Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
DREW
“This is so much fucking fun.” Tyler beams from his place on the sidelines as we wait for warm-ups to start, bouncing on his feet like an energetic puppy.
Members of the coaching and training staff bustle around doing their pre-game stuff, camera crews hover around the field, and after four years playing in college and almost fourteen in the NFL, it’s all so routine I could track it in my sleep.
“Right?” Cam says, broad grin on his face as he comes to stand on my other side, clapping me on the shoulder. “Best day ever.”
I glance between my friends, wondering if I missed something. “What’s going on with the two of you? We’re in Tampa, about to play a football game. Which we’ve done nine other times this season and we’ll do seven more times after this, or more if we make the playoffs. This isn’t all that exciting.”
The truth is, nothing about football holds much excitement for me anymore, and the idea of suiting up and taking the field at least seven more times this season makes me want to lay down and take a nap.
Preferably with a gorgeous brunette pressed to my side.
Fuck, I miss Caitlin. I saw her yesterday before I got on the plane to come here, and we talked last night and again before I got dressed for warm-ups and we’ve been texting all day, but any morning I don’t get to wake up with her next to me and see her with my own eyes is the worst morning ever. I miss her like a limb.
Before I can get too deep into my thoughts, a sharp slap to the back of my head has me jolting. “Ow, what the fuck?” I complain, rubbing the back of my head as I glare at Tyler. “What was that for?”
He glares right back at me. “That’s for the if we make the playoffs bullshit. Don’t be putting that kind of negativity out into the universe. We’re going back-to-back, baby!”
Now it’s Tyler’s turn to get slapped on the back of the head, courtesy of Cam. “Why?” he demands, glowering at Cam. But the menacing stare and the finger he jabs into Cam’s chest is blunted dramatically by his yellow sparkly manicure that glimmers in the Florida sunshine.
Cam rolls his eyes. “Don’t say we’re going to go back-to-back. It’s tempting fate, and I want to win at least one more time before I hang up my helmet.”
Cam’s words take a second to register, but when they do, a strange feeling settles over me. Like a script rewriting itself, a rearrangement of the world I thought I knew. “Hold on. What do you mean hang up your helmet?”
Cam shrugs, all casual and totally relaxed like he didn’t just insinuate plans to leave football. “My contract is up after next season. I’m not signing another one.”
I stare at him like I’ve never seen him before, my heart thrashing around in my chest with a feeling that hovers somewhere between excitement and dread. “You’re retiring?”
He huffs out a laugh, running a hand through his messy hair.
“Is that such a surprise? We’ve been playing for a hundred years.
I’m tired of having my life ruled by a game schedule and spending months out of the year traveling every other week.
I have a woman I love, one kid in high school, and the other heading there soon.
I want to marry Maddy as soon as humanly possible and keep building the life we’ve started that I love so much.
” He glances over at the tunnel as if waiting for her to appear from the locker room where she sets up in the hours before games when she travels with the team.
“I want to be as present of a parent to Riley and Ethan as I can in the years I have left with them under my roof. I want to have more kids and watch my family grow. With all the ways our lives are connected, I see you and Tyler more off the field than I do on it, and I have so many more people who are important to me now. The big life and big family I’ve always dreamed of.
I want to hold onto that. Nurture it and never, ever leave it.
Football has been an incredible part of my life, but I have new dreams now. It’s time for me.”
A woman I love.
The family I’ve always dreamed of.
Never, ever leave it.
New dreams now.
It’s time for me.
I turn Cam’s words over and over in my head, letting them settle somewhere deep.
And when they do, I feel something unspool inside me, the loosening of a knot long tightly tied, the exhale of a breath I’ve been holding forever.
Because I have new dreams too, I think, looking from Tyler to Cam.
Friends I know now will never leave. A sister I’m still getting to know.
A woman I love more every day. A past I’m ready to learn how to leave exactly where it belongs.
A family to nurture. To cherish. To hold on to tightly and never let go.
I open my mouth and the words are tumbling out before I have a chance to stop them. “I think…I think maybe it’s time for me too.”
