Page 124 of Changing the Playbook
She sucks in a breath, eyes wide. “You can’t make promises like that…”
“Sure I can.”
She kisses me. It’s salty and desperate and perfect, her hands fisting in my shirt, pulling me closer than physics allows. When we break apart, we’re both breathing hard.
“This doesn’t fix everything,” she whispers.
“I know.” I thumb away a tear on her cheek. “But it’s a start.”
She studies my face, searching for cracks in my conviction. Whatever she finds must satisfy her because she nods once, then burrows back into my chest, like I’m the only thing that matters in the whole damn world.
I hold her tighter, pressing my face into her hair. She’s still tense, still worried, still carrying weight that isn’t hers to bear. But for the first time since we got that call this afternoon, I feel her take a full breath.
It’s not enough. Not yet. But under the stars at Pine Hill Lookout, with the world spread out below us full of uncertain futures and unwanted possibilities, it’s a beginning.
thirty-four
SOPHIE
I can’t rememberMike’s skin ever feeling this cold.
The thought hits me as my fingertips rest against his shoulder blade, finding none of the furnace heat that usually radiates from him after sex. I know his body’s rhythms—how he runs hot after orgasm, how he unconsciously pulls me closer in his sleep like I’m something precious he might lose.
Not this morning.
This morning he lies beside me like winter, and maybe that’s fitting.
Maybe we’re both frozen in this moment before everything changes.
Gray dawn filters through my blinds, striping his sleeping face with shadow. 5:17 a.m. according to the alarm clock that’s watched us fuck and fall headfirst into whatever this is, but ‘this’ feels different now, since my mom was admitted again and since we hadthattalk at the lookout.
Forty-two hours. That’s how long she was admitted this time. Steroids dripping into her veins, infection counts dropping, everyone pretending this is normal. Dad actuallyhummedwhile signing discharge papers—some ancient Springsteen song about glory days—and Hazel yammered on about butterflies.
And Mike?
Mike was a fucking fortress.
The whole time.
He appeared with coffee exactly when we needed it. He taught Hazel card tricks when her energy threatened to explode. He knew when to lace his fingers through mine and when to step back, let me breathe. He was everything a partner should be and everything that anyone would kill to have.
Everything that’s going to disappear in six months.
The certainty of it sits in my chest like swallowed glass. Some NHL team will draft him—Chicago or Calgary or any of twenty cities that have different time zones to mine. He’ll pack up a bag, kiss me goodbye with promises we both know have expiration dates, and become someone else’s view in someone else’s bed.
Stop. Fucking stop.
My mind screams at me to stop catastrophizing, to live in the moment like I was a few days ago. But I can’t. Because Mom got sick again. And because this is what my brain does at five in the morning most of the time. It runs scenarios, calculates probabilities.
It remembers, now clear-headed after the overdose of Mike-induced happiness.
“Sophie,” Mike’s voice, rough with sleep, pulls me back. “Your brain’s so loud I can hear it from here.”
I hadn’t noticed him wake up or his breathing change, but as his arm tightens around my waist, automatic, the gesture cracks something inside me. I feel a tear well in my eye and I silently-but-angrily scream at my body to make it go away, to make everything what it was two days ago, to fix me and thisfuckingsituation.
“Sorry.” I finally manage, voicemostlysteady. “I was just?—”
“Overthinking?”
