Chapter 46
FORTY-SIX
reeve
“Hey.”
I open one eye to see Cam striding into my room. He yanks the blankets off me.
“You better get your ass out of bed. Lunch at the Forrester family compound begins in fifty-nine minutes.”
I squint at the clock: 11:01. “Let me sleep, dude. It’s my only break.”
“You slept for twelve hours. Get up and let’s go.”
“I wouldn’t call that sleep.” I roll over and sit on the edge of the bed.
I swear I haven’t had a solid night of sleep since the last time I talked to Jade.
She’s always in my head, and when I’m asleep, she’s somewhere in my dreams. “Listen, Cam, I think I’m gonna skip the visit today.
Tell Minnie sorry, but I’m just not up for it. ”
“Not gonna fly. I talked to her an hour ago and she was running around the kitchen like a nutjob, making dessert for our visit. If you don’t show up, she’ll kill me.
” Cam’s mom has been insistent for weeks we toast to the end of our football season—and my Heisman dreams—on the eve of my leaving for the ceremony, and the day has arrived.
Tomorrow I fly to New York, and the next day I either win or lose the Heisman Trophy.
“Minnie baked? She can’t turn on an oven.”
“Once in a while. I think the last time was before I met you.”
My stomach growls. “What’d she bake?”
“‘My boys’ favorites!’” Cam says in a high-pitched, Southern-accented imitation of his mom. “Pecan pie and lemon icebox pie.”
“Those are my favorites. You hate pie.”
“And she still tries to deny you’re the favorite. Now let’s go, Golden Boy.”
I’m grouchy about leaving my bed until we walk into Cam’s house and I smell the familiar scent—like cinnamon but better—and I remember I love it here.
Minnie glides in wearing a dress, heels, and a crisp, pale-pink apron that’s clearly never seen a single grain of flour.
She greets us with enthusiastic hugs and runs through her well-worn list of compliments about what handsome, strong, and all-around outstanding specimens of masculinity we are.
Cam quietly endures it, but I smile so she’ll keep going.
It doesn’t matter that she’s been saying it since I was an awkward string bean of a seventh grader; it never gets old.
“Lay it on extra thick for him, Ma,” Cam tells her. “Your boy’s nursing his first broken heart.”
Minnie gasps. “No.”
“I told you I wasn’t seeing that girl anymore,” I say.
“Well, sure, that’s practically the nightly news. But a broken heart? Truly?”
“Thanks, Cam.”
“As I live and breathe,” Minnie declares. “Well, can’t say I have much experience with that, but I do know that food fixes all the soul’s ails, so let’s move to the kitchen. You boys want to join me in a little afternoon bourbon?” She leads us down the hall and into the spotless white kitchen.
Cam nods at the near-empty rocks glass on the counter. “Looks like you got an early start to your afternoon.”
She looks briefly sheepish, then tosses him a smile. “Afternoon, morning. It’s all the same in this house.”
We eat and drink and I go hard on Minnie’s pies, which taste almost as good as they look.
Minnie’s fired up about attending the Heisman ceremony Saturday, and even though I’m sick to death of Heisman talk, she keeps the focus on her outfit, her hotel reservation, and, well, herself, so I make it through the conversation without the old stomach churn.
It feels so good to be home, back to the one place that hasn’t changed.
When I was in high school, I pretty much treated this place like a hotel, an easy thing considering the staff the Forresters kept on hand to maintain perfect working order.
I told myself this house was my home base, but not my home, even when I wanted it to be.
I knew once I went to college and I was a legal adult with a dorm room and a cafeteria to pick up where this place left off, I wouldn’t be coming back.
That idea lasted until fall break of freshman year, when Cam came home without me and Minnie cried because she thought I didn’t want to be part of their family anymore.
I guess I’m still working on believing she’ll always feel that way.
Later, when Cam falls asleep on the couch in front of the TV, Minnie finds me upstairs in my old bedroom, which hasn’t changed since I graduated from high school except for the new carpeting and the football she’s placed in a glass display cube from my junior year, when I threw for four hundred yards.