My breath whooshes out of my lungs, and I stand there a little stunned, taking stock of how I feel, and it’s nothing like I expected.
There isn’t any dread at all. My stomach isn’t in knots.
Instead, there’s just…calm. Calm and hope and a quiet lightness I don’t recognize at first because it’s not something I’ve felt before.
For a second I wonder if maybe Caitlin should have been the first person to hear those words, but as I watch Cam’s eyes soften, something like pride swimming in their depths, I realize this is exactly the way it’s supposed to be.
The broken boy and the brother who helped save him. Coming into the game together and leaving it the same way. A friendship that will last a lifetime.
“Well fuck, what the hell am I supposed to do?”
I turn at Tyler’s exasperated voice to see him with his hands propped on his hips, leveling us with an accusatory stare.
Cam smirks at him. “What are you supposed to do about what?”
Tyler rolls his eyes. “You’re my best fucking friends and you both just told me you’re retiring next year and leaving me here on the team all by myself.
Who the fuck am I supposed to sit with in the cafeteria on practice days?
Who’s going to watch movies with me in my hotel room when we’re traveling?
I suck at making new friends. No.” He shakes his head vigorously.
“You can’t retire. Either of you. I forbid it. ”
“This year.”
Tyler stares at me, his mouth dropping open dramatically. “What do you mean this year?”
I laugh at the actual fear in his voice, my chest lighter than air. “I’m not retiring next year. I’m retiring this year.” I stop and think about how those words feel coming out of my mouth and decide they feel just fine. “Yeah,” I say with a definitive nod. “This season is it for me.”
Cam reaches out and grips my shoulder, squeezing in a gesture of understanding that makes my eyes burn. And when he murmurs, “Proud of you, brother,” I realize Caitlin isn’t the only person who sees me. Cam does too. Probably always has. And that makes me the luckiest fucking guy in the world.
Caitlin.
“Shit,” I mutter, rocking from one foot to the other as I watch Tampa’s defense finish their warm-ups.
“What?” Tyler asks tersely, his tone less full-grown adult and more moody toddler on the verge of a tantrum. “Got another bomb to drop on me? Another way you’re planning on leaving me behind? This sucks so bad, you guys. We’re the Three Musketeers and you’re breaking up the band.”
“Nah,” I say, swinging an arm around his shoulder because I love the shit out of my cheerful friend.
“I just wish I could talk to Caitlin. I’ve been…
struggling a little with whether I’m ready to leave the game.
It feels right that you guys are the first to know, but now I really want to tell her too. ”
I watch as Tyler and Cam exchange mischievous smiles, looking at each other and then back to me, then turning their heads in unison back towards the stands.
Something races through me, a kind of knowing that has my hair standing on end. Excitement shimmers in my stomach as I turn, somehow already sure of what I’m going to see.
Caitlin.
Not at home in the house I hope one day will belong to us both and not on the other end of a phone. Here. In Florida. In the stadium where I’m about to play what I now know is the first game of the final stretch of my career.
She’s standing right against the railing between the stands and the field, golden-brown ponytail shining in the afternoon sun.
Our eyes catch and hold, the love there so intense I can feel it even from almost fifty feet away.
The stadium may be filled with fans, the field bustling with activity, but she’s all I can see.
When her hand goes to her hip, a smirk curling her lips as if to say What do you think you’re looking at?
I laugh out loud, my happiness so intense it fills me all the way to my toes.
When Caitlin tips her head to the side, I follow her gaze and my breath catches in my chest as I notice for the first time she’s not alone.
Avery stands next to her, grinning at me too, and the two of them are flanked by Caitlin’s friends—Maddy, Sophie, Maya, Sarah, and Emmy each decked out in Renegades gear, drinks in hand and what looks like an entire concession stand’s worth of snacks spread out over the ledge in front of them.
Jack and Oliver sit behind them with Cam’s kids Ethan and Riley, Hallie and Ben, and Rachel Parker and her husband, Steven, too.
A family, I think, the lump in my throat making it hard to breathe.
My girl brought me a family.
The love that swamps me is so enormous I wonder how it can be survivable.