I Wish You Were Mine (Oxford #2)(13)

Worst of all, Jackson suspected that Mollie knew it. Knew that her sister had only asked her to be maid of honor because it would look bad if she hadn’t. Knew that her sister’s invitations on Christmas and Thanksgiving had come from Jackson. Knew, even, that the invitation to stay with Jackson and Maddie in the gap between undergrad and graduate school had also been Jackson’s idea. An idea that had backfired.

Not that Jackson regretted it. If he could do it all over again, he would. Much as she had last night, Mollie had insisted on paying rent, even though he’d been making millions at that point.

But Mollie’s determination to pay her own way hadn’t been the problem. The problem had been that at some point during the year Mollie lived with him and Maddie, Jackson had found himself turning to Mollie when he should have been leaning on Madison.

When he’d come home from a shitty day at practice, needing to talk, Madison had laughed it off, reminding him of his paycheck, and telling him on more than one occasion to “suck it up.”

And then there had been Mollie, who’d always known the exact right question to ask, the perfect thing to say to remind him of the reasons he loved the game. Soon he’d found himself seeking her out for everything. Her plucky pragmatism had been a welcome change from Madison’s chronic self-involvement.

It hadn’t seemed dangerous. Not at first. He’d told himself that connecting with his sister-in-law was a good thing. Harmless.

But then he’d found himself seeking Mollie’s eyes when Madison had come home from yet another day of shopping, the two of them struggling to keep a straight face as Madison raged about having to wait a full five minutes for the valet to bring her Mercedes around.

Had found himself preferring the nights when it was just him and Mollie grilling steaks on the patio while Madison was out for a girls’ night, and dreading the fancy black-tie events Madison occasionally dragged him to.

Despite what the tabloids believed, Jackson had never once cheated on Madison. He’d never even wanted to. Never been tempted. Even when his teammates were hooking up with every available piece of tail, ribbing Jackson for being the old man, Jackson hadn’t touched another woman. Hadn’t looked. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but he had far too much respect for his marriage vows to stray.

Marrying Madison had been a mistake—he’d figured that out early on. But he’d had no intention of adding infidelity alongside stupidity on his list of flaws.

The time spent with Mollie hadn’t changed that. It wasn’t as though he’d lusted after her. She’d been twenty-two to his twenty-nine, for chrissake, and had treated him like the big brother that he should have been.

But his connection with Mollie, however platonic, had been the wake-up call he’d needed to realize that his marriage was seriously broken. The day after he’d dropped Mollie off at the airport on her way to Columbia University (Madison had been getting her nails done) was the day Jackson had contacted a marriage counselor.

It was also the day Madison had signed a contract for Real Housewives, Sports Wives Edition, despite Jackson’s ardent protests.

Desperate as he was to fix his marriage, Jackson wanted to do so privately. It had been enough of a stretch for Jackson to consider spilling his guts to a marriage counselor. He sure as f*ck hadn’t been about to do it on national television. Not that it had mattered—Madison had refused marriage counseling outright. Anything that would threaten their reputation as America’s golden couple was out of the question.

So on camera they’d pretended to be what everyone thought they were: two college sweethearts wildly in love. Off camera they’d been, well…broken.

And then they’d splintered. On camera and off.

Jackson swore and dragged his hands over his face, wishing he could banish all the memories.

His phone buzzed at his elbow and he glanced down, somehow surprised to see that it was an incoming call from Madison. No doubt she’d sensed him thinking about her and mistakenly assumed they were good thoughts. They were never good thoughts, but that wouldn’t occur to Maddie.

The phone eventually stopped buzzing, only to buzz once more with the voicemail notification. Jackson reached out a finger and spun his cell phone around on his desk, half hoping it would go crashing to the floor of his office and become unusable. He’d been dodging Madison’s calls ever since getting to New York. He hadn’t gone so far as to block her number—yet. But he’d gotten pretty adept at declining her twice-weekly calls the second they came in. He had nothing to say to her. And absolutely nothing that he wanted to hear from her.

He shoved his phone in his desk drawer. He’d deal with it later. Jackson turned his attention toward his computer, toward the blinking cursor on a blank white page.

Word count: zero.

Jackson’s job security: nil.

A year ago, Jackson had thought that being a star quarterback was a damn challenging job. The physical wear and tear. The memorization of plays. The constant pressure—not to always be at your best, but to always motivate your teammates to be at their best. Jackson had silently scorned all of his friends with “real jobs,” inwardly mocking their never-ending complaints about HR and micromanaging bosses and the “blue screen of death” on their corporate laptop. How hard could it be to sit at a desk all day and tap stuff on a keyboard?

Now he had his answer. A desk job was f*cking hard. Also miserable.