Chapter 25
Something was wrong before he opened the door.
She heard the Range Rover in the drive and the engine cut and a pause that was longer than normal.
He usually got out right away. Today he sat.
She watched through the kitchen window as he pulled his hat off and put it on the passenger seat and stayed in the truck for thirty seconds, his hands on the steering wheel, his head down.
When he came through the door, his face confirmed it.
"Hey, baby," she said.
"Hey."
It didn't sound right and his face looked worse.
"What's wrong?"
Beck pulled a chair from the table and sat.
His head dropped. His shoulders moved once, a breath that he caught and held and released.
The kitchen was quiet. The bar prep textbooks were on the counter.
The business card was still propped against the Civil Procedure spine on the coffee table.
The house she'd built was exactly as she'd left it that morning and the man sitting at her table was not.
It scared her.
She moved toward him quicker than she meant to. When she reached him she bent over and he wouldn't look up.
She made him. Put her hands on his face and lifted his head. His eyes were wet.
"Ethan, what's going on, baby?"
He pulled her down into his lap. His arms went around her waist and he held on and his chest was moving against hers, the breathing uneven, a man trying to get to the words and not finding the road.
"Talk to me, Ethan."
He turned toward the window. The late November light was coming through, gray and gold, the oaks bare for the first time since she'd known him.
He'd arrived in September when the trees were full and green.
Now they were stripped and the light came through different and the island looked like a different place.
"Damn, this is hard," he said. He wiped his eye with the heel of his hand.
Her stomach turned over. The scenarios ran through her head faster than she could stop them. His parents. The shoulder. Something she'd done. Something she hadn't done. Every fear she'd ever catalogued behind the bar arrived at once and lined up and waited.
"Are you leaving?"
His head turned to her so fast she felt it in his arms. "No. God no. Why would you think that?"
Relief hit her first. Then the concern came right behind it, the two of them colliding in her chest, and she settled into his lap and held his face and waited.
"I don't know. I've never seen you like this and you said it's hard and I just?—"
"I'm sorry." He held her tighter. His arms locked around her and his chin dropped to her shoulder. "I need to tell you something and it's harder than I thought it would be."
He was quiet for a moment. She let him be quiet. Six years behind a bar had taught her that the people who needed the most time to talk were the ones whose words mattered most when they arrived.
"I thought that day had come," he said. "When they told me I couldn't play anymore. It hurt, Kirstin." His voice caught on the word. "It hurt bad. Worse than I thought it would."
She held him. Her hands in his hair, his face against her neck, the kitchen still around them.
"And now they're telling you that you can still play," she said. "And you want to play."
He pulled back and looked at her. His eyes were red and the tears were there, small and quiet, falling without sound.
She'd never seen this version of him. The man who held baseballs when he was thinking and took his hat off before he got out of the truck and cooked bread at four in the morning because her birthday mattered more than a workout.
That man was crying in her kitchen because the two things he loved were pulling him apart.
"I don't want to lose you," he said.
"Why do you think you'll lose me if you play?"
"Because it's not fair to ask you to leave your whole life behind and go with me." He wiped his face. "And it's not fair to ask you to stay here and wait for me eight months a year either."
She felt her own eyes fill. She didn't fight it. If he was going to sit in her kitchen and be honest, she was going to sit in his lap and be honest back.
"I thought I'd been in love before." He turned to the window again.
He laughed, and it was a real laugh, a man who'd just realized how little he'd known about something he thought he understood.
"Damn, I had no idea what it really felt like.
To love someone and know they love you. Not because you played a game or had money. Because they just wanted you."
She leaned into him. Pressed her forehead against his temple. Her eyes followed his toward the window, the bare oaks, the gray sky, the island in November.
"I'm scared, Ethan." Her voice was small. Smaller than she wanted. "I don't want to lose you either."
He breathed in so hard it shook her.
"I'm not a quitter," he said. "I'll find a way if you want to find a way."
"I do."
She said it and she meant it. She meant it the way she'd meant "stay there" on the phone the night of the porch. The way she'd meant "I'm not going anywhere tonight" in the doorway after the birthday. She meant it with everything she had.
She just didn't know yet if everything she had was enough.
He fell asleep on the couch.
They'd moved from the kitchen to the living room after the conversation ran out of words. He'd lain down with his head in her lap and she'd run her fingers through his curls and he'd been asleep in ten minutes, the exhaustion of carrying something for weeks finally letting go.
She watched him breathe. He was beautiful and he was hers and he wanted to play baseball and she wanted him to play baseball and neither of them knew how to say that to the other without it sounding like goodbye.
She reached for her phone on the arm of the couch. She unlocked it. She opened the thread with Addison.
Don't answer if you don't want to. If you would've never seen Luke play and him smile at you that night, would you have still fell in love with him?
She sent it. She stared at the screen. Then the regret arrived, fast and sharp, the feeling of having asked too much of someone who didn't owe her the answer.
I'm sorry that was a stupid and personal question and I shouldn't have asked.
She put the phone face down on the arm of the couch. Beck shifted in her lap. His hand landed on her knee, warm, even in sleep.
Her phone buzzed.
Addison:
No don't apologize. I know why you're asking and the answer is yes, when you see him play it's going to do something to you that you aren't prepared for.
Kirstin read it twice. She set the phone down.
She turned off the lamp. She sat in the dark with his head in her lap and Addison's words on the arm of the couch and she stayed there until the light was gone.