Page 96 of This Wild Heart

It was the right voice to listen to, and all the other parts of me knew it too. Everything felt precarious without the buffer of his family.

“Delicious,” I told him. “Thank you.”

He blinked. The heat was gone. “Of course. I was gonna watch some film.” On the couch was a tablet in a Voyagers case. “But if it’s going to distract you, I can move.”

Parker was his own distraction, but that wasn’t something I planned on saying out loud.

“Go ahead.” I took another bite, my eyes drawn to the game he was bringing up. It was a game they’d played against LA late last year. He used his finger to navigate the bar on the video, speeding through the first quarter, then stopped on a certain play.

He watched it once, shoveling a wolfish bite of garlic bread into his mouth before he backed the tape up and let it loop again. Parker’s eyes narrowed, and he repeated the play for a third time. Then a fourth.

“What are you watching for?”

The words were out before I could stop them. It wasn’t like I was a stranger to someone watching film, but I still found myself interested, wanting to know whathesaw.

With the late afternoon sunlight streaming into the room, Parker’s eyes glowed a deep burnished bronze when he glanced at me. “Watching how their defense lines up against the two tight end formation. Not a lot of teams use that, so it usually means I just rewatch our games a lot.” He tilted the tablet toward me, and I angled my legs, my bent knees just a few inches from his muscled thigh. “See what they do there? There’s a slight shift in these two cornerbacks just before we snap the ball. It means they’ve got a good sense of the routes we’re running.”

I glanced quickly at the sharp lines of his profile. “Do you always see what you’re looking for?”

He nodded, eyes still locked on the screen. “Usually. We can make last-minute adjustments if the defense shows their hand. This was third and eighteen, and if we didn’t get the first down, game was over.”

“So what happened?”

Parker dragged the play back to the beginning, and I saw the way they angled their bodies, anticipating the outside routes from both Parker and Beckett. The quarterback—Christian Reyes—snapped the ball and faked the handoff to the running back, then danced back four or five steps in the pocket. His line in the middle weakened slightly, his center pushing to the right so the running back could cut up the middle, still clutching the pretend ball to his stomach in hopes of tricking the defense. No one fell for it, though, a defender reaching out to swipe at the ball in the QB’s hands when he got past the center.

My eyes moved to Parker, and I found myself leaning in as he tussled with the cornerback, who matched him step for step down the line. After he cleared twenty yards, Parker paused, then cut in a few yards, a split second before the quarterback released the ball.

It was a little high, thrown intentionally that way to avoid getting tipped, and if Parker hadn’t come in, if Reyes hadn’t adjusted his throw, it wouldn’t have worked. Parker’s arms extended, snagging the ball out of the air. In the next step, he tucked it against his body, stiff-armed the cornerback and surged forward another four to five yards past the catch before three defenders swarmed him.

The entire play took less than ten seconds in real time, but as he backed it up to watch again, I found myself watching different positions. Beckett, on the opposite side of the field, had two defenders guarding him, and as soon as the ball released, he switched modes, stepping in front of those two, pressing into their chest to slow their progress as their attention snapped to Parker. The running back, once he knew the defense didn’t take the bait, also started blocking, holding off a linebacker who tried to sneak around him to get to Parker.

On the film, Parker hopped up and shot an imaginary bow and arrow, indicating that he’d cleared the first down marker. Then he clenched his fists, the muscles in his arms straining, and then he tipped his head back, letting out an adrenaline fueled roar. Obviously, I watched a lot of football, mainly keeping my eyes on Max. He didn’t have the same kind of energy on the field as Parker. His was more focused kind of play that didn’t allow for much in the way of celebration. With Parker, though, it was like watching buoyant energy unleashed. A playfulness only possible when someone truly loved what they did. I found myself smiling, and when my eyes darted to him, he was too.

“I can’t even imagine what it’s like,” I said quietly. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if it was better than sex, but that felt like a monumental step in the wrong direction, so I kept that particular question buried.

He sighed. “Catching a ball like that? One of the best feelings in the world.” His smile faded. “When you don’t? It’s fucking awful. I still beat myself up over that one.”

My eyes dropped to my lap. I didn’t have to ask which one he was referring to.

“Do your teammates?” I asked.

His brow knitted together for a moment. “It was hard for everyone to swallow. Never heard the locker room so quiet after that game.”

“How does that work?”

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you like, apologize? Do they come up and try to make you feel better afterward?”

“Some did,” he replied. “I didn’t really want to hear it, though.” His Adam’s apple bobbed on a hard swallow. “And a lot of guys didn’t say anything. We were so close, you know? I don’t blame them for being pissed. I should have caught it. End of. I bet I’ve watched that play five hundred times since it happened.”

People, I’d found, were generally very predictable. Even if their own patterns weren’t obvious to themselves, they were there. On the surface, Parker might not have seemed like a perfectionist, but it screamed out at me, clear as day. It wasn’t about keeping a perfectly clean house or always having your shit together. It was those invisible standards of conduct, and his were ingrained in him so deep that the mere thought of deviating from it triggered a tidal wave of self-recrimination.

Letting his own feelings breathe felt like punishment, so he shoved it down, shoved it down, further and further, until it eventually exploded. Like … having explosive sex with your fake wife because everything finally boiled over.

I chose my words carefully. “What do you think you learned, watching it all those times?”

After a moment, Parker tipped his head back, allowing him to rest on the back of the couch. “That I don’t ever want to do that again. That I need to be better. Faster. Bearing the responsibility for everyone’s disappointment and pain …” He got that haunted look in his eyes, the one I hadn’t seen in a few days. I wanted to trace the skin under his eyes. Even though the dark circles had ebbed, he still looked tired. “I’m really fucking sick of feeling that.”

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