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I laugh. “I can’t imagine you getting out of breath.”
“Well, I came pretty close this morning.” I smack his chest, and he grabs my hand with his strong one. He intertwines our fingers, and I shiver. No guilt. This is how it should feel. “For someone so small, you can be so violent.”
“Don’t test me,” I warn, and he flashes an amused smile. “So, how’d the interview go?”
“I’ll find out Friday,” he says. “But my chances look pretty good. Now I just need to find an apartment and bring my car down here. My dad’s gonna need his back eventually.”
“What about your stuff? Don’t you still need to pack?”
“I’ve been packed for over a month actually,” he tells me. “Did you know your entire life can fit neatly into a ten-by-ten storage unit?” I shake my head, and he blows a breath of air between his teeth. “It’s actually kind of depressing.”
“So you never actually told me the full story of what happened,” I remind him. “Do you want to talk about it now?”
“My knee never healed right,” he explains. “From an old injury in high school. Ben told me to take it easy after it happened, but I didn’t listen. I kept pushing myself, because if I stopped I’d have nothing.” He takes a moment to clear his throat. “But during my last appointment with the team’s physical trainer, he told me that if I kept playing I could permanently damage my knee down the line. Then I was given a choice. I could keep playing and risk endangering myself at any given moment, or I could walk away.”
“Doesn’t sound like you had much of a choice to me.”
“Maybe,” he says. “But that wasn’t the only reason I chose to retire. I made a lot of bad choices to get to where I was. Made a lot of sacrifices I shouldn’t have. My life could’ve turned out differently, if I…”
“Confessed sooner?” I ask tentatively. “To Alice?”
He shrugs, but I know better than to believe his nonchalance.
“No sense trying to change the past,” he finally says. “I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to move back home, but now it feels right.” He glances over his shoulder to meet my eyes.
“Really? Dallas is so much cooler than San Antonio. I’m sure you could’ve easily gotten a coaching position up there.”
“Nah,” he says easily. “I’ve always missed it here, to be honest. My mom most of all.”
“You’re a momma’s boy?” I ask, and even though my voice takes on a teasing tone, inside my heart swells with the new information. His cheeks flush scarlet, but I let him off the hook. “I love that. I’m a momma’s girl myself.”
“Yeah?” he asks. “Not a daddy’s girl?”
I roll my eyes. “Oh, fuck him.”
He barks out a laugh, and I shove at his arm. “Fuck mine, too,” he says.
“They can go fuck each other.” I hold out my hand to high-five, and after his palm connects with mine, he intertwines our fingers again. Funny how a week ago we barely knew each other, but now touching him has become second nature. “Who would’ve known we’d have daddy issues in common?”
Among other things.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a club for that,” he says. “How bad was yours?”
“Well, he left when I was twelve and I haven’t heard from him since.” It’s funny how many ways you can explain the worst day of your life, how many ways it can evolve over the years. Back when it first happened, when all those raging emotions were still fresh, I let other people do the talking while silently fuming in my mind. After a couple of years it came out curt, with no shortage of resentment. When it comes up now, I like to keep it simple and to the point. Try not to let it show how much it still hurts, even after all these years.
For an entire moment, he’s stunned silent. Then he says, “Okay, you win.”
He seems surprised when I let out a laugh. I’m a little surprised at myself, if I’m being honest. Of all the ways I’ve explained my dad leaving, I’ve never laughed about it before. But I have to admit, it feels good to laugh at something that once caused me so much grief.
“What about your dad?” I ask, because even though I’m laughing now it doesn’t mean I’m ready to go into detail. “He doesn’t seem… that bad.” Aside from weirdly commenting on the kind of girls Theo dates.
“I hated the way he treated my mom before they divorced,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, both of them made plenty of mistakes. But they disagreed on how to move forward. He… called her a lot of names.” He shakes his head. “We’d get into a lot of fights when I tried to stand up for her.”
“That’s awful.” I try not to let on how much I know about his parents’ divorce. When we first met, Ben and I initially connected over our abandonment issues. We used to spend hours talking about all the complicated feelings we harbored over our parents. I know their mom left because she felt stifled by her marriage to their father, even after the fight he put up to work on their relationship. But she’d already made up her mind, leaving Ben to be raised by his dad his last three years of high school.
And then there was the fight. Because it wasn’t just his mom at the root of all his abandonment issues. Theo was there, too.
“And he had the nerve to say football is what tore our family apart, when he’s the one who cheated with his assistant. What a fucking joke.” Theo scrubs a hand down his face.
