Page 79 of Overtime
“Oh... Okay. If you’re sure. We could go to my place.” He offers, his brow furrows as he looks up at me.
He looks tired and frustrated and I feel guilty that I’m the source of it, even if it wasn’t my doing this time.
“No. You should get rest anyway. You have the game tomorrow, and it’s an important one. Gotta stay focused on the end game.” I grin at him, trying to be reassuring.
* * *
When he drops me off,he parks the car and walks me to the door like the gentleman he is.
“I’m sorry about tonight. About the call and losing my shit there for a minute. I meant everything I said though.”
“It’s okay. It was a good night up until the little voicemail mishap. We can just pretend that part didn’t happen.” I smile at him, and there’s still the faintest bit of the light that returns to me in his eyes despite how emotionally exhausted he looks.
“You’ll be at the game tomorrow? We can get dinner after and spend the night together before you have to leave.”
“Absolutely. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” I kiss him then, because I’m not cut out for anymore discussion tonight. I just want a shower, bed, and time alone to process and recover. He kisses me back, and something flickers over his face as he looks at me when he pulls away.
“Okay. I’ll see you then. Goodnight, Joss.” He kisses me one last time before I walk in the door and he heads back for his car.
When I get inside, Violet’s just heading up the stairs to bed, and she stops to look at me.
“I didn’t tell him.” I hurry past her on the steps.
“Then you tell him tomorrow. But you’re telling him.”
“Tomorrow,” I repeat the word but whether or not I can follow through with it is a problem for another day. One when my heart doesn’t feel like fragile cracked glass that’s about to shatter.
FORTY-TWO
Colt
As we stretchon the field before the game, I run over the scenario for the fiftieth time in my head. I should be thinking about the game, running over my plays in my head. And I am, but I’m also trading off thinking about how to win her over. What I might be able to say before she gets on the plane tomorrow that will make her come back after her next project is done.
She’s at least agreed that she’ll use the apartment over the studio. That there’ll be opportunities for her to travel back and forth from wherever she is in the world back to us—back home to me. I’ve settled for that promise. The chance to see her again.
I’m furious with myself for not asking for more. For not telling her right then that I want her for good, however we have to make that look so that she can still pursue her career. Then my mother’s voicemail fucked things up in a way that I don’t know if I can repair. Joss is resilient and she gives very few shits about what people outside her inner circle think of her or her life choices. But she’s vulnerable when it comes to the people she loves, and that my mother might have been able to pierce through because of me makes me never want to speak to her again.
I hadn’t returned any of her calls before or since and have no intention of doing so. Anything I could say to her or my dad right now would likely sever our relationship for good. It’s already on thin ice. While I’m absolutely going to make it clear that they’ll never ever fucking talk about Joss that way again or it will be the last time they speak to me at all, I still have a small stupid hope that they’d see her for who she really is. How much she means to me. How I can’t see a future without her in it.
“You all right there?” Ben asks as we move to start doing some warmup passes.
“No.”
“I figured that might be the case.”
“Word travels fast.”
“Violet said she was wrecked last night, and she didn’t say much this morning before I left. She was smiling and looked like everything was fine, but I know when she’s that quiet it’s not good.”
“She overheard a voicemail she shouldn’t have.”
Ben stops abruptly and looks at me like he might murder me. “Not another woman.”
“Hell no. Are you insane? Even if I wasn’t gone for her, she’s more than I can take on a good day.”
“Then what?”
“My mother, spitting vitriol about her and me finding arealwife and not a prostitute.”
