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Without realizing I’m doing it, I’m rushing over, tearing the phone from his hand. “Who are you talking to?” I snap.
“Bro, what the hell?” He yanks it back, shoving me away, but not before I see the name on the screen.
Guess Lolli messaged him, too.
Chase studies me with narrowed eyes, but I spin away, squeezing my lids closed a moment.
I don’t hit the showers.
I grab my shit and get the fuck out.
Payton
Lifting my camera,I follow the newest addition to the team as he flies off the starting line, sprinting to the end and blowing his opponent out of the water.
I’m pretty sure it’s in good fun, a locker room bet maybe, seeing that they tugged their pads off their shoulders and dropped them to the turf.
He spins, smiling as he swipes his hand through his dark hair.
The team is shouting and shoving on number thirteen, heckling him for losing to the new guy, I’m sure, but Noah only shakes his head, walking over to where the receiver coaches have gathered.
It’s late August now, more than a month since the one-year anniversary—such a ridiculous expression—of Deaton’s death, and I’m feeling a little more like myself again. The weeks leading to that day were unexpected, the months before that even more so.
But what a beautiful mess it was.
I shake off the thought.
After Deaton died, I was stuck in a state of disarray. Confused and unable to get past the shock of it all. For the longest time, I didn’t quite feel real. A few months after his death, I found I wasn’t crying every single day anymore, and the days I realized this, I’d cry out of guilt.
Who did I think I was, walking around and having lunch with my friends, taking breathers on the beach while he was lying cold in a coffin?
A sharp pain flickers through me, and I wince.
It’s such a strange thing, to lose someone, and as sad as it is, I’m kind of seasoned in it as if it’s a sport I willingly participate in. Technically speaking, I lost my dad when he divorced my mom, which led to losing my brother. I lost my friends when my mother began to meddle in my life, and I lost my free will at thesame time. I lost my senior year when I got pregnant, and then I lost Deaton.
Every one of those instances, I mourned in one way or another. I knew I had to take it a day at a time, and I did. Slowly, things got better. I could think of him and smile or laugh, missing him without complete misery.
But the one-year mark of his death? That was like nothing else I’ve experienced, and I can’t pretend it doesn’t have something to do with an entirely different dark-haired man.
Regardless, it was as if after a year of compartmentalizing, my boxes were full, the overflowing weight too much to hold strong. They tumbled to the floor with a heavy crash, the latches splitting from the locks and pouring over me until I was a body with no heart, lungs with no air.
I felt dead inside, guilty beyond measure.
He was dead, and I lived a whole life in one year’s time.
I carried a baby to full term. I got my GED. I started an internship at the job of my dreams, and I made it to my eighteenth birthday with a little less weight on my shoulders.
I created a home in the home my brother and found family offered me. I took their hands, and I held on for dear life.
Instead of sinking under at the thought of Deaton, I trained my brain to swim, to tread the endless waters of grief until I found a way to breathe easier.
I untied the rope around my wrists and broke the surface of my woe whirlpool. I had a little boy to bring into this world, to protect and cherish, and a fractured girl wouldn’t be strong enough. He deserved more. So as time passed and I discovered where the light I felt within me was coming from, I leaned in ever so slightly.
It wasn’t my intention to fall off the cliff, but I did.
I fell headfirst, but I never hit the ground.
Strong hands held me steady.
