, but she sure as hell always knew everything that was going on in Maybelle all the same.
“Um,” he faltered.
“What the hell did you do?” she barked.
That blew away his reluctance in a split second. It had been only a few days since he’d ended things with Daisy. It had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done. He wasn’t the guy who laid out ultimatums or was dead set on telling people what he thought and felt and wanted. He was the guy who was happy and laid back, who joked about sports, coached football, drank beer and laughed with his friends, and occasionally got up to hijinks to help his friends pull their heads out of their asses.
But he cared too much about Daisy to accept less than everything from her. And he refused to believe that it had been the wrong thing to do.
So he frowned at his mom and said in as serious a tone as he ever used, “I broke up with Daisy. Is that what the hell I did?”
“Why? That girl is sunshine, sweet and creative and she loves—”
“Don’t,” he cut her off, holding up his hands to block the words from landing on his heart, which was already bruised and shook up enough.
Shelly’s stern expression softened and she sat on the couch next to Dunk. She ruffled his hair affectionately and sighed quietly. “Alright, son. Why don’t you tell me your side of it? Because I can’t imagine what Daisy Rhys could have done wrong that would make you break up with her.”
“Yeah, I’m the screw-up who no one takes seriously,” he muttered, “so clearly it had to be my fault. I must have been the one to screw up.”
“Now, now,” Shelly chastised, “don’t get all prickly. I’m just trying to understand. You were so happy and I thought things were going so well. I know she’s been having a tough time helping her brother, but I can’t see how that would be any kind of a reason to break up with her, Dunk.”
His mom and Terrence, who had been Dunk’s stepdad since he was five, were really good people. They worked hard, laughed hard, hugged their children and told them they were proud. They’d cheered at all of Dunk’s games, when he was playin
g and later when he was coaching, and they’d supported his sisters in all of their activities too. They’d never let him get away with anything just because he was talented on the gridiron.
But they weren’t people who got too serious with each other.
Life was good, and they were happy.
He wanted to give her some jokey answer, some clever thing to get her to laugh and ruffle his hair again and then leave him alone.
But she was his mom and he loved her, and he was hurting.
So he explained, “I’m thirty-one now, and I’ve had plenty of fun—”
“Please don’t mention your sex life to me, Dunk,” she ordered.
That dragged a quick laugh out of him. “I’m trying to say that I wanted more with Daisy, Mom. Almost six months of dating—actually dating— and Daisy was already my number-one priority. But I’m not hers.”
“Dunk—”
“And it’s okay,” he said really fast, as if he said and thought it enough, it would become the truth. “With all the other girls, they approached, I let them call me, let them come and go when they were ready. No big deal.” His jerky shrug showed his discomfort, but he forged on, “But it wasn’t casual like that with Daisy. I thought we were making something real, a partnership, Mom. I know Conor’s recovery is tough and important, but I needed her to make time for me, too. To be there for me, too. And she couldn’t be. Or, wouldn’t be. So I told her that was okay, but…”
“I’m proud of you,” she said, her tone soft even though the words rang out like an announcement on the high school loudspeakers. “It’s always been so hard for you to say what you want.” She ruffled his hair like he’d hoped, but then she whacked him on the back of the head. “But you’re an idiot if you think a partnership is always equal all the time, son.”
“What?” he yelped. “Mom! I’m dying of a broken heart over here!”
“Get your head in the game,” she said, back to that no-nonsense tone. “One of the reasons you’re such a good coach is because you understand where the other team’s mind is at, what they want to get out of a play or a game or a season. I raised you better than to see only your side of it.”
Petulant, he muttered, “How’m I supposed to get what I need to be happy if that’s not what Daisy needs to be happy? Daisy did the whole self-sacrificing thing with her ex-husband and all it got her was empty arms.”
Shelly huffed. “Daisy fell in love with that boy when she was in pigtails and braces, Duncan. She worshipped him. She didn’t know how to hold back and not give him everything she had. I don’t think a man can understand that drive.”
“This isn’t some feudal romance,” he groaned, rolling his eyes. “I don’t want to take and take. I want to give and give. But she has to be there to accept it, doesn’t she? Doesn’t she have to be willing to at least try to find a way to accept my love and it give back? If she can’t, then that’s not fair.”
Her lips pursed like she was sucking on something sour, and she pushed around to dump out the laundry onto the coffee table. She shook out the first shirt with a snap and began to fold it efficiently, thinking.
“I thought she was my Cinderella,” Dunk went on, and as he spoke, he felt his basic nature, happy and positive and hopeful, coming back to him. “I fell in love with her and it was amazing, Mom. The best feeling I’ve ever had. She might’ve woken that up in me, but I’m not Sleeping Beauty or Snow White. I’m a man and it’s 2017 and I want a partner.”
“Hmph,” she said, and sent him an arch look as she kept folding.
Dunk laced his hands behind his head and smirked, knowing that noise meant that she couldn’t argue with what he’d said.
“I’m gonna call Jesse and see if she wants to grab some barbeque,” he decided aloud.
Maybe it sounded trite to say that Daisy Rhys had changed his life, and maybe it was naive of him to think it was this easy to just accept that the timing hadn’t been right. Maybe late that night, when he was a little tipsy and a little nostalgic and his arms were empty, he’d have this momentary doubt. Maybe he’d doubt Daisy. Maybe he’d wonder if she just hadn’t loved him like he thought, even though they’d never said the words. Maybe he’d wonder if she hadn’t loved him enough, the world’s worst qualifier of all time.
