The Thing About My Rival (The Boston Commoners #1)

Chapter 35

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

HUGO

I fling open the door to our office and Wilcox spins around to stare at me.

The pain in her face makes my heart crumple like a deflated football.

“How long had you been standing there?” The hurt in her voice is just as obvious.

“Ten-minute warning for the bus, folks,” Leo’s voice calls from the far end of the hallway.

Turning around and walking away would be my easiest option right now. But it would also be the dick option. It would be the option the me of two months ago—and my whole lifetime before that—would have taken.

Instead, pulse pumping, I step into the room to do the right thing. Not just because it is the right thing, but because it’s what I want to do. I want to make this as right as I can make it. Which isn’t very right at all. But I need to do my best.

“Look, Drew?— ”

“Drew? Drew ?” Her face flames. “Since when do you ever use my first name? But now it’s all Drew? Like that’s somehow going to make everything okay?”

I don’t know why I did that. Maybe I was just trying to get her attention—something I’ve craved since the moment she breezed into the locker room that first morning at the end of August.

“We always knew only one of us could stay.” Congratulations to me, for managing nothing better than stating the unhelpful fucking obvious.

Wilcox will be devastated to no longer have any ties with this place. And the thought of her in pain makes me want to puke—the knowledge that I’m the cause of that pain makes me want to punch myself in my head, in my knotted guts, and frankly anywhere that might hurt enough to feel like appropriate punishment for ruining everything for her.

If I hadn’t been here, she would be thriving in this job. And so fucking happy.

But she’s the exact opposite of happy. And it’s all my fault. And my verbal ineptitude is just making everything worse.

“How long have you known?” She folds her arms, her hands forming fists, shoulders hunched. “Did you already know when we…did all… that …this morning?”

This morning was amazing. It wasn’t like sleepy morning sex. It was more fired up, more tossing each other around. We’d ended up on the floor. It was like we were trying to fuck ourselves to victory.

“Of course not.” How could she think I would possibly keep a secret like that from her? “They told me just a few minutes ago. Right before I was scouring the place for you, to see why you weren’t on the bus. ”

“So you thought you’d stand outside the door and listen to the executioner deliver his death blow?”

“Shit, Wilcox.” I rub my forehead. “It must have looked like that. But it wasn’t like that at all. I just heard Leo talking to you. So I thought I’d better not interrupt.”

I step toward her, hand pressed to my chest, trying to hold in my heart, which feels like it’s on the verge of squeezing itself out between my ribs and flinging itself at her feet. “I had no idea you were going to find out now. It’s awful. Completely ruined a great day for you. I know exac?—”

“Remember when you stood outside this door and heard Ramon yelling at me? You didn’t decide not to interrupt that time.”

“And you gave me a right bollocking for it, remember? Told me I shouldn’t have charged in to save you. So I didn’t this time.”

“Only because saving me would have meant you losing. And we all know if there’s one thing the mighty Hugo freaking Powers must never do, it’s lose.”

This is a nightmare. An unwinnable position. I’m damned whichever way I turn. Torn in half.

She sniffs and rubs her nose with the back of her hand.

“Anyway, just now, I still didn’t want you to save me .” Her eyes are full and pleading, her voice tight as a drum. “I wanted you to save us .”

The crack in her last word is like a giant boot crushing the very essence of my being. I can’t let her think I’m giving up on what we have.

“This doesn’t change anything about how I feel about you.” I reach for her, desperate to pull her against me, to bury my face in her hair, stroke her back, do whatever I can to make her feel better .

But she retreats and looks away, making the boot grind down harder.

I’m aware that the heel of my hand is pressing against my temple, but the rest of me is numb. “Do you really think this means it’s over?”

Please, God, no. It’s taken me till I’m thirty-four to find the person who fits with me. I can’t lose her now.

“I love you, Wilcox. I want to be with you every minute of the day. I skip around this place not just because we’re winning and I love this job, but because you’re here.”

“Well, obviously I’m not going to be here any longer. So this is all yours.” She throws her arms wide and gestures to the office. “Exactly as you wanted right from the start.”

She stomps toward the wall joining the locker room and crouches down. What the hell is she doing?

“I’ll even help you out with this.” There’s a ripping sound as she snatches up the line of tape I stuck on the floor.

Although it was only two months ago, it feels like a different lifetime. Like I was a whole other person, someone with no idea what life had in store for them. No idea that the woman currently crouching her way across the center of the room, yanking up the tape, would change my life forever—change me forever.

“Yup.” She reaches the other side and peels off the strip up the wall. “Your very own office.” Then off the windowsill. “It’s all yours.”

The tape on the window makes a particularly horrendous noise as she rips it off.

She turns to face me, scrunching it all into a ball with both hands. “All. Fucking. Yours.”

“Oh, come on. We’re an amazing team. We complement each other brilliantly. But you know the guys wouldn’t take you as seriously in training sessions as they take me. You know they?—”

“ Seriously? ” Her whole face and neck flash red, her eyes wide and spikey. “You’re saying exactly what my father said to me when I was a kid and told him I wanted to work in the game. I always knew you were cut from the same cloth. That was my gut instinct. But I let myself get swayed with all the charm and the sex and the it’s-different-with-yous. But it was all bullshit. You’re just like him. And I should have gone with my gut.”

“Fuck, Wilcox. I didn’t mean it like that. It came out wrong. Just clumsy word choice. I’m panicking here.”

