Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 115577 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 578(@200wpm)___ 462(@250wpm)___ 385(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115577 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 578(@200wpm)___ 462(@250wpm)___ 385(@300wpm)
Smile.
Hit the mark.
Count the beats.
Sell the performance.
My body knew exactly what to do even when my heart didn’t.
I smiled on cue, hit every count, and let instinct carry me where joy usually lived. I knew how to do this part.
I’d been performing my whole life.
The lights were blinding and familiar, the bass vibrating up through the soles of my boots as we took the field. The crowd thundered around us, a living thing, and somewhere in another life — maybe even just a few weeks ago — it would have been enough to make my heart soar.
Tonight, it just made me feel hollow.
Because even as I moved, even as muscle memory carried me through counts and transitions and formations, I kept noticing all the places he existed.
The sideline.
The bench.
The spot near the tunnel where he always seemed to end up after warmups.
The flash of his number in the corner of my vision would take me right out of my haze. Watching him catch the ball and run it down the field would have my heart in my throat every time. And even when he wasn’t in view, I felt him.
Everywhere I looked, there was some trace of him. Everything I felt inside urged me to him like a beacon calling me home.
At halftime, he jogged right past me into the tunnel, and just when I thought he’d ignore me, his eyes flicked up.
Right to mine.
Time slowed, the background of the stadium blurring behind him. The pain in his gaze gutted me, and when he hesitated, when his gait slowed just enough for me to notice, I wondered if he wanted to run to me.
I wondered if he’d say fuck it and do just that.
But it was only a moment, a split second in time before he was tearing his gaze away and jogging into the locker room.
It took everything in me not to watch him too closely for the rest of the game.
Not to search his face for something.
Not to wonder if he was watching me.
Not to hope.
By the fourth quarter, I felt like I was floating outside my own body.
And by the time the final whistle blew, I knew one thing with painful, perfect clarity.
I couldn’t keep doing this to myself.
I couldn’t keep standing in the middle of my own life waiting for someone else to tell me whether I got to have it.
I couldn’t chase him.
I couldn’t make this easier for him.
I couldn’t solve the war inside him any more than I could dance my way out of my own heartbreak.
But I also couldn’t lie to myself anymore.
I wanted roots.
I wanted purpose.
I wanted a life that felt like mine when I woke up inside it.
And God help me, I wanted love, too.
Real love.
The kind that stayed even when life made it complicated.
I didn’t know if Braden and I would ever find our way back to each other.
I didn’t know if this team and this season had been our whole story, or just the beginning.
But for the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of what I wanted just because wanting it hurt.
And when I stared at my reflection later that night, smoothing a wipe over my skin to remove the makeup, I smiled.
For once, I didn’t see someone I needed to fix, shrink, or figure out.
I just saw me.
And she was enough.
Braden
The day after the game, I sat at Ginny’s bedside, one hand holding hers and the other holding my phone. My eyes were fixed on the screen, on the unanswered text from Emily the day before.
Em: Thinking of you today. I hope Ginny is doing okay. No need to respond, I just know it must be hard to be here, and I want you to know you’re not alone.
I’d changed her name in my phone. She wasn’t trouble — not anymore. And maybe she never was to begin with. Or maybe if she was, it was the good kind of trouble, the kind that makes you live a little, that wakes you up from a lifeless survival, that makes you smile and laugh for what feels like the first time.
Her words made my chest ache, and the longer I stared at them, the more I wanted to punch myself right in the face.
She was there for me.
Even after all that was said, after I’d let her walk away… she was still there.
It’d killed me to be at the game and not talk to her, not run to her, not throw myself into her arms and take back everything I’d said before. But I could feel Coach’s eyes on me, could hear Claire’s warning ringing in my ear.
Combined with my nightmares of what’d happened to Ginny, they were powerful enough to hold my restraint.
It was the right thing to do.
Just because it killed me didn’t change that fact.