Chapter Twenty-Seven Griffin
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Griffin
A week later
I knew it was coming. Her first text came through just as I’d sprawled out on the new loungers in my backyard. Didn’t even know what it said, and I was already smiling, heart turning over happily in my chest.
Ruby: Hi.
Me: Hi.
Three little text bubbles danced across the screen, and instead of leading her into conversation, I simply wedged a hand behind my head and waited to see how she was going to handle this.
Ruby: Are you busy right now?
Me: Terribly.
Ruby: Oh. We can talk later.
Biting down on my grin, I snapped a picture of my legs in the lounger, the pool and trees and grass beyond it. I sent it without anything else.
Ruby: Looks rough. I’m out of practice feeling sorry for you, but I might be able to conjure something up.
Me: You should. I’m all alone. No one to play Marco Polo with.
Ruby: You cheat at that game anyway, so I wouldn’t play even if I was there.
Me: Just because you’re the loudest swimmer in eastern Colorado doesn’t make me a cheater. I have excellent senses, you know.
Ruby: Whatever helps you sleep at night.
Me: If you were here, huh? Is this your way of saying you want to come for a visit? I’ve got six extra bedrooms.
Ruby: If you’re trying to elicit sympathy, I’d work on your approach.
Me: Trust me, I know better than to try. That’s why I like you, birdy. You keep me humble.
The text bubbles appeared again. Then disappeared. It happened two more times, and I exhaled slowly while I waited. Then my phone vibrated with an incoming call, and I sat up so fast I almost dropped my phone.
“Hey.”
At the breathless sound of my voice, I winced. Fuck’s sake, it sounded like I’d just sprinted a mile before picking up.
“Hi. I hope it’s okay that I’m calling.”
My eyes slammed shut, an immediate tightening in my throat at the sound of her voice. Fuck, I’d missed her. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that, but I held back. For now.
“Yeah, birdy,” I said, my voice rough and quiet. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
“You too.” She sucked in a quick breath, and I could see her face so clearly in my head. Could imagine that little furrow in her brow. “I, um, I practiced what I was going to say, and now that I’m actually talking to you, I feel like I’m going to burst into tears.”
The tremble at the end of her sentence had me smiling softly. “What’s going to make you cry, sweetheart?”
The endearment slipped out, and I swiped a hand over my face while my heart hammered wildly in my chest.
“You,” she whispered, voice thick with emotion. “Griffin, I . . . I don’t even know what to say. When I think about how much you must have spent . . .”
I bit down on my grin. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Griffin,” she admonished. “I found the name of the shell company that bought the land and traced it back to you.”
“Did you?” I murmured. “I might need to do a better job hiding my tracks.”
“You bought the land for me,” she said quietly, and I could hear the tears. “I can’t believe you’d do that.”
I’d do so much more, I almost told her. Instead, I said, “It would’ve been a fucking shame to lose that view from your office.”
On the other end of the phone, she was quiet. “That simple, huh?”
No.
Not even close.
“Nothing about my life feels simple,” I admitted tiredly. The sun had gone down enough that I could finally see bright little specks of stars in the midnight-blue sky. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have her there with me? “But that decision did, if you can believe it.”
She inhaled shakily. “Thank you. It’s . . . it’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
“Did it make you smile when they told you?”
“Yes. I swore in front of the library trustee when she showed me the paperwork.”
I laughed. “Worth every penny, then.”
“Why did you do it, Griffin?” she asked. “And don’t say it’s because of my office view.”
The fact that she wouldn’t let me off the hook had me smiling, a hand rubbing absently over my chest. She’d never make anything easy, and there was something about that that made me so fucking happy.
Before I answered, I swallowed. “There’s a big tree in my backyard,” I said.
“It’s got the same kind of branches like the one that was in between our yards growing up.
” Instead of giving me shit about the slight shift in direction, Ruby just listened quietly.
“I’d looked at a couple houses before I saw this one, and I don’t know—when I saw it . . . I just felt like it was a sign.”
“Of what?”
Even during this eternal month without her in my life, Ruby was pushing me. In the way we should be pushed when there’s something in our life we’ve been too scared to do. My throat was crowded with a hundred things unsaid, and I forced the answer out past all the others.
