Chapter 29
29
brIAR
I emerge from my bedroom the next morning at the ungodly hour of five a.m. to find Leo and Elara making breakfast again, only this time Elara is actually helping Leo.
“Mom likes her pancakes with like a whole pound of butter,” Elara says, handing him a stick.
“A whole pound?” he asks, his eyes wide as he takes it from her.
She nods solemnly. “Yes. It’s bad for her, I know. I keep telling her.”
Firstly, I use one small square of butter per pancake. That’s nothing terrible. And definitely not an entire pound. Second, my kid is a brat.
“What are you lying to Leo about?” I ask, Champ at my heels as I enter the room.
Both Leo and Elara turn, their eyes wider than ever as they realize they’re busted.
“Elara was just saying how beautiful you are,” Leo says with a smile as Elara sends him a thankful glance.
“Cut the shit, Warner.”
He looks down at my daughter beside him and shrugs .
Grabbing dog food, I fill Champ’s bowl before settling into the island chair, where I’m immediately served a mug of coffee, a plate of pancakes, and syrup. Elara heads to the fridge, opening it and scratching her head before turning to Leo, who shrugs once more. Elara starts grabbing creamers, and before I can say something, she pushes them across the counter as far as she can toward me.
All ten creamers. Leo had gotten more while he was at some specialty store. He said that they looked interesting, and he wanted me to try them out.
“Thank you,” I smile at her, immediately digging in.
Leo flips a couple more pancakes before adding them to a plate and setting them down. Loading a plate up, he gives it to Elara, who sits next to me before fixing himself a plate.
“What’s on the agenda for today?” I ask them both. It’s Monday, and Elara will be picked up in two hours by Heidi for school.
“I have to go to the facility,” Leo sighs, stabbing his pancake a little too aggressively before shoving it into his mouth.
“Not looking forward to it?”
The guys lost yesterday. It definitely wasn’t pretty. It had been a bit of a struggle the entire game, but the last few minutes were heartbreaking.
“No. We knew we would lose at some point, but everyone forgot to play yesterday. I was just hoping for a nice easy Monday.”
When a team wins a game, usually Monday consists of some workouts, but otherwise they’re generally left to hang out and have a super easy day before their day off Tuesday. If they lose though, Mondays usually consist of going over tapes and team meetings to figure out where they fucked up. After yesterday's game, I can confidently say that everyone was to blame, and I’m not even a coach.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him, frowning .
“It is what it is,” he says with a wince. Leo has always been hard on himself, of that much I know. These men are always hard on themselves after a loss, but quarterbacks are looked at as the face of the team. The team’s loss is always going to be blamed on them, even if they did everything perfectly. The defense utterly failed? Why didn’t the quarterback just score more points? The defense and the offensive line sucked? The quarterback should have dealt with it. A tight end dropped the ball five thousand times? Quarterback should have fixed the problem.
Football is a sport that you really shouldn’t be playing if you don’t love it more than anything, and for that I look up to the players. You can’t say they don’t have heart. And that’s especially true of the quarterbacks. To have that kind of pressure on them? I wouldn’t be able to do it.
“Well I hope it goes well,” I tell him with a small smile.
I’m still not over everything that happened, and I think that’s okay. I also haven’t decided whether I’ll be keeping the car I was given. The office? Sure. That’s one thing. One thing that was super nice and heartfelt, and I genuinely appreciate, though scary all the same. But a car that’s worth over one hundred thousand dollars? I don’t think I can accept that.
I could buy a house for that. Well, a really, really terrible house that’s falling apart, or a tiny shack, but I could do it.
Elara finishes her pancakes at record speed as we talk, and in an instant she’s dropping her plate into the sink and zooming down the hall.
“Where are you going?” I call after her as Champ follows.
“Getting ready for school mom, duh.”
Sighing, I turn back to face Leo, his eyes trained on mine so intensely I rear back.
There’s something about his eyes that always leaves me uneasy. Like they read me far too well for me to feel comfortable being the subject of their stare for too long. Like if I let him sit there and look at me like that for even a little longer, every single secret I’ve ever kept will come out.