“This old house feels alive again when you boys come home,” she tells me. “Just like old times.”
“Old times like when we’d come home drunk? Sneak girls into the attic bedroom? Smoke behind the pool house and set the trellis on fire?”
“Oh, lord.” She laughs. “I forgot I didn’t have a strand of gray hair until you joined the family.”
“Come on, Minnie, you’ll never have a gray hair in your life.”
“Not that the sky will ever see.” She sits down on my bed and crosses her legs. “You all right, honey?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Because until today, the only time I saw Cameron outtalk you at the table was when you were coming off a concussion. He wasn’t kidding about your broken heart, was he?”
“I guess not.”
“What came between you and this girl of yours?”
“She was going one way and I was going the other.”
“Of course. That’s how all relationships end . . . except the ones that don’t.” She gives me a meaningful look.
“Uh . . . translation?”
She sighs dreamily. “Oh, I don’t know. I was never great at love. But I know if I had a man who loved me, I wouldn’t abide him turning tail just because things got a little rocky. Are you trying to work it out with her?”
“Can’t say I’ve really tried,” I admit. “But I’m not sure she wants that. I’m not even sure I know how. I don’t have answers when it comes to me and her.”
“Do you love her?”
I nod.
“Do you think she loves you?”
I think about Jade up on that rooftop, looking down at me.
The way she showed up for me in that simple way that only she could understand meant the entire world to me.
I remember the way she used to look at me, those too-short moments when she forgot she was supposed to appear indestructible at all times and she lost herself in watching me. “Yeah,” I say.
“Well, there it is.”
“There’s what?”
“Your answer. You found love, so now you hold on to it, darling.”
“She won’t tell me she loves me. She won’t tell me anything.”
“And yet you know she does. How did she manage that?”
Touché. “So it’s all on me? I have to fight for her and she just gets to sit there and say yes or no?”
“Looks like it.”
“What a bunch of bullshit.”
“I know you’re used to winning. On the field, it all comes easy to you, but love’s not like that.” She smooths out the bedspread with a manicured hand. “You’re going to be lonely the rest of your life if you expect love to play out like a game of football.”
“I didn’t expect it to. I didn’t expect it at all, really. I was trying to stay as far away from a relationship as possible.”
“In that case, thank your lucky stars it found you. Now you better fight like hell to keep it.”
A wave of exhaustion moves through me. “I thought when a relationship was right, it would come easy. That if you have to fight too hard, it wasn’t meant to be.”
Minnie shrugs like she doesn’t have the answer, but the light in her eyes tells me otherwise.
“Only you can say whether this girl is worth fighting for. But if you want real love, you have to be willing not just to fight for it but to lose it altogether—to know you might end up heartbroken and alone, but that you did everything in your power to give your heart what it needs. That you didn’t just sit around waiting for love to happen to you. ”
She’s right. Sitting around waiting for love to happen—for Jade to come to me and tell me what I want to hear—is exactly what I’ve been doing, and I’m miserable for it.
But the feeling of wanting her back is matched only by the fear of needing her like I do.
Of losing her and ending up broken forever.
“I don’t know, Minnie. Forgive me for saying this, but I always respected you for the way you handled Mr. Forrester passing away. You didn’t fall apart. I don’t want to need someone so much I just lie down and die if they up and leave.”
“You don’t give yourself enough credit for what you went through. Honey, you’ve already survived the worst. Ain’t nothing going to destroy you.”
After she goes downstairs, I sit thinking about whether she’s right or just doing the mom thing.
Until a few weeks ago, success always came easy to me on the field.
As long as I put in the work, I got the gains and then some.
And the truth about this ugly season is that it didn’t happen to me; I let it happen.
I got lazy, I think bitterly. Lazy is the one thing I swore I’d never be as an athlete.
And that beautiful final win I’ve had? That didn’t happen to me either. I worked for it. I worked to get back what I lost.
Maybe it’s not too late to win her back too.