23. Berkley
Dream On, Dixie
I’d been running nonstop since the beginning of the year, and I was tired.
Actually, tired didn’t even begin to cover what I was. What I desperately needed was a week of uninterrupted sleep and five more hours in the day, minimum, to stay on top of my homework and Bar studies.
A girl could dream, right?
March passed in a flurry of school and studying. After the trade deadline drama, I’d been unable to stop myself from clinging tighter to Brent. When he was on the road, I missed him like I’d miss a limb. Only the utter end-of-semester madness kept me from going crazy without him.
The neediness scared me in a bone-deep way. It scared me how few reservations I’d had about opening my heart and life fully to him. After Lee had cheated on me, after he’d hurt me so thoroughly and embarrassed me so badly, I didn’t think I’d ever love someone again.
Leave it to Brent Jean to prove me wrong.
On the surface, everything looked perfect. But looks could be deceiving, and the thought that he could’ve been traded and left me—and that I would’ve rearranged my entire life and career aspirations to follow him—had resurrected insecurities within me I’d thought I’d buried deeper than that.
While my parents’ marriage had proven to me time and time again that it was okay—wonderful and necessary, even—to share my life with someone, that it was okay to want that for myself…the more serious I got with Brent, the more difficult it became for me to hang onto the things that had been so important to me before he’d come into my life. To keep him, I’d conceded on things I’d once stood firm on. And the further they slipped from my grasp, the more I felt like I was spinning out of control, losing myself in the process of giving myself to Brent.
When Brent wasn’t on the road, we spent every spare moment together, alternating between his place and mine, if only so we could come together at night and wake up together in the morning.
At this point, with his hectic work schedule and my equally crazy school schedule, it felt like we were simply going to the motions. The sex was still mind-blowing, everything I’d secretly hoped for but never dared ask for from previous partners. As a lover, Brent was attentive, inventive, and utterly devoted to pleasing us both fully. I’d never been so sexually satisfied.
And emotionally—God, every time I looked at him, I fell a little more in love. For his part, Brent practically worshiped the ground at my feet—would happily get on his knees and do just that if I asked. This love was more precious to me than anything, more than I’d ever dreamed of for myself.
And in those moments, when his arms were wrapped around me or when he looked at me with his heart in his eyes, I forgot myself. My world narrowed to a pinpoint, where all that mattered was him and us together.
But when he was gone, and I could once again see reason, how quickly I’d become one of those girls I never wanted to be left a sour taste in my mouth.
I was at an impasse. There wasn’t anything wrong, and yet I couldn’t shake the dread that settled over me without warning.
Why did I feel like everything was about to blow up in my face?
“You should move in.”
I stilled.
There it was, the proverbial other shoe.
It was early April, and with the regular season rapidly drawing to a close and the Warriors ramping up for a playoff run, time together had been harder and harder to come by. This was one of the rare mornings when one of us hadn’t had to run off early for class or practice before the other had awoken. Instead, we’d risen with the sun and spent the morning lazily making love. Afterward, we’d curled together, my back against his front, his arms caging me against his chest.
The moment had been perfect until he’d dropped that bomb.
I shifted over until I faced him. “What did you just say?”
“I said you should move in. We spend all of our time together anyway. It doesn’t make sense to keep leasing two places when we could just have one.”
“No,” I said quickly, shoving his arms away and rising to sit. The response was so automatic, so rapid fire off my hip that I almost laughed at Brent’s expression—mouth flattened into a line, eyes wide enough that the sclera dwarfed the irises, that muscle in his jaw ticking.
“And why the hell not?”
I really should’ve been asking myself the same question. Logically, there was no reason not to. But I wasn’t working with my logical brain here. No, Irrational Berkley was in charge, and I was simply along for the ride. Irrational Berkley knew that if we moved in together, I’d be relinquishing the final piece of my independence. If things went south, extricating myself would be impossible. As it stood, untangling all the parts of me and my life that were tied so tightly to Brent would surely kill me anyway. But living together?
That wasn’t a step I was ready to take.
“Berk?”
I knew I needed to answer, to give him some sort of explanation for why I wasn’t even considering this.