“That maybe it’s not too late to be a little bit like the people I admire,” I admitted in a thick, emotion-roughened voice. “That I can see the things about them and try to do what they’d do without losing the good parts of myself.”
“Must be quite a tree to remind you of that.”
“You remind me to do that, Ruby.” I sat up and ran a hand through my hair. “I kept thinking about that weeping willow tree that you loved and those little kids in the creek, and I knew what you’d do if you had the money. You wouldn’t even think twice about doing it for one of your friends.”
Ruby sniffed, crying quietly on the other end of the phone.
“Don’t cry, birdy,” I urged. “It’s fucking killing me.”
“Sorry,” she said in a tear-thick voice. “I wish I could give you a hug to thank you.”
I dropped my head back and exhaled a harsh puff of air, arms aching to wrap tight around her. “I wish you could too.”
“Will you come see it when it’s all done?” she asked tentatively. “We’ve already commissioned a few local artists for sculptures, and a landscaper is working up final plans for the butterfly garden.”
I smiled. “Couldn’t keep me away.”
“Okay.” She sighed. “Great.”
“You’ve been good?”
Ruby hummed quietly. “Busy. We were able to take all the money we raised to buy the land and put it into improvements around the library. We’re renovating the kids’ section and adding some new private study rooms.”
“That’s great.”
“What about you? You start training camp soon, right?”
My eyebrows popped up. “Look at you, with the correct verbiage. Someone learning a little bit about football since I left?”
“Maybe,” she answered primly. “SportsCenter is very informative. They love to talk about you.”
I snorted. “They sure do.”
“They talk a lot about Barrett too.” She paused. “About your rivalry.”
“That’s also true.”
Ruby blew out a harsh breath, and I braced myself for what was coming next. It was only a matter of time before she asked.
“What happened between you two?” she asked. “If I’m allowed to ask.”
I smiled. “I’m impressed you made it this long without forcing me to tell you.”
Ruby scoffed. “Like I could force you to do anything.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised, sweetheart.” I winced at the thick beat of silence that followed.
Every time one of her nicknames slipped past my lips, it felt like I was screaming at her: I have Big Feelings for you and I don’t know what to do about it.
“It’s not a pretty story. You sure you want to hear it? ”
“Yes.”
She sounded so eager that I laughed. “All right,” I murmured, settling back into my chair. “I’ll jump past all the regular brotherly competition as we grew up. You saw a lot of that.”
“But you still loved each other,” she said, so completely sure that I had to smile.
“We did.” It hurt to admit that out loud.
“I don’t blame my dad; he leaned into that competition to motivate us, and fucking hell, it worked.
He beats himself up for it now, but it’s not his fault.
We’ve both told him that. In high school, we were both starters, both getting heavily recruited by Division I schools, and the fun in our competition just .
. . slowly chipped away. He was still getting straight A’s.
I was skipping classes with my friends, phoning in my grades, and God, it pissed him off that I was still getting the same interest he was.
It pissed me off that he thought I should be doing exactly what he did, that he thought he was the one who had it figured out, so I kinda .
. . rebelled, I guess. You think I’m a screwup?
You think I can’t have fun and still be a better player than you? Fucking watch.”
My throat was a little dry, so I took a sip of my drink, staring up at the stars.
“In college, though, things turned again. We ended up at Oregon; the athletic department really made a big push to have both King brothers because they thought we could transform their program on both sides of the ball.”
This was where the story got harder to say out loud, and in my pause, Ruby asked, “And did you?”
“Yeah,” I said gruffly. “Won our conference title two years in a row. Made it to the championship both times too. Lost it our junior year. Won it our senior year.” I let out a dry laugh. “Almost wasn’t at the last game, though.”
“Why not?”
“The longer we played together, the worse our rivalry got. He was . . . fuck, he was revered by coaching staff. Professors. Everyone. Spent an ungodly amount of time watching film, preparing for the games, was on the dean’s list every fucking semester.
I was going to parties on the weekends, and I was a legend on campus.
The kind everyone thinks of when it comes to an athlete.
Revered for a completely different reason, by total strangers who constantly reminded me how fun I was.
How impressive, because I could do all that and still dominate on the field.
I hate how much I lived for all that approval.
” I swallowed hard. “But I took it too far. Did stupid shit, over and over and over, to prove exactly how different we were.”
“What happened?” she asked quietly.