Out of Bounds(32)

When I raise my face and take a long swallow of the beer, the answer rears its head once more.

“Fuck,” I mutter when I set down the beer.

Because I know.

I felt it nagging at me when Elkins talked.

We had a smooth, well-oiled machine—one that I’d turned around after a hellish last season.

Then I put my focus elsewhere. I took off the blinders and let someone in. A woman. And I’m crazy for her, but yet the second this thing between us moved up a level, my game fell apart.

And I don’t have the luxury of time. Of figuring out a balancing act. I’ve got one season with Los Angeles, and we’re more than a quarter of the way through it.

If I want to finish this year poised for the future, I need to realize sooner rather than later that there’s no room in my life for both football and falling for someone.

Grabbing the phone, I dial Dani’s number.

“Hey you,” she says, her voice soft. I don’t deserve her sweetness.

“Hey. How’s it going?”

“I’m fine. But enough about me. That was a tough game today. How are you doing?”

Her tone is comforting. She’s not trying to reassure me, or tell me I played great. She knows I didn’t. I’m glad she’s not lying just to make me feel better. But even so, I know what I have to do. Rip off the Band-Aid.

“Dani,” I say, clearing my throat. My tone makes my meaning clear, because her voice changes too. It’s no longer gentle and girlfriend-sweet.

She’s all pro attorney as she says, “Yes, Drew?”

I heave a big, fat sigh. “I think we need to cool it for a bit.”

“Oh,” she says crisply.

“It’s not you. It’s that I’m losing my edge. I need to focus more on the game,” I say, my tone tinged with regret. “We had a good thing going. We had a great streak. And I put it on the line by letting myself get more into you. I can’t take a chance. I need to impress the coach and the team and the city so they keep me. My contract is up at the end of this season.”

She’s quiet for a moment. I have to wonder if I should have done this in person. But then, I’m glad that I can’t see her. If I did, I’d want to touch her. To kiss her. To take her in my arms again. It’s better this way. I keep caving when I’m with her, and that’s the problem. “I understand,” she says, and her voice is cold.

I hate the frozen sound. I hate that she’s shifted so quickly. But I don’t get to hate her reaction, because I’m the one who gave her this news she didn’t expect. It must be like a brain freeze to her. It came out of nowhere, and now she has to deal with it. But I have to deal with my mistakes too.

“Good luck, Drew,” she says, “I know you’re going to have a great season.”

She hangs up.





Chapter Thirteen

Dani

I shift my gaze away from a parasail floating above the ocean, returning my attention to my sister. We’re at a beachside bar to celebrate since she just aced one of her key nursing school exams.

I can’t even bear to look at the parasail.

Which is an utterly ridiculous emotional response. Drew and I never went parasailing. We simply talked about it. I’m not even at the café where we had our first drink. We’re a few bars down. Ally wanted to surf this afternoon, since I left the office a couple hours early, but I wasn’t in the mood to get on the board, so I’m nursing my frustrations with margaritas.

I’d like to say the margarita is the best medicine, and that it’s inducing Drew amnesia. But no such luck. Aimlessly, I swirl the straw around the dregs of my drink, wishing it were a magic potion to make me forget him. Since there’s nothing—not a damn thing—I can do about the situation. It’s like he handcuffed me with his breakup. Like he silenced me in court with a gag order and I’m left slack-jawed, wide-eyed, shocked.

The only thing that’s taken my mind away from how he cut our love affair off at the knees is work. Blessed work. It’s been my steady during my twenties, and it’ll do the same in my thirties, I’m sure. It’s the one thing that I can control, so I’ve been doing a ton of it this week, burying myself in it. Even today, I logged ten hours, since I was at my desk at the crack of dawn. All the work reminds me of what matters most in my life. I have my sister, I have my family, I have my job, and I have surfing for fun. I don’t need him to complete me. I’m better off focusing on the things that are steady and constant. The things that I can rely on. Not a man who changed his mind on a dime.

Even so, parasailing with Drew would have been so fun. We talked about it the other night after we screwed on my kitchen counter. A hot flurry of tingles races down my chest from the memory. The man was relentless, and he f*cked me with passion, and tenderness, and the last time, with sweetness. The last time felt like . . . making love, even on my kitchen counter. The way he looked at me, how he held me as he drove deep inside me, and then how he never took his eyes off me. After, he didn’t just tell me how much he liked f*cking me. He told me all the things he wanted to do with me outside the bedroom arena. “I want to take you to the movies, and I want to take you up on that surfing lesson we never had, and I want to go parasailing with you,” he had said that night, then he kissed my neck. “And play you in whack-a-mole and beat you.”