But for now, he knew how amazing it was to be in love and he wanted to find that again. No more letting women and life happen to him. He was a new man.
“What was up with you at pool?” Dunk asked Jesse later, once she was full of barbeque and a porter, so full that she was too lazy to move and escape the question. “Oh yeah, I remember. Did you think I’d forget? You were a little damn overboard with the harsh truths. It’s not like you.”
Jesse groaned and slumped down in her side of the booth. “I can’t take you seriously with rib sauce all over your damn face,” she evaded.
“Out with it,” he prompted, brandishing a rib at her.
She eyeballed him, gauging how dug in he was about getting this out of her, and finally relented. “This isn’t to share,” she stated first.
Dunk crossed his heart and made the Boy Scouts’ sign.
“I got a job offer… in Chicago.”
When he gaped, she glared defensively.
“It doesn’t start until October. A small, upscale hotel, apparently a cool neighborhood. They’re looking for a new GM and the owners were at a conference at La Fontaine and came by to check out the Dogwood. We emailed and talked a few times and then they offered me the job.”
“And you’re thinking about it seriously,” Dunk surmised.
After she’d jerked her head once in confirmation, he blew out a noisy breath and then grinned and held up his hand for a high-five.
She rolled her eyes but smacked his palm hard, then yanked her hand back before he could grab it and hang on to it.
“Okay…” he rallied, “that is really great.”
“But?”
“No buts,” he protested immediately. Too fast, really. She cocked an eyebrow and pointedly took a giant bite off a cheesy potato wedge. “I think I get why you’re considering it.” He paused, feeling a little uncertain about saying it out loud. “Okay. We’re officially in our thirties. Aden and Leda are both settled down and domestic and while we love their significant others, it’s not like it was a few years ago. And Munn isn’t working with you anymore, so the Dogwood isn’t the same as it used to be either. And…”
“And even if I wanted to, there’s no one in Maybelle who could be my significant other,” Jesse finished bluntly. “You and me, we’ve always kind of had a similar thing going with women. You’re pure fun, I’m the drunken experiment, but it ends the same way: plenty of sex, sure, but that’s it.”
He couldn’t fully understand what Jesse had gone through her whole life, being the only out lesbian in Maybelle. But if he were honest with himself, he’d always kind of wondered why she stuck around. Maybelle was a lot more welcoming and accepting than plenty of small towns, especially southern ones, but she’d never had a real chance to have a girlfriend.
So he ran his hands through his hair and then smiled, soft but still really big and goofy. “You know we all will miss you like hell, Jesse.”
“Will, not would?” she asked, as close to unsure as she ever was.
Now he did snatch up her hand and squeeze it. “Yeah, will.” He leveled her a look, the kind of steady, positive-vibes look he gave his kids when they needed to buckle down and make the win happen. “Come on, you already know you’re going to say yes. You just don’t want to say cause you know everyone’s going to freak out and cry and all that nonsense.”
“You’re going to cry like a fucking baby,” Jesse retorted. It was lame, and it showed off that no matter how allergic to expressing emotions Jesse might be, that didn’t mean she was a robot without feelings. “Thanks,” she added hoarsely, reaching over to mess up Dunk’s hair.
He let her, not even trying to slap her hand away. “Anytime.”
“Stop look
ing at me like that,” she ordered.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re… fond of me. Cut it out.”
“I can’t help it. I’m just so proud of you.”
She groaned and threw a wing at his face.
He squawked in outrage and picked up a clean napkin to wipe the sauce off his jaw and on his tee shirt.
“So I’m going to move to Chicago and start a new life,” Jesse mused. “What are you going to do now?”
He squinted and said with all seriousness, “Build a shrine to you.”
She tried to glare at him, but her face scrunched in disgust.
Dunk knew she meant, now that he had broken up with Daisy. But he didn’t want to talk about it anymore today, and he didn’t have any kind of an answer anyway. Luckily Jesse was a good friend and let it go, changing the subject easily to how football training camp was shaping up.
From the outside of their group, it might have looked like Dunk’s best friends were Aden and Jack, but secretly, Dunk loved Jesse as much as he loved the two guys. She was stoic and close-mouthed, but she was as loyal as anyone could be, she never crossed the line from teasing to mocking, she always backed him up, and she never asked for anything from anyone.
So the part of him that struggled with the fact that they were grown up now, settling down with significant others and settling into careers, was sad as hell about this. And things would never be the same without her here.
But he didn’t want to stay the same his whole life, and he definitely thought that she deserved to spread her wings and be fully herself.
And he’d been to Chicago. It was nothing like Maybelle—it was loud, fast, dirty, and careless—but it was exciting, full of sports teams and music and people who liked everything you could think of. She’d love it.
He’d soak her up until she left, and then he’d make more of an effort to spend time bonding with Jack, who was so busy as the county prosecutor that they didn’t see him hardly at all these days. Maybe he’d let Jack drag him along to all of the high-brow, classy shit he liked, like black and white movie nights at the movie theater. He’d been pleasantly surprised by the knitting circle and the wine and paint events; maybe he’d like going with Jack to the Richmond Symphony Orchestra. He could get some culture, spread his own wings a little bit. Maybe meet a classy girl.
