The Crush (76)

“We’ve missed a lot of time,” I said. My voice was rough, my chest heavy again. Somehow, after all this, it still felt like we were just as far away from each other as we had been at the beginning.

I hated it.

I wanted to tell her how much I hated it.

How that frustration and missing of her clawed at the insides of me when I least expected it.

But it would only make things harder for her if I did. So I wrestled those words down and kept them locked tight.

We stayed on the phone for another hour. She talked about Tim, how the whole family cried when they gathered for an update after his tests. How excited the whole family was for Lydia’s baby to be born any day. It was the first grandchild in their family, and she secretly loved that Lydia and Erik didn’t find out the sex. She cried when she told me how angry Parker was that Tim decided not to get treatment. I talked about practices and my interaction with Ned. I didn’t tell her about my call to Allie because I still wasn’t sure what—if anything—could come from it.

I was still stuck. And she knew it.

My eyes started to get heavy, and she could hear it in my voice.

“Go to bed,” she said gently.

“I’m glad you called.”

“I am too.”

When she didn’t say goodbye, and I didn’t either, I smiled. “You hang up.”

“You hang up.”

I laughed. “It’s like we’re living out the adolescent version of the relationship we missed.”

“No sex and awkward phone call endings?”

“Yup.”

“Good night, Emmett,” she said quietly. “Good luck in your game this weekend. I’ll be watching.”

“Good night, Adaline.”

I kept the phone to my ear until well after she disconnected.

I love you. It was what I wanted to say.

When I set the phone down next to me, I dropped my head in my hands. There was an end to all of this. I just couldn’t see it right now.

As I thought it, my phone buzzed. My head snapped up.

Allie: I’m flying into Ft. Lauderdale on Monday. Reservation under my name at Mastro’s for seven p.m.

Me: I’ll be there.





Adaline



Emmett looked exhausted.

It was the first thing I noticed when the camera landed on him during the national anthem. He stood, tall and handsome, with his hand over his heart and streaks of black underneath his eyes.

But that black didn’t hide how tired he looked.

There was sharp focus in his eyes, and anyone who didn’t know him probably wouldn’t see the tightness in his jaw or the lines around his eyes that weren’t normally there.

No one in my family said a word because they all knew not to poke this particular bruise.

Poppy slid her hand over mine where I was clenching my fingers together in my lap.

Mom gave me a sad look because seeing his face was just hard.

If I thought four months apart was hard after our first night together, then the last six weeks was absolute fucking torture. Talking to him on the phone the other night …

It helped.

And it made things worse.

Hearing his voice, hearing him laugh, hearing the way he remembered things, it only made me miss him in a far more visceral way than I had before. It was my fear in this whole thing, and now I didn’t know how to turn the faucet off.

Thoughts of Emmett flooded everything, and there was no way to turn it back to a manageable drip.

This time, though, I watched everything. All the commentary. All the talking heads breaking apart how his team had looked in preseason, how they looked during week one in Green Bay.

The anthem finished, and Emmett—stoic and stern—walked around to his teammates, smacking shoulders, slapping helmets, checking in with the guys who he was about to take the field with.

In the announcer’s booth, the first of the commentators chimed in. “Emmett Ward is looking razor sharp heading into his sixth season. They’ve come so close to the Super Bowl but ended last year with a loss and a devastating injury to defensive lineman Malcolm Delgado. With the changes to ownership in Ft. Lauderdale and some roster shakeups in the off-season, what do you think Ward’s chances are at leading his team that deep into the postseason?”

I sat forward, rolling my lips between my teeth as I listened. On the other side of me, Greer smoothed her hand over my back.

The other commentator, someone who’d retired a year or two earlier and played with Emmett at Ft. Lauderdale, shrugged. “Hard to say. A month ago, I might have had a very different answer to that question. But as you saw on SportsCenter earlier this week, we’re getting some reports from our sources citing major tension in Florida. Coming on the heels of that rocky start last week in Green Bay, it’s hard to ignore that it might be true. I haven’t been able to pin down the accuracy of it, but if a team starts losing faith in their leadership, it can make for an uphill battle.”

“Leadership on the field?” his partner asked. “Or off?”

“Both, I think.” He shook his head. “I hope it’s not true because Ward will be facing a challenge as it is, trying to create new chemistry with all these players who have been brought in to strengthen the weak spots on their O-line. The good news is he’s got a full season to do that, and hopefully, they can keep building that into next year.”