“I’m sorry for how I reacted,” I tell him gently, rubbing my hands together.
He tucks his bottom lip under his teeth, not saying anything.
“I appreciate it, Leo, I really do. But I just, I don’t know. I just don’t think that you can throw money at things and have every problem go away.”
“I wasn’t trying to make any problems go away, Briar. I was just trying to make you happy.”
But I can’t accept that as an answer I want to say. I just can’t. Who spends that kind of money and doesn’t expect anything in return?
“I know that everything that happened last season is resolved, but it scares me to let you spend this money thinking that you’ll have some kind of hold on me,” I tell him.
Leo’s issue with my brother lasted weeks and almost resulted in my brother and Isla never officially dating. They had been seeing each other casually for a while secretly, and then when Leo found out, shit hit the fan. It wasn’t until the Super Bowl that they both ended up together with or without Leo’s permission.
Leo lets out a breath, his shoulders slumping. “And I regret the pressure I put on them. I’ve regretted it every single day since, Briar.”
“Then why?”
He looks around and clears his throat.
“I wanted what was best for her. I had done everything I had done for her benefit, and I wanted to make sure she had the ability to live life for herself and not feel like she was living in someone’s shadow for longer than she had to. I knew how she felt about growing up with me.”
“But you made it worse, you realize that, right?”
Leo stands, takes a few steps back, and leans against the counter. Crossing his arms, he lets out an apprehensive sigh. “For most of my life, everyone knew that I was going to be something. My parents spent a small fortune on my success, and my sister paid for it. I knew that I wanted to give back to her.
“The second I was able to make money from my sport, I did. And it was a lot. I paid off my parent’s house, retired them, and moved them where they wanted after sending them on a world tour as a thank you for everything they did for me. But my sister was living with her friend at the time, struggling to make her own dream come true. She wanted to be an artist, as you know, and she didn’t really have much time to make that come true as she was working constantly.
“So I bought the place next door and told her she didn’t have to worry about rent. Just make sure you can eat, focus on your art, sell prints, whatever you have to do. Just do it. I wanted her to make a name for herself, and I wasn’t going to rest until that happened for her.”
He pauses, biting his cheek.
“If I failed when I was younger, it was like I was letting every single person in my life down. There was so much expectation that the only thing I could do was make sure that I was everything they expected and more. And I think I definitely made it. But I wanted to make sure that my sister had her own success story, and in doing so I went above and beyond when I shouldn’t have. I should have realized that she could make her own decisions, and for that I’ve been kicking myself for months.”
I sit back in my seat, my arms propped on the side of the chair. “Why do you have such a hard time just letting things be?”
He contemplates this for several moments before he leans forward, looking down at his feet. “I don’t really know. I just feel like I’ve been in control of everyone’s destinies. Like I was in control of whether my parents were happy or not. And even though it was my decision to help her, I was in control of whether my sister could make her dream come true. I don’t know why I have such an issue with it, I really don’t. But I do know that it’s a problem,” he pauses, his green eyes meeting mine, “and you were the only person to really wake me up to it.”
“You should have been woken up about it before me,” I tell him with no hesitation. I feel mean, but it’s something that needs to be said.
He nods. “I know. But no one really stands up to me. And I wish they did.”
As annoying as it is, I understand where he’s coming from. As our eyes meet, I feel like I’m staring at the other end of a magnet.
Someone who’s been so in control of everything in his entire life to the point of self-sabotaging when he’s not in control, and a woman who’s been so out of control of everything that sometimes she just doesn’t care.
And sometimes, she cares too much.
And the cycle continues for the both of us.
I decide to drop it for now, instead taking another bite of pancake. “Your publicist emailed me last night,” I tell him, watching as he visibly relaxes, letting out a breath.
“Oh yeah?” he asks, taking a slow sip of coffee, his eyes trained on me.
I nod, stuffing my face. “She says everything is on track. We’re doing well, and that you’ve been getting some good press.”
His eyes don’t leave me as I continue on, and they don’t leave me when I get up and rinse my plate off.
And they don’t leave me as I make my way back down the hall without another word.
But I feel it.
I feel it much more than I want to admit.