33. Beckett
Beckett
I’ve never been one of those athletes with intense pre- or post-game rituals.
It’s probably because when I was a receiver, I wasn’t the star, but if I was on the field, I was faster than everyone and my hands were good enough, so I was having fun.
And when I started kicking, it always went far enough, and it went through.
No questions about it. Nothing special required.
Just a multimillion-dollars-a-year leg.
Until it didn’t.
I don’t think I’ve grown superstitious since I started smashing yardage and scoring points again.
Beckett Davis is back—you can just ask anyone.
But I do like spending post-game days with Greer, and I’m particularly keen on spending this one with her.
We have one more game before we play Baltimore, and even though I think it probably carves another piece out of me each time we’re together and I can’t really have her in all the ways I want, it’s making my kicking better.
Maybe I am growing superstitious, because I’m setting expectations when I walk through my front door: I expect to spend the day fantasizing about all the things I want to do to her when she’s finally off shift, and I expect to spend the day pretending she’s actually mine.
I don’t expect to see my brother and sister camped out in my living room.
Nathaniel glances away from the TV, mug of coffee still steaming in his hands, and Sarah drops the knitting needles she was whipping around at rapid speed.
“Oh.” I palm my jaw. It’s a bit embarrassing to be around them, actually. After Mom’s big show the other week where she proved she knew everything about them, and nothing about me. “What are you two doing here?”
“Good morning to you, too.” One eyebrow kicks up in amusement, and Nathaniel takes a sip of his coffee before leaning forward and setting it down on the table. Right above the same corner I cracked my head on when I had Greer on the floor the other week. He gives a shake of his head. “It’s your day off. We thought it might be nice for the three of us to do something. Go grab brunch or something?”
I can hear her laugh when it happened—raspy, echoing across the apartment and all the way up to those vaulted ceilings that usually only hear me swear when I kick the occasional football outside the practice net.
It was probably lonely up there without her laugh.
This whole apartment was probably lonely without her smiles littered everywhere, collecting dust because I’ll never move them.
I think I was probably a lot lonelier than I thought before I met her.
I blink. Nathaniel’s still talking. I close my eyes and shake my head. “Sorry, what?”
“You’re distracted.” Sarah’s eyes go wide, sparkling, and she points a knitting needle towards me. “Thinking about a certain someone, perhaps?”
All I think about and everything I can’t have.
That doesn’t exactly seem like something my brother and sister will care about, so I drop my bag and hold my hands up when I walk backwards towards the fridge. “Thinking about how I could have improved the kick in the second. Went a little to the right.”
A scoff sounds in Nathaniel’s throat, and he twists against the back of the couch so he can face me. “I doubt it. You played great last night. We all watched at that resident mixer I had to go to.”
“Oh yeah?” I pull open the fridge, clearing my throat when I grab a box of water. Greer says she prefers her water in cardboard, so those overpriced boxes found their way to these shelves. It was probably a bit desperate—think I ran out the morning after she mentioned it. “Who’s we?”
I think I look indifferent when I turn back to face them, twisting the cap off the water and tossing it on the counter. I shrug one shoulder.
Indifferent. Cool.
Not hopelessly, desperately, stupidly in love.
I know Greer watched the game—she texted me afterwards with strict instructions to rest, ice, and elevate my left side after I landed on it during the tackle.
They laugh at the same time—looking at each other like they’re in on some big secret, our shared green eyes wide and incredulous.
Those laughs echo, too. And for a minute, I imagine a different life for myself—one where I have Greer, but I have this version of my brother and my sister, and maybe my parents love me properly and this whole place is full—but I blink.
It’s not full. It’s empty. And those are things I’ll probably never have.
“Jesus, Beck.” Nathaniel shakes his head, golden hair falling across his forehead. “She’s done a fucking number on you. I mean, I think I get it now.”
I ignore all those fake things, taunting me from my periphery, and narrow my eyes. “I thought you were terrified of her.”
“Nah.” Nathaniel’s eyes flick down to his arm for some reason. “She’s not so bad.”
A soft smile curls on Sarah’s lips, and she tips her head, chocolate hair just like mine falling all around her. “You can tell us all about the game that has you so distracted. Come on, we want to take you to breakfast.”
I debate making an excuse, saying I hurt myself during the tackle, and I need to take an ice bath or foam roll out my legs. But they both look at me—wide, expectant smiles and those eyes we share catching in the early-morning sunlight as it streams in through the windows—and I don’t mean to be, but I’m back in time with them: scratching out a calculus equation with Nathaniel and braiding a wig for Sarah because her fingers were too tired.