She throws the scrunched-up ball of tape at my chest. “I don’t ever want to see you again, speak to you again, or hear from you again.”

I unstick the tape ball from my T-shirt and crush it in my fist.

No. This can’t be the end. It can’t be.

Tears fall from her shining eyes now, tearing at my heart, tugging at my smashed spirit. “And you can go run the Orlando game yourself.”

“ What ? You’re not coming?” She can’t possibly mean that. “No. That’s not you. You wouldn’t walk away from the team. Of course you’re coming.”

The horn of the bus sounds in the car park.

She stomps to her desk and swings her bag off the floor and onto her chair.

“How can I? Look at me!” She gestures to her red, tear-stained face. “I can’t be around them looking like this. I’d be a distraction. They’d wonder what the hell is wrong with me. And I can’t tell them the truth because that would put them off even more. They need to focus on tomorrow’s game and nothing else.”

She snatches a drawer open. “And right now, my attitude is not exactly aligned with the positive, winning mental energy they need to maintain.” She grabs one thing after another from the drawer and stuffs them into the bag. “What I want to do doesn’t matter. It’s better for the team if I don’t go. So I’m not.”

And there she is, the Wilcox I know and love. Putting the team first, even though I know for absolute fucking certain it will break her heart not to be at that game.

I have no clue how to fix something as monumental as this. And there sure as hell isn’t time for me to even start trying to figure it out right now. But I do know we all want her to come with us.

“I would never mean to hurt you. I’m so sorry. I know you’re upset. But the guys need you.” She bites into her lip, fighting to control her tears as she shoves a fistful of orange and blue pens into her bag. “Fuck, Wilcox, I need you.”

I toss the tape ball into the wastebasket. “We need to hype up these guys into goal-scoring machines. We need to do it together. They need to win.”

“Pfft,” she scoffs as she scrunches some papers into the bag. “You mean you need to win. This is your team now, remember? It has nothing to do with me.”

“Don’t say that.” I can’t help but move toward her again.

She’s always a magnet to me, even now when it’s clear she’d prefer me to be in another room, another city, or on another planet. “ We got this far. Together. This team is more yours than it will ever be mine. You can’t not come.”

At least this time she doesn’t back off. “Of course I can not go. Not only is it best for the team, I’m also not standing side by side with a man who has no higher opinion of me than my father. I have to put up with him because he’s my only family. But I do not have to put up with you .” The final word comes out in a strained, heartbreaking croak.

And it crushes me. Like a giant hand just reached down from the sky, yanked my soul from my body and tightened into a fist around it.

Christ, all I want to do is scoop her up and make it better. To make her understand she has it all wrong. To love her.

“So just go win the game. That’s the only thing you care about. Winning.” She swipes her face with the back of her hand. “Oh, and the press liking you again. You succeeded with that too. Mission accomplished on all fronts.”

The bus horn honks again.

I cough to eradicate the spiky lump in my throat. “Please come.” I take one last chance and rest my hand on her arm, desperate for the contact and desperate to encourage her. “You’ll regret not coming. I know you will.”

She snatches her arm away—that might be the last time I ever touch her—and turns her back so she’s facing the window, staring at the just-visible rear end of the bus.

“The guys really will want you there. I’m not just saying it to get you to come.” I know I sound pathetically pleading, but I don’t care, and if she won’t do it for me, maybe she’ll do it for them.

Her shoulders heave as she takes in a jittery breath.

“Just go,” she says. The fight has left her voice. There’s no anger left. All that remains is the sound of hurt .

“Don’t make me choose, Wilcox. Because I can’t stay here with you right now. You know I can’t. I have to go help these guys win.”

“I know,” she says. Her shoulders slump and her head drops forward.

“Jesus. Look, I’ll call you later. We can?—”

“Don’t. I’ll be busy packing.”

My stomach feels like it’s been tossed into the wastebasket along with the scrunched-up ball of tape. “ Packing? ”

“For Portland.”

“They offered you a job?” Of course they fucking did. They’d be mad not to.

She stands statue-still. “Yup.”

Now someone’s jumped on top of my stomach in the wastebasket and is stomping on it.

I refuse to believe this is the last time I’ll ever see her. I have to refuse to believe it because the reality of that is incomprehensible. “And you’re leaving right away?”

She continues to stare straight ahead through the window. “I’m not leaving anything. I’m not leaving anyone. I’m just trying to save myself.” Her voice is calm and emotionless now.

I push my fingers through my hair and rest my hand on the back of my neck, which is the tightest it’s ever been. “Well, I guess the idiot here is me, then. For allowing myself to believe for a single second that I could have a relationship that worked. What a fucking fool I was.”

The bus makes two more sharp, impatient honks.

I turn toward the door and shove my hands into my pockets. My fingers graze the thing I’d forgotten I’d put there .

“Here. I found this on my bathroom floor just after you left this morning.”

She turns to look at me over her shoulder. Only her head moves. Her body stays resolutely facing away from me, no longer mine.

I take out her log cabin charm and hold it in the air.

A fresh tear falls from one bloodshot eye and rolls down her beautiful pink cheek as she watches it dangle and swing from side to side.

A few minutes ago I had everything I’ve been fighting for since my knee injury. I coach a team that’s on the up. The British media is writing positive stories about me. And European clubs are showing interest.

But now? Now I have a hollow gnawing feeling in my gut that says I have absolutely nothing.

I toss the charm around in my hand. “I’ll leave this here for you.” I set it on the still-empty bookshelves next to my desk and walk out the door.