“It’s just too soon.”
Woefully inadequate but the best I could offer.
For a beat, Brent didn’t move. Then he disentangled himself from the sheets and stood.
“Where are you going?” I asked, the sheet slipping to my waist, forgotten. Normally, the sight of my bare breasts would have Brent closing the distance between us and sinking into my body faster than I could blink.
Now, he didn’t even meet my eyes or look in my direction at all.
“Shower,” he said, tone clipped. “I have to be at the airport in a few hours.”
Before I could protest, he slammed the bathroom door shut. That alone would’ve been enough to tell me he didn’t want me following him…and then he locked the door behind him.
Fuck. What had I done?
After our tiff the previous morning, Brent had been chilly with me. I didn’t push him on it, mostly because I didn’t have the energy for a knockdown, drag out fight. When he left for the airport after hardly speaking to me all morning, he offered me nothing more than a chaste kiss to the corner of my mouth and a “see you” as his parting words.
The beast inside my chest wanted to rage and scream and claw at him for acting this way, but I held myself in check.
I only had myself to blame.
Thankfully, between classes and my Bar study group that was meeting that evening, I was almost busy enough not to dwell on it.
Harper Park and Ryan Boyce had been my law school friends and comrades since the first week of classes three years previously. We’d met by chance, having chosen the same study table in the library and bonded over the first week madness.
Tonight, it was my turn to host our study group, so for once while Brent was on the road, I was at my own apartment. In preparation for having company, I’d made snacks and spread my books, laptop, and study guides across my living room table and floor.
Ryan arrived first, handing me a bottle of red wine as a thank you. Harper showed up shortly after, her arms weighed down with a mess of notebooks and files.
“So, I think we should just start at the top,” I said once we’d settled. “I printed out some flash cards with a case example on the front and the winning argument on the back. There’s also a stack of general terms in each of the Bar test subject categories. Which should we do first?”
“Let’s start with terms,” Ryan said. “Then work our way up to the bigger stuff.”
Harper nodded in agreement, and I picked up the note cards.
Before we began, Ryan suggested we make it into a game. The stack of cards was shuffled and divided into three piles, each of us taking one. We would go around the circle, one of us asking the other two to provide the definition for the word on their card. The first one to correctly answer would receive a point. At the end of the game, the two of us with the fewest points would treat the winner to dinner and drinks.
“Y’all are going down,” Ryan said. “I can’t wait for my steak dinner.”
“Dream on, Dixie,” Harper said. I held back a chuckle at Harper’s subtle dig of Ryan’s South Carolina accent, and Ryan glared at her.
The first several rounds went smoothly. We worked our way through over half of the cards, all maintaining our composure. At the point when I was in the lead with twelve points, Ryan in second with ten, and Harper pulling up the rear with nine, all hell broke loose.
When I presented my next card, Ryan and Harper answered at the same time, though both incorrectly. When I told them they were wrong, they proceeded to yell at me and argue like the lawyers they were meant to be. This disagreement eventually devolved into Ryan throwing popcorn at me and booing loudly whenever I opened my mouth.
Finally, sick of being accosted, I pulled out my textbook, flipped to the term in question, and shoved the book in their faces.
“HA!” I yelled. “Told you.”
A blush rose onto Ryan’s cheeks as he read, and Harper whispered, “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I said, “but I think that’s enough for tonight. Brent plays soon, and I need to clean this place up since someone trashed it with popcorn.”
Chastised, Ryan rose to his feet and started picking stray popcorn from my living room carpet. “Sorry,” he mumbled as he dropped the pieces back into the bowl. “Hey, speaking of Brent, are you bringing him to Treasure of Detroit?”
I paused by the hall closet, where I’d headed to get the vacuum.
The Treasure of Detroit Ball was Wayne State’s version of a Barrister’s Ball. It was basically a law school prom. The third-year law students got all dressed up and descended upon the Colony Club to rub elbows with their classmates, as well as practicing lawyers and political elite from the area who had made a lasting impression on that year’s class. I was on the organizing committee along with ten of my classmates, and we’d chosen to keep this year’s event classic. There would be a sit-down dinner and a walking buffet of appetizers later in the evening. Local businesses and wealthy individuals were donating items to a silent auction, the proceeds of which would go to our class’s chosen charity—a local women’s shelter. We’d also booked a live band and were offering a cash bar.