I don’t want to be there—I want to be here. But I’m not sure a here exists for us, and I don’t want to hurt their feelings, so I grin and jerk my chin towards the door.
“Your girlfriend is really good with a needle.” Nathaniel pulls back his sleeve, holding up his arm where a tiny piece of gauze and medical tape sit at the crook of his elbow. He squints, inspecting it, before looking back up at me, grinning. “Not even a tiny bruise. I mean, can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve seen her do a running whipstitch.”
I look down at my menu, and I repeat the same mantra that runs through my head on a steady loop now. “She’s not my girlfriend.”
She’s not mine. She’s not my girlfriend. She won’t compromise for you, and she shouldn’t have to.
You’re in love with someone you can’t have, but that’s okay, you’ve survived before, and you’ll survive this.
Maybe.
“Wait, what?” I glance back up, and Nathaniel nods, tapping his arm again.
“Oh! Let me see. My IVs used to bruise me all the time.” Sarah lights up when she grabs his arm, inspecting it, like she’s talking about rainbows and unicorns, not her cancer-ridden adolescence, and we aren’t sitting in an upscale brunch restaurant on the bottom floor of a hotel in the financial district. She turns back to me, nodding in approval. “It looks great.”
“I’m sure it does.” I drop the menu and point towards my brother’s arm. “I’m sorry, what are you talking about? Why was she giving you an IV? Are you alright?”
These warring ideas—that something might be wrong with Nathaniel, but also, maybe, that there’s going to be this other person I need to be for them—make me want to sink into the ground and disappear.
“Beck.” He reaches forward, grabbing my forearm, face pale before he lets go with a little shake of his head. “I’m fine. Sorry, it was a joke. I got a little carried away with the wine at dinner last night watching your game with Greer. She just gave me an IV to help with the hangover before I left.”
I roll my shoulders a few times, like that’s going to shake off decades of expectations and the fact that one of the first things I think when there might be something wrong with my brother is whether my family might need more from me. I exhale and try to smile. “She lets you call her Greer?”
Nathaniel kicks back, nodding and raising his palms in the air. “I know. I really gained a lot of ground last night. We hung out, and it was only scary, like, eighty-five percent of the time. Some might call it pretty great, actually.”
“She’s pretty great.”
A massive, colossal understatement.
Nathaniel clears his throat and cuts a sideways look at Sarah. She sits up straighter, giving him a tiny nod in return.
They remind me of two kids preparing to show a parent the routine they’ve spent all day painstakingly practicing.
And I guess they kind of are.
I’m not sure what I am to them—but I’m not the same thing they are to each other.
“She gave me a bit of a talking to.” Nathaniel runs a hand across his jaw and exhales. “I’ve been—we’ve been—we haven’t thanked you enough for everything that you’ve done for us.”
There’s a weird feeling in my chest. My heart pumps a bit faster than it should, all because of the idea that there’s this person in my life who thinks I’m worthy of defending. But I give a jerk of my chin. “You always say thank you.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Nathaniel shakes his head, glancing around like he’s realizing, maybe, upscale brunch wasn’t the best place for this conversation. He looks back at me, raising one hand before he shrugs. “I don’t know how to be around you sometimes. And it’s not because you’ve done anything wrong. It used to make me so mad you’d trot out for all these press conferences and commercials, for any other noble cause you deemed worthy, but you’d never show up for my blood drives, and it never occurred to me there was something taken from you that wasn’t taken from me.”
Swallowing, I give them a noncommittal jerk of my shoulder. I try to grin, but it gets stuck.
Kind of like the three of us.
Sarah sniffs, blinking, but a tear tracks down her cheek anyway. She wipes it away before giving me a watery smile. “We love you, Beck. Every single version of you. Very, very much. Our lives wouldn’t be what they are without you. Not even a fraction of them.” She closes her eyes, the corners pinch like she’s in pain when she inhales before continuing, voice dropping to nothing. “And we should have told you every single day.”
She sits back, inhaling bigger gulps of air than she needs, shoulders shaking, trying not to cry. Nathaniel wraps his arm around her, squeezing once before they both look back at me.
Golden hair and green eyes on my brother. Stubble lining the more-defined lines of his jaw, and shoulders that grew broader over the years. Maybe because I kept them from collapsing under the weight of it all, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter.
