Chapter 29
Alec whipped the reading glasses off his face and pressed the pads of his fingers into his eyes. It did little to help alleviate the pressure that had been festering there for the better part of three days, but at least when his eyes were forced shut, he didn’t have to stare in the mirror.
Because holy fuck, what a bleak picture that had become, or so Cal had unhelpfully informed him.
Alec couldn’t even remember the last time he’d brushed his teeth properly, let alone run a razor across his cheeks.
It was no wonder his brother shook his head in disgust every time he tossed a plate of food in front of Alec’s nose, as if he were doing some great service by keeping Alec alive.
For the record, he wasn’t, at least not with his cooking. Then again, Alec didn’t deserve the comfort of good food, or even good company.
No, he’d torched those options spectacularly.
Truth be told, he couldn’t trust himself with either.
Didn’t deserve to. Because trust was one of those earned things only shared with the most important people in one’s life, and no matter what sort of excuses his frantic mind kept coming up with, none of them changed one crucial heart-wrenching fact.
Marisa was right. He had lied to her. Because he trusted himself more to do the right thing and fix his fuck-up with Phoebe, rather than confiding in Marisa and letting her see the flaws of his past, hoping she might accept him anyway.
And look how bloody well that turned out.
Alec picked up his phone again and scrolled through the call history, hope still high in his heart that he’d see her name returning one of his countless calls. When he didn’t, he darkened the screen and tossed the damn thing in the end table drawer. Again.
“Still no word from her?” Cal asked, cracking open a beer and handing him one.
“What do you think?”
“I think three days of silence speaks volumes.” The words were gentle, caring, but they sliced deeply.
“I know.”
“Do you want to hit the gym again?”
Alec scoffed and mindlessly tossed Hugh his rope toy.
When Christmas morning had rolled around and he hadn’t heard from Marisa, Alec had sped over to her apartment and all but sprinted out of his car to see her, to beg her to listen to him, so he could explain how much of an arse he’d been and hope she’d understand.
He already knew forgiveness was likely out of the question, but he had to try regardless.
Instead, Enzo had been there, standing outside the restaurant and brandishing a pizza peel like it was a semi-automatic weapon.
With one silent gesture toward Alec’s parked car, the man evicted him from Marisa’s neighborhood and her life.
The gym had been his refuge after that, but even pushing his body to exhaustion couldn’t help him escape all those bloody mirrors reflecting his raw selfish stupidity back at him.
So, no, he didn’t fucking want to go to the gym.
“I’m almost done reviewing this contract. I’ll sign it and send it back to Brennan. Then that’ll be done, and we can all just move on.”
Cal took another sip and leaned over Alec’s shoulder to read the documents. “I thought you had negotiated for the remote-work clause. Did I miss it, or is it on another page?”
“This is the original contract. I asked to revert back to it.”
Hugh pounced over to Alec with the rope toy in his teeth and shimmied just out of reach when he went to grab it.
That was just fine with him. He had no interest in forced revelry, let alone being dangled about by a dog.
“Why the hell did you take it out?”
“Because there wasn’t a point in keeping it in any longer.”
“Yes, there is. It would free up a bit of your time to—”
“Do what?” Alec seethed, hating the clog of emotion he couldn’t keep from his voice. “Waste it here? She doesn’t want to see me, and I’ve done enough damage. I won’t be adding on the pain of my presence to her plate.”
And that was perhaps the heaviest truth of all, the one that tipped his scales so extremely, there was no recovering from it.
He’d hurt her and likely ruined her business’s reputation in the process.
“I get that she won’t talk to you, but you’d be foolish not to give it some time.
Maybe she’s not interested in hearing from you now, but in a week?
A month? Wouldn’t it only make things worse if she finally gets to a point where she’s ready to hear your groveling and you’ve taken your explanation halfway round the world with you?
She deserves to hear the whys of it all and take as much time as she needs getting to that point, but if you rob her of that, she might just hate you more for it. ”
“I’m pretty sure she couldn’t hate me more than I hate myself.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s a bet you wouldn’t win, but what the hell do I know? Phoebe played a fucking awful hand. I knew she was jealous, but this was a new level of treachery.”
And there was the other name Alec was trying so hard not to think of. Phoebe. Fucking Phoebe. She of the Plant Nanny narcissism who wore bloody camera glasses to meet him at a bar and spliced his words together so she could ruin all the things he cared about.
Because he’d fucked her life up, too. Strung her along with promises he knew he’d never fulfill because rugby had had more of his heart than she had at the time.
And now, he had nothing.
Despite his fingers itching to strangle the woman or threaten her with litigation, none of it would make the situation any better.
None of it would bring Marisa back or reverse the absolute crushing heartache that destroyed the damn near perfect smile he’d put on her face seconds before everything went to shit.
“I’ll deal with her. Preferably from an ocean away and through a mountain of legal paperwork.
She knows what she did, and she’d be a fool to assume I wouldn’t bark back.
But I don’t entirely blame her. Oh, don’t get me wrong,” he amended when Cal lifted a single brow, “a vile part of me would like to take one of her precious plants and wrap it around her bloody neck, but I’m the reason she did what she did to begin with.
When I last saw her, I told her to be well and that I hope she finds peace.
I genuinely meant it, too. So, if this is the route she needed to take to do that, it’s my own bloody fault for hurting her to the point where she felt such drastic measures were her only way out. ”
Cal plopped his large frame onto the couch and hooked his arms over the back. “You’re a better man than I am, that’s for sure.”
