AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My chest warms and my heart seems to grow a little bigger as it fills with everything I feel for this woman.
It’s my old shirt bearing the name of our high school along with a Tiger, our mascot.
I left it at her house once after we’d gone swimming back when we were teenagers, and she never returned it.
I’m a little broader now than I was back then, but I slip it on. It still fits.
I catch something in her eyes as she studies me with it on, something warm like the feeling I have in my own chest.
She gets dressed quickly as I head out to meet with Ellie, who’s standing in the kitchen with Sam looking confused.
“You sleep in different rooms when you spend the night?” she asks, and she looks embarrassed as soon as she says it. “Never mind. Not my business. So let’s break down what happened last night.” She opens a tablet and starts poking at it.
“I have something I need to tell you,” I say before she gets started.
She pauses and glances up at me. “Am I going to be mad?”
“Depends.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “Okay. Let’s have it.”
Jolene walks into the kitchen before I get a chance to say anything. “What did I miss?” she asks.
I clear my throat. “This remains between us, right?”
She nods. “Of course.”
I walk over to Jolene and lace my arm around her waist. “Jolene and I are…um…”
“I’m his girlfriend,” she gushes, and I laugh.
“Yeah. That,” I say.
Ellie looks confused, and she glances over at Sam. “What?”
“It’s a long story, but we were together years and years ago, and then our families became enemies. We recently reconnected, but there’s too much at stake for us to go public with it, so Sam agreed to be my date in public to throw off suspicion.”
“To throw off suspic—” Ellie cuts herself off with a heavy sigh. She doesn’t even look surprised at this point, and I can’t imagine what sorts of things she’s had to deal with in her career representing football players. “Right. Okay. So your dads don’t get along, which is one thing, and on the other side of the page, you can’t publicly entangle with someone from the media because of your position and you can’t publicly entangle with a coach or you’ll be accused of having a biased opinion. Does that cover it?”
“Mostly,” Jolene says. “There’s also this whole factor about me being a woman in sports reporting and how going public with a coach will confirm suspicions people already have that I used my body to get the job.”
She twists her lips as she thinks that one over. “Maybe. Maybe not.” She turns to Sam. “And you? What are you getting out of this?”
“A gorgeous new wardrobe and sticking my hot new boyfriend in my ex’s face by way of the tabloids while simultaneously supporting my best friend.” She shrugs, though truth be told, she looks a little tired. She switched her hours to weekdays from nine to three, and she’s been working five days a week instead of three to cover the switch in her hours. She needed her weekends free to be able to attend events with Lincoln, and it looks like it’s starting to catch up with her. “Except Jo and I had to have a public fight not so long ago so everyone would believe us, and I didn’t love that part of it.”
“Right. So what’s the goal here?” Ellie asks. “We eventually tell the families? We wait for the first season to blow over and hope nobody will care about the new coach’s love life? Or we just keep this secret forever?”
I glance at Jolene to let her field that one, but she just shrugs at me with wide eyes.
“I guess we’re not really sure about that,” I finally say. “Aside from the media angle, I just don’t see how our families will ever be okay with this.”
“Let me ask you a question,” she says, and I nod as if to tell her to go ahead. “Why are you two together?”
Jolene gives me the same sort of look telling me to field it.
“I love her. I’ve always loved her. My entire life, I’ve tried to recreate what I had with her, but I never got it back until I got her back,” I say.
“Whoa,” Ellie says. “So that’s romantic AF. And you?” She glances at Jolene.
