Page 77 of Summer Affair
Jillian tried her best to keep the uncertainty out of her eyes but couldn’t help the flickers of anxiety bubbling up.
“I got a call yesterday from the team doctor,” he said, and she felt everything right down to her core go still. “He ordered an MRI on my knee last week and the results came in. I’ve been cleared to go back and practice with the team.”
“That’s great,” she said, hating that her voice betrayed her. This was great news for him. It’s what he’d been working toward for the past six months, what he’d told her upfront before anything had happened between them. This was his dream and she wanted that for him. She wanted him to be happy. “When do they want you in Seattle?”
“In two weeks, right after Sammy’s football camp ends.” And right after her heart would break.
That he wasn’t smiling told her that his heart wasn’t exactly excited about the news either.
“Hey.” She cupped his face. “This is great news. You get to go back to a job that you love. Your friends and teammates and your future.”
“That’s what my brothers said.”
“What do you say?” she asked carefully.
He was quiet for a long moment, and she was certain he could hear her heart slamming against her rib cage.
“That after these last two months, leaving my family is going to be hard. That leaving you and Sammy is going to be hard. That no matter how hard you and I try, making this work will be harder. I’ve seen how long-distance—my kind of long-distance—tears families apart, and I’m afraid, in my world, expectations and reality don’t match up,” he said. His eyes were so conflicted it broke her heart.
“Then I guess we’re both afraid of that and I don’t know how to get past it.”
One hand spanned her back, the other making lazy patterns on her thigh. “I’m not afraid of how we feel for each other.”
“Then what are you afraid of?”
“I’ve been here before,” he said. “I know the pain is nowhere near what you went through getting pregnant with Sammy, but I know what it’s like to lose a kid. Jasmine and Zac, they’re my ex’s kids and they are amazing.”
“What happened?” she asked, but her gut told her she already knew the answer.
“By the first year, I began to think of them as mine and thought that someday I’d be their stepdad. Then one day, I’m in Denver for a game and I get this call. Veronica found the ring I had bought. Our three-year anniversary was coming up and I was going to ask her to marry me. She said it made her re-examine our relationship, made her think about what it would be like to be married to me. In the end, she decided that while she loved me, she didn’t think I was cut out to be a dad.”
Jillian could feel the weight of the pain Clay still carried with him. It was the kind of heavy that made her gut knot with anger. “She ended things by phone?”
He gave a barely-there nod. “I got home and found her nightstand cleared out. I went to her house to deliver Christmas presents for the kids, but she refused to let me see them, saying it would be too confusing. I never even got to say goodbye.”
While Jillian had seen just how confusing it was for a child to have someone part in and part out of their life, she couldn’t understand the decision to deny her kid the chance for closure. In fact, she went out of her way to facilitate a healthy relationship between Sammy and Dirk, even when he made it impossible. But Veronica’s decision to cut Clay off without giving him the chance to say goodbye, especially after such a long relationship, was petty and cruel and left Clay wondering what kind of father he’d make.
“She’s wrong, Clay,” she said vehemently. “She denied her kids the chance at a relationship with a caring and selfless man.”
“Did she?” he asked. “At the time my life was crazy. Hell, it’s still crazy. Between games and training, my job bleeds into every aspect of my life. What kind of world is that for a family?”
“Every relationship has hardships.”
“Would you let Sammy get close to me? Not as your friend, but as your partner?”
She wanted to say yes, her heart ached to say yes, but she wasn’t sure if she’d be willing to put Sammy in a position to have his heart broken especially after everything he’d already gone through.
She met Clay’s gaze, which was torn and uncertain, and wanted to reassure him, but she also didn’t want to lie. They’d built their friendship on honesty and their budding relationship on a genuineness that had her saying, “I don’t know.”
His gaze flickered away so she cupped his cheek and brought him back to her so that he could see the sincerity there. “I wasn’t finished. If I knew where this was headed and that we’d built a solid foundation, then yes. But bringing him in too early would only set us all up for heartache.”
“I’d never do anything to hurt you or Sammy.”
“I know that up here.” She tapped her head, then her chest. “But in here, I still have traces of that scared woman who was left behind. Who had to give up her life to make one for her family, only to have the dream of a family be taken away. I’ve rebuilt my life, Sammy’s life, and we’re safe and happy.”
“I’d do whatever it took to keep you safe.”
“I don’t need you to keep me safe, Clay. I just need you to be able to take things slow, to understand why I’m going to need time to figure out the next moves,” she said. “I’m terrified to let someone in only to have them want to change what I’ve pieced back together. To change me.”