Not even a little bit. Not by half. And that’s why I have to leave.
Alec cleared his throat, already hating the response he knew was heading for him, but he couldn’t avoid it any longer. “I’m leaving.”
Cal’s brows furrowed, and he leaned closer, his beer dangling from his fingertips. “To where?”
“England.”
“But Dr. Campbell hasn’t cleared you yet, has she?”
“No, but I’ll not wait around for it. I need to go back, get out of the States.
I can finish recovering at home, perhaps even faster once I’m away from all this chaos.
Hopefully rejoin the lads for the January leg and start to make arrangements to sell my flat come the spring.
Finish out the farewell tour of the season Great Britain says they want to throw me and whatnot. ”
It was the only course of action left. Start the transition to coaching so he wouldn’t have to think about all he was leaving behind, both on the pitch and in Jersey.
“You are such a fucking coward.” Cal shook his head and brought his beer to his lips, not bothering to meet Alec’s eyes.
“I ruined Marisa’s life, her goddamn livelihood.
My face was the one plastered all over her golden ticket, and it all came crumbling down because I thought she’d be ashamed if I confided in her about Phoebe, and then my stupid words hit the Internet and torched the rest of her good reputation.
I humiliated her, Cal. What right do I have to stick around?
Just so I can cause her more pain? I’m doing the right thing here.
The honorable thing. I’m giving her the space she requires to rebuild what I ruined.
The last thing she needs is seeing the likes of me showing up to remind her of what she lost and why. ”
Cal took his measure with a long, hard stare, then shrugged his shoulder and took another sip of his beer. “Like I said. Coward.”
A fresh coating of rage painted his vision. Was he serious with this coward shit?
Alec shot to his feet, but Cal was already there, his beefy arms a bulwark against whatever aggression his brother saw in Alec’s eyes.
“The reason I say you’re a coward is because you’re allergic to teamwork.”
Alec’s ire paused its trembling assault. He blinked. “What?”
“You heard me.”
He blinked again. “I’m a bloody rugby player. A team captain!”
“And when it comes to your personal life, you’re shit at relationships because you think everyone should exist in a vacuum.
That each person has a job, and that job should be executed accordingly.
One person kicks, while the other tackles.
And that may work on the pitch, where the integrity of the win is determined by roles and responsibilities, but none of that matters when it comes to who you care about.
Relationships are not transactional. You either love someone or you don’t, but if you can’t communicate that, how the hell do you expect them to behave? They can’t read your bloody mind.”
Alec was about to say . . . Well, he wasn’t quite sure what, because Cal’s words had wormed their way into the spaces between his simmering emotions.
He hadn’t been in love with Phoebe. He’d always known that, but had he ever really communicated that to her?
No. Instead, he’d strung her on for two years because the illusion of happiness for both of them seemed a fair imitation of the real thing.
But with Marisa . . . Their entire short time together had been nothing but a transaction, a fabricated sort of teamwork based on mutual goals and methods of achieving them.
Except then he’d gone and fallen in love with her, and he’d had no earthly clue how to handle it.
Alec plopped his arse down into the armchair and scraped his hand across his scalp in frustration. “Fuck.”
He’d never bothered to parse out their roles and responsibilities, because for him, he’d do anything just to see her smile again.
No transaction. No stipulations. No expectations.
Just . . . joy. Every kind look and gesture she gave him had turned into a precious gift, and he’d gone and showed his compensatory gratitude by assuming that he needed to keep the unpleasantness of his life away from her as much as possible.
He’d assumed she couldn’t handle it or that she shouldn’t need to, but that had never been Marisa. That glorious woman had shown him nothing but courage, and if he could ever hope to see her again, even for one moment, he’d need to show her the same.
“I’ve got to, um . . . Shit.” His mind sprinted in a thousand different directions, desperately searching for the right one that would lead him back to her. Anything. He’d say anything, do anything, to show her what she meant to him, to show her that—
“Ow! Hugh! Goddammit!”
The beast, lost in the joy of tearing something to shreds, backed his big arse right into Alec’s calf, knocking his knee into the coffee table.
Cal already had the right of things, as he’d had the foresight to lift his beer in the air and back out of the wrecking zone, all the while laughing at Alec’s misfortune, the bastard.
Alec rubbed his aching knee and leaned down to Hugh, who had an assortment of not-rope-toys in his muzzle. “Give it here. Whatever you’re destroying deserves a proper burial.”
But what Alec plucked from Hugh’s jowls instead were several sheets of his contract that had fallen on the floor, along with a small bit of paper that was thicker than the rest and still hanging on for dear life on the dog’s fang.
Alec extricated the discovery from the canine tooth it was hooked on and stared at the punctured paper.
It was a business card. The one Martin Penhaus had slipped him at the Crystal Christmas Ball. The one he’d planned to pass to Brennan as a simple courtesy, but hadn’t thought anything more of.
But as he fingered the jagged edges of the unassuming scrap, the ripples of an idea began to take shape.
One that would only work if he got his arse in gear right the fuck now.
Alec tossed Cal his phone. “Pull up flights to England for me, will you? Whatever the soonest feasible one is.”
“You’re still going?”
“Aye. I need to settle some things first, but I don’t have much time. I’ve got a lot of people to talk to, and I need to catch them all before they go on New Year’s holiday.”
If the crazy road he hoped his future might lead him down was to be paved, it needed the proper foundation first.
He just hoped that, after what everyone on social media had witnessed, the people he needed to speak to would still be interested in hearing him out.