Chapter 27 #2
“He tried to ruin—!” Nope, not what I need to say here. “How I treated you is unacceptable. That’s it.”
“But if you thought I was going to steal Donovan, or worse, if I was going to-to-to drop him off on your doorstep or—”
“But you weren’t! Fuck. What the fuck, Tilly? Why the fuck are you like this?” I blurt out. I know I shouldn’t be yelling at her, she should be yelling at me, but what the fuck is this? Why does she always do this?
She does recoil at that, but instead of unleashing like I deserve, she just pushes back in my lap, cowering like I’ve just wounded her, and the only relief I get from it is that her ass pushes into my knee just right that my ankle lights up.
That pain, that’s what she needs to give me. More of it. All the pain. But she just looks heartbroken.
“Because I want to be with you,” she whimpers, her voice warbling and her eyes filling with tears as she makes herself as small as possible there in my lap. “I don’t want to be mad at you. I just want you to-to-to—”
“To what?” I explode, holding back this awful urge to throw her off me just to, I don’t know, to escape but also to hurt her, because I’ve already hurt her so much and it’s not working. None of it works. I just need her to—
“To stay with me!” she cries out, and instead of running from me like she should or take the pound of flesh I owe her, she just drops her head back down, burying it in my chest like Donovan does when he’s having a meltdown.
“I’m not going anywhere! I just fucking told you I—fuck, Tilly! Fuck you. Fucking grow a backbone, for fuck’s sake.”
I want to take back the words immediately.
I can’t believe I just yelled that at her.
And when she replies with the weakest, most pathetic, “Why are you being so mean to me?” I want to take back everything I’ve ever said and just crawl into the little box Gabe built under the back deck for Joss’s pet raccoon.
But I’m too worked up. I don’t know how to stop myself from screaming, “Because I love you and you deserve better than me! And you deserve better than you.”
And everything stops.
The air is sucked right out of the room.
There’s nothing left.
She’s the mother of my child and the person I want to spend forever with, but I’m an asshole to her, and she’s no kinder to herself.
Her bottom lip trembles. Her breath is exquisitely ragged as her chest, full and firm and slightly sticky with the paint of the jersey she wears, my number emblazoned on her chest and my name across her back, flutters against me.
She stares at me with giant eyes and whines, “That’s how you tell me you love me? ”
Okay, yeah, that could have been delivered better or saved for another time or addressed already, but this is who we are.
“Yeah, it is. Because I never want to let you go, but I can’t take care of you if you’re not taking care of yourself, too.
And I’m going to grind you down to nothing if you don’t stand up for yourself.
I need you, Tilly, I need you forever, and I don’t know how to do this with you if you’re not willing to match my forever. ”
“If the cancer comes back—”
“Stop!” I bellow, but this time, I sit up and slam my lips into hers, just because I need her and I hurt and it has nothing to do with my ankle.
It has everything to do with how I’m still more stressed about her than I am about the blackmailer when the blackmailer is probably going to end us homeless, just chasing her gigs.
Until she decides it’s too inconvenient to tell me she’s feeling off, and by the time anything is done, she’s terminal.
I kiss her harder before I drop back down.
“Just . . . stop. You’re not listening to me.
The cancer? We can’t control if the cancer comes back.
We can’t control how sick Donovan is going to get.
We can’t control if I’m going to get injured on the field again.
But we can do things that will make what we can’t control easier to manage, and you’re not doing it.
I need you healthy, Till. I can’t be fighting you for every single thing.
I . . . I can’t be halfway across the country trying to keep my career going and stressing if you’re okay. ”
Yet again, she gets this sad look about her. “I’m s—”
“Stop. Do not apologize. Stand up for yourself. And tell me how you feel about how I treated you all that time I thought you were scamming me.”
I see the way her bottom lip moves. I know she’s gnawing on it, probably going to draw blood if she keeps going. I can’t keep pushing her like this, but I can’t let it go.
“I felt sad,” she whispers like it’s the most shameful thing in the world.
“I was so scared that if I didn’t do everything just right, you were going to abandon us.
And I felt like I had no right to ask for help from you, so the minute I did, you were going to realize that you didn’t need to be there.
It didn’t make any sense that you were there. And I’m . . . I’m . . .”