The same eyes on my sister, and cheekbones that sharpened as the years passed, and a beautiful pink flush to her skin I wasn’t sure I was ever going to get to see.
I blink, and I think they might finally, finally be adults now.
That maybe all three of us are.
“I was happy to do it all. I am happy to keep doing it.” I swallow. It’s the truth. “But thank you. For saying all that. I don’t think I always know how to be around the two of you, either.”
Sarah gives me a soft smile, hope written in the flush across her face. “We can figure it out together.”
Nathaniel grins, nodding. “I love learning. Big passion for it.”
“Mom and Dad—” Sarah starts.
“It’s like they forget, or maybe they just don’t know what to do with me. Mom forgot I donated all the time.” I shake my head with a dry laugh, before tipping my chin to Sarah. “You might not remember, you were young. But I donated every time you needed a transfusion. I lied to all my coaches about it. Didn’t matter the season. Football. Hockey. Soccer.”
She whispers, “I remember,” but it sounds a lot louder than that, because I think it’s permeating every inch of me. Ringing out in all those empty spaces I wanted to be occupied by Greer but maybe needed to be occupied by other things instead.
I exhale and run a hand down my face. “It’s not that I don’t want to be there for you guys. At the drives. Or to give you whatever it is you need. It’s just that sometimes they—Mom and Dad—they’ve set this expectation that I’m going to solve everything and whenever they imply you need something—”
“Tell them no!” Sarah slaps her hand against the table in this uncharacteristic display of emotion a lot bigger than her, and her eyes flash with what might be anger towards our parents before it turns inwards and her voice cracks. “Tell us no.”
“Sarah.” I shake my head again. “I’m not going to suddenly stop making sure you have the life you want and deserve.”
Nathaniel cuts in, and his voice breaks, too. “What about what you want? What you deserve?”
I raise my eyebrows and lean back in the chair. I don’t know how to answer that, so I give them half a smile. “These expectations. They’re getting heavy. That’s all.”
“Let’s start with boundaries. If Mom and Dad assume, or they ask for something, the three of us can talk about it privately. And you can say no.” Sarah leans forward, emphasis on those last words before she keeps going. “And we’ll work on getting to know each other again. The real people we are now.”
Real.
This—my relationship with my brother and my sister—another casualty littering the highway of my life that she breathed life back into.
I give them a wry smile. “Funny. Greer told me I should think about setting boundaries.”
Nathaniel grins, holding his hands up again. “Your girlfriend is very wise.”
“Not my girlfriend.”
“Why not?” Sarah asks, a glow brightening her features, like she’s looking at a particularly interesting puzzle, and she can solve the whole thing for me if she just adjusts a few pieces.
But she can’t.
I jerk my chin. “She has her reasons, and I won’t ask her for more than she can give.”
“Beck.” Sarah shifts forward, grabbing my hand in hers. “You deserve good things. You deserve what you want out of this life. You should tell her how you feel. It’s not asking her for something she can’t give you if you’re just telling the truth.”
She means well—but this isn’t a movie. Greer is a real, living, breathing person who deserves the space she asks for, and a sudden confession from me isn’t going to change that.
I flash a strained smile. “We’ll see.”
Both of their mouths open, like they’re about to protest.
But I widen my eyes. They sink back in their seats, and they look a bit like children again—but it’s not this nefarious thing keeping us stuck somewhere in time.
It’s like we’re just us—an older brother telling his two younger siblings to knock it off. No expectations and nothing weighing anybody down.
It goes like that for the rest of brunch. Nathaniel spends too much time deciding what he wants, before he asks for endless substitutions. His disappointment when they don’t have his preferred mushroom sends Sarah into a fit of laughter she can’t quite escape, wiping wildly at the corners of her eyes.
But she manages to spend too much time talking about knitting patterns, and Nathaniel asks for one of her needles to stab his eardrums.
They both laugh at me when I go on and on, fingers pointing, hands waving, and I grab a napkin and try to illustrate this specific military formation Napoleon tried that I read about in a book Greer gave me.
And when the server brings the cheque, Nathaniel does this big show of asking for one bill, putting a heavy emphasis on how they want to take their big brother out for brunch.
I give them a dry grin. “It’s the least you can do. Neither of you have paid a bill your entire lives.”
Sarah tips her nose in the air. “I had cancer, you know.”
Eyes go wide, and the server looks back and forth between us like he doesn’t know what to do and he’s contemplating ripping the bill up and taking the loss, but we’re laughing.
It’s nice.
Real.
Maybe I can’t have her. But she did give me this.