10. Rhett
RHETT
As if the woman couldn’t get any fucking sexier.
She stared up at me through those black-rimmed glasses of hers, slightly lopsided on her face, as if she didn’t quite care how they sat along the bridge of her nose.
I couldn’t help it. I balanced the tray in one hand and reached out, gripping her glasses and repositioning them so they sat a bit straighter on her face.
I’d seen her with those pathetic little magnifying reading glasses before. But never in a pair like this.
Never in the kind of glasses that haunted every single geeky girl dream I’d ever had as a horny ass teenager.
I felt my cock leap against the zipper of my jeans.
She probably didn’t have a clue how beautiful she looked.
“Yes?” Victoria answered, pulling me out of my trance. I shook my head a bit as she continued. “I’ve worn glasses of some sort ever since I was a teenager.”
I marched into her room, brushing past her until I set the tray of food down into a chair next to the bed.
I felt her eyes watching me like a goddamn hawk as I turned back toward the door. “Forgot something downstairs. Be right back.”
If she said something to me, I didn’t hear it. I rushed out of that fucking bedroom so quickly that the carpet would have caught on fire had my feet been fucking matches. I rounded the corner of the hallway, tucking myself into a dark corner before I shoved my hand down my pants.
I rearranged my growing erection before I slipped into one of the many bathrooms to wash my hands.
I took my time making my way back to the bedroom. But the sounds of giggling and kissing made my ears twitch. I knew those sounds. They were the sounds that frequently came from Coach’s office. Or the locker room. Or the showers of the locker room.
Thank fuck, we’re on this end of the house, I thought to myself as I made a beeline back down the hallway.
“Oh, Colton,” Bry groaned somewhere in the distance.
I heard her yelp softly before Coach’s voice echoed into the kitchen. “Careful, this house echoes.”
Bry giggled as I silently slipped out of the kitchen and into the hallway. “Might wanna pin me to a wall closer to the bedroom, then.”
I grimaced at their words as I picked up the pace.
Bry giggling sounded out once more before I heard something that sounded like a growl.
Ew. Fucking hell, that’s gross. I wrinkled my nose as I trudged down the hallway, leaving their sounds in my fucking dust. By the time I got to Victoria’s room, there was a soft, warm glow of light pouring from beneath the gap of the door toward the carpet.
However, when I nudged the door open with my hip, the first sound I heard broke my heart.
I heard a sniffle before I saw Victoria furiously wiping her face.
“Hey, hey, hey,” I said as I quickly closed the bedroom door behind me. I made my way to her with a quickened pace. “Hey, it’s okay. Look at me.”
She just shook her head and tried turning away from me, but I gripped her shoulders. I spun her in my direction. And when I gripped her chin, tilting her sorrowful steel gaze up to mine, I allowed the pad of my thumb to swipe along her cheek.
Drying her tears as they helplessly fell.
“How did this happen?” she whispered.
I immediately pulled her into my arms. “Hey. Hey. I’m right here.”
“I hate this. I hate this so fucking much. I want to strangle him, Rhett,” she choked out.
I threaded my fingers through her loose hair and let it spill down her back. “Just let it out.”
Had I not already seen her once before in this state, I would’ve been shocked when she collapsed into me.
But flashes of that night we watched Golden Girls rushed through my mind.
The destitute look on her face. How she randomly cried at points during the show that weren’t worth the tears.
How she eventually laid her head on my shoulder as if her entire body gave out due to the war raging within her.
I tightened my grasp when I felt her collapse into me, her body refusing to hold her up any longer.
“It’s okay, I gotcha,” I said softly as I scooped her off her feet.
I walked over to the edge of the bed and perched against it, holding her in my lap as if she were nothing but a child in need of soothing.
“This just isn’t my place, you know?” she managed in between her hiccups. “I-I-I-I—it’s just… not my bed. Not my… my shower. Not… not my…”
I pulled her closer and let her feel it instead of saying it, pressing my nose into the top of her head.
I couldn’t help how I inhaled her scent.
“I just… I’m just not… not good without my… my routine,” she said, her voice becoming choppier as her emotions ran away with her.
My eyes darted along the room, scrambling for purchase on anything that might help distract her.
And that’s when I realized there was a mounted television on the other side of the room.
I scooped her back up into my arms. I tucked her into the bed.
I fluffed some of the silky pillows up, propping them behind her before I walked over to our food.
I cracked open her soda and poured it over a glass of ice.
I took great care in handing her the food I brought for us, so that she could nourish herself if she wanted.
And after I got her secured in bed, I went in pursuit of the remote.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice sounding a bit drier than before.
“A-ha!” I exclaimed softly as I thrust the remote into the air. “Found it.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Found what?”
I turned toward the television, aiming the remote at it, and turned it on.
Victoria gasped as if she didn’t even realize the damned thing was in her room.
How disoriented had she been all day? It was a smart television, thank fuck, so I knew how to navigate it.
And the second I pulled up Hulu, Victoria made the cutest little sound.
Almost like a squeal, but punctuated with snicker. “Please tell me you’re putting on Golden Girls again.”
I grinned as I scrolled right to the show and picked a random episode. “How did you know?”
I brought the remote back to the side of the bed I crawled into.
I kept my distance, making sure she had plenty of space in between us.
After all, I wanted to help her get through this, not overwhelm her during the process.
I pulled my food into my lap. Poured my drink over ice.