She drops her head right back down and throws her arms around my waist. But when she squeezes me, her nails dig in.
Like, really dig in.
“And I’m so mad at you I could spit teeth,” she admits, but instead of that anger, I hear defeat. “Twenty million dollars? That’s an insane amount of money. Absolutely un—I can’t even imagine what I’d do with that, but I wouldn’t be in that apartment.”
That’s it. That’s what I need her to start saying. “Why didn’t you ask me about it?” I push.
“Because I wasn’t entitled to it!” she says with more gusto and more biting nails.
“I didn’t know you were Donovan’s dad, you jackass!
I made twelve thousand dollars last year, and you were making me buy diapers and borrowing my car and-and-and—” She flops off me, nearly knocking my knee and just fucking everything up, and then pushes me to slide over enough for her to take half my pillow. “Why didn’t you talk to me?”
“Because I was happy.”
“You were miserable.”
“I wasn’t, actually. Or, I was happy being miserable?
I wanted to keep Donovan, and he needed you, and it got comfortable.
Once I thought I knew what happened to the money, it didn’t matter anymore.
As long as you didn’t take more, and it didn’t make any sense for you to blackmail me again when I was right there, I decided I’d rather just forgive and move on. ”
“So then is it really so strange that I did the same?”
“It is when the person you’re catering to is an asshole to you, yeah.”
“How much money were you going to get if you got the touchdown?”
“Fifty thousand. And I was about ten rushing yards from one-hundred thousand on top of that. It would have settled up the blackmailers’ demand and covered Andy for the rest of the month. Would have left us with five thousand.” I was so damn close.
Tilly smacks my gut, but it’s the back of her hand, and it’s a fairly floppy smack. “You fucked up, Blaise.”
I grin, glad that she’s being sassy with me if not actually irritated, and twist myself to kiss her again, more softly this time.
“I love you, Tilly.”
She pouts — she actually pouts — and says, “I don’t know how much I love you right now, Blaise, but I was warming up to you until all this.”
I laugh loudly and attempt to tip myself over her and take advantage of this linebacker-sized bed.
The second my ankle starts to shift, an alarm goes off.
The medical team rushes back in.
Doc Tremaine yells, “I told you no sex in here!”
Newly promoted Emily Hess, Director of Public Relations, stares me down across the long table they’ve brought me to at the Wilmington Juggernaut’s corporate headquarters.
There are about a dozen suits here, from Team Owner Tamara Godwell all the way down to an intern scribbling notes furiously on a tablet while another intern calmly types them — I think this is for dramatic effect — but Emily Hess is the one who’s stressing me the most.
Also, there are representatives from four different departments, but no one from legal.
I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Legal’s usually around for the bad stuff and definitely when there’s an actual law that’s been broken — which, hi, blackmail — but they’re conspicuously absent for me. There’s a private detective here.
Not a real police detective. This is a guy who used to be a cop and is now into what looks like shady shit, if I’m taking a guess.
But it’s Emily Hess, sitting between Godwell and the team manager, who’s stressing me out.
“So then, after the Texans game last season, I’m out partying, having a good time, and I get this email.
It’s got the name of the girl, and I’d been thinking about her, you know?
Wondering if she was okay and shit. Usually, I don’t open emails if I don’t already know the address, but it’s that same name. I go for it.”
Everyone listens but with varying degrees of focus.
Coach Keenan is rubbing his eyes. The HR Director went ashen the moment I said I thought Tilly had come down enough from the acid to give for-real consent.
The team shrink has this glazed look, like he’s heard this sort of nonsense from players so many times that it just rolls right off him.
Okay, he’s heard this sort of nonsense from me personally dozens of times. The first year, they had me seeing him weekly.
“There’s a video in the email. A, uhh, a porn, I think.
And listen, I get unsolicited shit all the time, whatever, we’ve all seen ladies jamming twelve-inch—never mind.
Anyway, this is different, right? It looks like one of those leaked celebrity sex tapes, where it’s all dark and grainy and the angles are off, and I’m just confused, I figure I should watch it.
Just, like, I don’t know, maybe it’ll be good or . . . or I don’t know.”
Emily Hess breathes in and out at the most even pace I’ve ever seen. She doesn’t move otherwise. She doesn’t react at all. She’s probably a beast at poker. But I swear I see wheels turning.