Page 64 of Necessary Roughness

“Flip a coin?” She saw his mouth curve into a smile. She scooted closer to him and laid her head on his shoulder. “This is what I have been thinking about over the past couple of weeks,” he said. “I’m enjoying the job, but I miss you so much that I’d dig ditches if I could come home every night to you.”

“You’ve told me you wanted to be a coach. What happened?”

“Nothing happened so much as being five hours away by jet and missing you and Sadie.”

“Maybe I need to sell the clinic to the other employees and move to Atlanta with you,” she said.

“Why would you do that?”

“It’s not fair to ask you to give up something you wanted to do in life.”

“It’s not fair for me to do that to you, either,” he said. “I know the chances of buying an established business for pennies on the dollar don’t happen often.”

She pulled herself up and looked into his eyes. “How often do any of us find someone we’d like to make a life with?”

He reached out to stroke her face. “Are you proposing to me?”

She let out a laugh. “Not unless you’d like me to.”

They sat quietly for a few minutes listening to the sounds of a lazy summer’s day. Sadie snorted a little and rolled onto her back, all four legs in the air.

Jordan waved one hand in front of her face. “Did she just fart?”

“Sadie, girl. Go sleep somewhere else.” The dog made another snorting noise, got up to pad around the table, and lay down at his feet again. They both laughed.

“We’re back at the same place,” she said. “Maybe we should flip a coin.”

“No. Let’s talk about something else for a few minutes. Why did you decide to become a physical therapist?”

***

JORDAN SETTLED BACK against him again. He breathed in the scent of her perfume, laid his hand against the softness of her belly, and listened as she described why she’d made such a huge life decision at twelve years old. He listened to the animation in her voice, watched her gesturing as she talked about her days and her happiness at seeing patients recover as she worked with them. She had passion for what she did. She got results. She wanted to keep doing it. Suddenly, he knew the answer to their problem, but he wasn’t going to share that with her yet.

“Maybe I need to shut up so you can talk for a while,” she said. She took a swallow of beer. “Why did you decide to become a football player?”

“I was good at it.”

“What would you have done if you had chosen something else?”

“That’s a pretty good question. I’m enjoying learning to be an assistant offensive line coach, but I don’t have the same zeal for it as you do with your career.”

“It’s early,” she said. “It will come.”

He could love the job all he wanted to, but it was never going to measure up to the woman in his arms.

***

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, Tanner was on a plane back to Atlanta. He’d spent his time distracting Jordan from the conversation she’d tried to have with him about what was next for them. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to talk. He knew what he was going to do. He’d known the second he’d listened to her talk about her job and how much she loved it.

She could move to Atlanta to be with him. He knew she’d find a new job in days, new clients, and she’d be happy. Jordan’s default was happy and always had been. At the same time, he’d be taking her away from everyone she knew and loved to sit in an apartment (or a rental house, if he ever had enough time to start looking) waiting for him anywhere between eleven and fifteen hours a day, ten and a half months a year. He wasn’t afraid of hard work, but he was afraid of ending up like other guys he’d met since he started three weeks ago. Their wives left because they couldn’t handle the hours. They rarely saw their kids.

If he was going to work those kind of hours, he wanted to work in a job that he couldn’t wait to get to in the morning. He wanted to make a difference in someone else’s life at that job. Even more, he wanted to make a difference in his own. He wasn’t the guy he’d been before his career blew up or the guy he’d been when he first met Jordan. He still wasn’t perfect, but he’d learned something from the peewee flag football team: everyone had to start somewhere.

The next morning, Tanner pulled into a parking spot at the team’s headquarters before seven AM. He let himself in and called out “Good morning” to the administrative assistant behind the front desk. He’d seen Steve’s car already in the lot. He’d try his office first.

Steve was at his desk. The coffeepot was already on. A bottle of ibuprofen sat in the middle of his desk blotter. He glanced up from his tablet.

“Hey, Cole. Welcome back.”

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