Game On(68)

I shoved my brand new suitcase—another unpleasant reminder of the mess I was leaving behind—into my beat-up car and got in. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to go back to my soon-to-be empty apartment and a job that I wasn’t even sure I was excited for anymore. But I didn’t have anything to stay for.

Mandy leaned in my car window and gave me another hug.

“It will be OK,” she told me. “And I’ll see you soon.”

I had cried too much in the past few days, I wasn’t going to cry now. So I pasted a big fake smile on my face and waved out the car window at Chris and Mandy until I could no longer see them in my rearview mirror. Then I aimed my car towards Houston and got the hell out of Austin.





Chapter Thirty-Two


There wasn’t much to pack. A few possessions that would fit in my mother’s tiny apartment and even less things that were worth taking with me. My clothes were piled in the backseat of my car, along with my bed linens, stacked next to the boxes of books that I hadn’t even bothered to unpack since moving into this place. The furniture I was going to leave on the curb with a note indicating it was free to anyone who wanted it, and everything else could be donated.

I had spent most of the last week canceling my power and water, giving the apartment the scrub-down necessary to get my deposit back, and crying into a pint of ice cream. I wanted more than anything to be moving on, to not be thinking about Nathan, but that seemed to be pretty much impossible. I had however, come up with the brilliant idea of making a human-sized ice cream container that could double as a sleeping compartment. I figured it would be a bestseller among women who had done the same dumb thing I had—namely, fall in love with a guy they couldn’t have. There wasn’t much that could soothe that, but lots and lots of ice cream sure helped.

“You ready, hon?” My mom had come to help haul the last of my furniture to the curb and take the few possessions that hadn’t fit in my car back to her place. Asking her if I could move back in with her after I returned from Austin had been far less painful than I had feared it would be. It probably helped that when I drove from the hotel to her house, promptly bursting into tears on her doorstep and crying for several hours about my broken heart, she was quick to suggest that maybe I needed a break from living on my own.

She had been absent for a good deal of my childhood, leaving me in arcades and outside of bars while she looked for her next boyfriend and bill-payer, but the years (and apparently menopause) had settled her a little. I had to admit I had been a little surprised when she opened the door. Gone were the low-cut shirts and barely-there shorts, now replaced with pretty dresses, that while still shorter and tighter than the outfits most women her age wore, were positively puritanical on her. She had tucked me into my old bed that night, making sure to keep my stuffed unicorn at arm’s reach. It had done a great deal to ease the pain of Nathan’s hurtful words.

But weeks later, I was still heartbroken, and still missing him. A part of me thought of going back to Austin, of going to him and begging him to forgive me, but to my surprise it was my mother that held me back.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, hon,” she told me. “In fact, you saved his bacon. He’s the one that should be asking you for forgiveness. Not the other way around.”

I knew she was right. The drama-filled story that Tim had attempted to pass off as news had been killed, keeping Nathan’s name out of the gossip pages. There had been murmurings around the office about the upcoming MLB draft, but I had done my best to ignore it, even turning down Mike’s offer to let me go back to Austin and cover it. The announcement was going to be made today, so no doubt Nathan and his family would be holding a press conference. But I didn’t want anything to do with that story in a professional capacity. In a personal capacity, well, I couldn’t deny that I wanted to see Nathan again, but I knew that it was better if I stayed away. Better for both of us.

“Everything done?” my mom asked, wrapping her arm around my shoulder and dropping a kiss on the top of my head.

I looked around my empty apartment, expecting to feel sad, expecting to miss it just a little, but I was ready to move on. This apartment had been a part of the old me. The Sophie that had dated guys like Nick and let co-workers like Tim tell her what she was worth. I wasn’t sure who the new Sophie was, but I knew I was done with the old one.

“I’m ready to go,” I told my mom, and she stood by as I locked the apartment for the last time and dropped the keys off at my landlord’s door.

“Oh,” Mama said as we approached our cars, parked next to each other in the driveway. “I almost forgot.” Leaning through her open window, her butt sticking way up in the air, she seemed to be grabbing something she had left on her passenger seat. Wiggling out, she winked at the small crowd of tenants who had happened to catch a glimpse of her impromptu show. If I wasn’t used to it by now, I would have rolled my eyes, but I was more interested in the thick envelope in her hands.

“This arrived this morning.”

The return address was Mandy’s, which made sense since she was the only one besides payroll that had my new address.

“I’ll see you back at home, OK, hon?” Mama gave me a kiss on the cheek.

I barely managed a nod. “Uh-huh.” I stared down at the envelope. What could Mandy possibly be sending me? I managed to shake myself out of my trance long enough to wave at my mom as she pulled away.