“To be honest, I’ve been so busy I kind of forgot about it,” I said.
And things between me and my boyfriend were so tense at the moment that I wasn’t sure I was even allowed to ask. I hadn’t spoken to him since he’d left the previous day, and the disconnect made me anxious, had my entire body clenching like a fist.
“Forgot?” Harper said, incredulous. “Berkley, you’re dating the hottest man alive and you forgot about an opportunity to dress him up and parade him in front of your classmates? At an event, mind you, that you helped plan.”
I shrugged. “I don’t even know if he’ll be home.”
“He will be,” Ryan said, holding up his phone. “They play Nashville the night before, and then New Jersey on Monday, both at home.”
“Why did you look that up?”
“I really want to meet him,” Ryan admitted with a sheepish grin.
“That makes two of us,” Harper said.
“Ry, you don’t even like hockey.”
“Maybe after three years in Michigan, it’s time to change that,” he said. “You know I want to stay here after graduation.”
True. He had told me so on several occasions.
“Okay, fine. I’ll ask him, but he’s a busy man, so no guarantees.”
Harper snorted. “From what you’ve told us, he worships the ground you walk on and would do pretty much anything you asked.”
Also true. Or, at least, it had been. Now I wasn’t so sure.
Once Ryan and Harper had gone, I curled up on the couch to watch Brent’s game. We may not have been speaking, but the Warriors were still my favorite team. Tonight, they were in Colorado, taking on the Chargers. It was nearly nine, and my eyelids felt like sandpaper every time I blinked. I laid my head down on a throw pillow and pulled my blanket up to my chin, drifting slowly off to sleep just as the puck dropped to start the game.
I woke several hours later to my phone buzzing on the coffee table.
“Hello?” I asked, my voice cracking.
“Berk?” Brent said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Just fell asleep.”
“You didn’t watch the game?”
“No, baby. I’m sorry.”
“So you missed my four goals,” Brent said.
That forced me fully awake. That and the fact that he was being…nice, the iciness from yesterday seeming to have vanished in the intervening hours. “Four? Brent, are you serious?”
He laughed, the sound a warm caress. God, I missed him. “No, but I did have one. And we won, thank you for asking.”
“That’s great, babe,” I said, rising from the couch and making my way upstairs. I put Brent on speaker while I went through my nighttime routine. While Brent chattered about the game, my unease grew until I burst, like a cork popping free of a champagne bottle.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted in the middle of his sentence.
“Me, too.”
“It’s not that I never want to live with you,” I said in a rush. “But this is such a stressful time for both of us right now. I’m about to finish law school and take the Bar, and you’re gearing up for the playoffs. Maybe once summer is over, we can revisit the idea, but right now…”
“I get it,” he said. “It wasn’t fair of me to spring that on you, and it was really fucked up of me to react the way I did. I know better than to toss those kinds of bombs on you in the heat of the moment. It’s just something that’s been on my mind, and I guess I wanted to gauge where you’re at. Clearly, I fumbled.”
“You didn’t fumble,” I said. “It just surprised me. We both reacted badly.”
“We did,” he agreed. “But we’re okay.”
“Of course,” I assured him, my shoulders dropping as I relaxed for the first time in two days.
“How was your night?” he asked.
“Good. Ryan and Harper came over to study.” Both Ryan and Harper’s comments floated through my mind, and now that it appeared things between us were once again on solid ground, I had no reason not to extend the invitation to Brent. “Which reminds me, there’s something I wanted to ask you.”
“What’s up?”
“Next Saturday, there’s this Treasure of Detroit Ball my class is hosting. It’s like law school prom. People get really dressed up, and there will be dinner and drinks and dancing. Would you maybe want to come with me?”
“Of course,” he said without hesitation. “Well, as long as we’re in town.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. I’d do anything for you, Berk. You know that.”
I did, and I was more grateful for it than I could ever express.