Page 175 of On Merit Alone
I took another shot. “Yeah, but what about you?”
“What about me?”
“You were going to retire, Ira. And now you’re going to change all that for what? So I don’t get traded?” I asked. I shot and shot again before turning to him in a huff. “You are more important than my contract too, you know. I would’ve gotten another one, but you shouldn’t be liable for giving up what you want to take care of me.”
He blinked and blinked again. His head tilted and then shook as he looked at me incredulously. “Can we get on the same page real quick?”
“Sure,” I said, eyeing him.
“I would give just about anything to know that you’re happy. To be the onemakingyou happy. You are my top priority, Merit.”
“Ira…”
He cut me off. “But in this case, I didn’t have to give anything up. Turns out I want to play.”
I blinked. “Explain.”
This time, he turned to take a shot. “For the longest time, I’ve been feeling sort of incomplete. Like I’d done all these things and I had all this stuff and it still wasn’t enough. I thought it was a passion thing. Or that maybe I was done with this phase in my life. And I thought I needed to quit basketball in order to find out what the next step was.”
I rebounded for him and he took another shot. “So then what?”
“Then two things happened,” he said, another shot down. “I tasted what a championship could feel like… And I met you.”
The ball stopped in my hands. I held onto it instead of passing it back, and I stared. He stared back. Slowly, I turned to shoot.
“So what? Now you know you want to keep playing since you almost got your championship?” I asked.
“Correct.”
“But what good is that if you throw it all away to be attached to me?” I asked. “I mean, it would never happen, but what if you didn’t get another team? What would you do then?”
“I’d be alright.”
“How, when you just said?—
“I’d be alright, Merit, because what you’re still skipping over is that other part of the equation. The part where basketball wasn’t making my life complete, butyouare,” he said.
When I just blinked at him, he dared to explain further.
“Basketball doesn’t make me feel more understood than any other person in the world. It doesn’t make me laugh when all I really want to do is cry. And basketball is sure as hell not the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You are, Merit. And I’ve never had the urge to make anything totally, completely, selfishly mine until you.”
I dribbled and dribbled and dribbled. Trying to work through thejumble of his words and my own thoughts. I didn’t take another shot. I turned to him again instead. “But it’s your dream, Ira. You said it yourself that you want a championship, and that’s not with some other team. I know you. You want that right here. And I would never ask you to give up your dream for me. Never.”
“No, sweetheart.” He crossed the court and brought himself to stand in front of me. “Maybe it was my dream before. But ever since I met you, I dream of a girl I noticed taking shots in the middle of the night with no one around. I dream of her running around with my little niece and bumping her head trying to save her. I dream of a woman who cried her eyes out the same way when I gave her a hug after a hard game as when I gave her a dog. The girl who, right now, instead of being mad at me for doing something incredibly selfish, is mad because she thinks I did it for her and not myself. I dream of my future with her, all the damn time I do. And I think if it’s half as bright as how the present with her has been, then I’ll be a lucky man. When I close my eyes and dream, Merit, it’s no longer holding a trophy in the air, though that would be great. When I close my eyes and dream, baby, I dream of you.”
I sniffed, turning away from him quickly and taking another shot to hide my tears. “Okay.”
He chuckled; that deep, rich sound filtering into my ears and trickling down to my heart with levity. “Okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I think I get it.”
His eyebrow raised, his face going skeptical. “You get it?”
“Yeah,” I shrugged. Though there was nothing casual about me and my spewing emotions, I still played it off. “You’re obsessed with me.”
If his chuckle made my heart light, the way he tipped his head back and laughed made it soar. When he sobered and his gaze settled back down on me, I tugged on his shirt, adding, “I’m sort of obsessed with you too.”
“Well, I knew that from the very start,” he said.