And as Victoria’s sniffling turned to giggling, my heart felt lighter than it had since this shit slammed into our laps that very morning.
But as we ate alongside one another and watched television, I noticed that she played more with her food than actually eating it.
“Just a few bites, yeah?” I asked as I took another large mouthful of the vegetable alfredo.
She groaned as if I asked her to eat a fucking cockroach, but she did as I asked. She took small bites of just the vegetables in the alfredo. It led to her eating a few noodles. Which led to her poking around with her salad.
I cleared my plate and downed my drink before she barely got halfway through her meal.
“I don’t think I can eat anymore, Rhett,” she muttered as she pushed her plate off her lap a bit.
“Hey, not a problem with that,” I said as I slipped out of bed and gathered her half-eaten dishes. “I’m just glad you got something into your system.”
I silently gathered our dirty dishes and placed them on the tray on the bedside table.
I crawled back into bed and slipped beneath the sheet.
I shifted a bit closer to Victoria, watching to make sure she didn’t shift away from me.
And when she didn’t, I settled against her, my clothed thigh against the outside of her nightgown.
Even without our skin touching, I felt her overwhelming warmth.
I wanted to blanket myself in it.
Somehow, by the grace of some god I didn’t pray to, I managed to focus on the Golden Girls episode in front of us.
It was one of my favorites. The one where Blanche is proposed to, but ultimately turns the man down because she knows she deserves better.
I always enjoyed the confidence she built up in herself over the course of the episode.
But instead of laughter, Victoria started crying next to me again.
Soft, barely-there sniffles that gave way to those hiccupped sobs.
“Aaaaaaall right,” I murmured as I raised my arm and slipped it around her waist. “Come here.”
She didn’t even fight me, and that’s how I knew her mind was spiraling.
She leaned her head on my shoulder, drenching it with tears, and my attention was no longer on the Golden Girls episode.
Her body shivered. Her sniffles broke my heart.
I gathered her into my arms, pulling her into my lap as I spread my legs a bit, making room for her so that she could curl up and rest her cheek against my shoulder.
I felt her breaking down.
I knew her grief was pulling her under.
And I was desperate to do anything to help.
“What do you need?” I asked as I peered down at her, taking in her blotchy red face. “What do you need from this moment right now?”
She shook her head, jaw working. I watched her fight it the way she always fought it, that war she always waged against her own softness like softness was something to be ashamed of.
“You don’t have to be fine right now,” I said. “Not in here. Not with me.”
She drew in a breath that shook on the way in and steadied on the way out. She did that sometimes. Inhaled the chaos and exhaled something that looked like composure, even when it wasn’t. Even when her eyes were still red and her hands were still trembling slightly against my arm.
She was quiet for so long I thought she’d gone somewhere I couldn’t follow.
Then she looked up at me.
Not the way she usually looked at me, the measured, guarded look she’d perfected over fourteen years of running a room full of people who underestimated her.
This was different. This was the version of her she kept for rooms where nobody was watching and nothing was required of her.
The one she didn’t know I’d been collecting for three years.
“He would have told me to stop being an idiot,” she said.
I didn’t ask who. I knew.
“Ryan.” The name sat soft in her mouth. Not painful, exactly.
Just full. “He had — God, he had absolutely no patience for my bullshit. I mean that in the best possible way.” The ghost of something that wasn’t quite a smile moved across her face.
“He would have watched you today. Everything you did. The calls, the mud on those cameras, the way you managed all of us without once making it about yourself.” She paused.
“And then he would have looked at me like I was the biggest idiot he’d ever loved and told me to get out of my own way. ”
I stayed very still.
“I’ve been so afraid,” she said, “of everything that comes after. The mess of it. The risk.” Her gray eyes stayed on mine, clear and deliberate in a way that made my chest ache. “I’ve been treating grief like it was loyalty. Like wanting something for myself was some kind of betrayal.”
“It isn’t,” I said quietly.
“I know.” She said it like she was hearing it for the first time and meaning it. “I think I’ve known for a while.” Her hand came up and pressed flat against my chest, right over my heart. “I just needed to catch up to it.”
I covered her hand with mine.
She looked at where our hands were stacked together for a long moment.
Then she tilted her face up toward mine, and what I saw there wasn’t grief and it wasn’t desperation and it wasn’t someone trying to forget.
It was Victoria Caldwell making a decision with her whole self, clear-eyed and deliberate, the same way she made every decision that mattered.
She kissed me.
Not me pulling her in. Not me taking what I’d been wanting for three years. Her. Her hands sliding up my chest, her chin tilting up, her mouth finding mine like she’d already thought about exactly how this would go and had decided she was done waiting.
I went completely still for one half-second, one stunned, reverent half-second, and then I kissed her back with everything I had.
She made a sound against my mouth that I felt in the back of my spine, and I gathered her in closer, one hand at her jaw and one at the small of her back, holding her like something I’d been waiting to hold for a very long time.
Because I had been.
Three years. Every turned left instead of right. Every morning in the shower. Every practice where I clocked exactly when she walked in because some part of me was always listening for those heels.
All of it led here. To her mouth on mine. To her hands in my hair. To Victoria Caldwell choosing me on purpose, in the dark, with no audience and no reason I could see except that she’d chosen to.
This woman was mine.
And she’d decided it herself.
She moaned in my mouth and collapsed against my chest.
All bets were officially off.