JAKE
My phone rings, playing the Gilligan’s Island theme song.
I keep looking at her.
The phone keeps ringing.
“You can answer it,” she says around a bite of ice cream.
I glance down. The number on the screen is from Tampa. I stand, and before I go inside, I look at her one more time.
I go into the kitchen and answer the call. “Wheeler.”
The voice on the other end belongs to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers general manager. Hearing his voice again feels strange. Like somebody reached straight into the ground and pulled up old memories by the roots.
He gets right to it. Injury. Need. Seasonal contract to start. Team wants me to come down this week if I’m interested. Needs an answer soon.
I brace one hand against the kitchen counter and stare through the open door while he talks.
At Mo.
Still sitting there eating ice cream, completely unaware she’s currently wrecking my ability to think straight just by existing in an oversized Bucs sweatshirt, ironically.
Hank’s asleep at her feet, snoring hard enough his jowls flap out every few breaths.
A whole life right here in front of me.
For a minute, the past and the present stand side by side in my head.
Stadium lights. Crowd noise shaking the ground under my cleats. Cannons firing. That old electric feeling right before a snap, when sixty-five thousand people are waiting to see if I’m about to become a hero or the reason they all get quiet.
There was a time I would’ve said yes before he finished asking. For a long time, I didn’t know how not to go when football called. It was the only thing I trusted not to leave me.
But now I’m standing barefoot in my kitchen, looking at Mo on my porch, in my sweatshirt with my bulldog asleep at her feet.
And somehow that looks bigger than any stadium ever did.
“Jake?” the GM says.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “I’m here.”
“You interested?”
My eyes stay on the porch.
On her.
On the life I tried hard not to build with her and somehow built anyway in pieces small enough I didn’t see it happening.
Her coffee cup beside mine in the sink.
The way Hank checks where she is now before he settles anywhere.
Her hair tie on the nightstand.
The place beside me already shaped for her before she’s ever promised to fill it.
“No,” I say.
There’s a pause. “Want some time?”
“Thank you for the consideration, but I need to decline.”
“You sure?”
I think about her saying you make it very hard not to stay. Her knee angled toward me in the truck earlier. Her hand grabbing my arm when she laughed so hard she had to bend over. The side of her foot pressed against mine under the table as if it was the most natural thing to do.
“Yes, sir,” I say. “I’m sure.”
Silence hums on the other end. Then he does the polite disappointment thing. Says he understands. The door’s open if circumstances change. He’s glad I’m healthy again.
I thank him again for the call and hang up.
Then I just stand there in the quiet kitchen with the phone in my hand.
I don’t feel like I gave something up.
No ache. No second-guessing. No itch under my skin telling me I’m making the wrong call.
Just relief so immediate it almost knocks me sideways.
I look back through the door. Mo shifts in the chair and tucks the other foot underneath her, pulling the sweatshirt over both knees. She scrapes another spoonful from the carton while Hank sleep barks once under her chair like he’s defending us from dream marauders.
This is the life that feels like mine.
I slide my phone into my pocket and head back out to the porch.
Everything in me wants to pull her up out of that chair and tell her I just turned down Tampa without blinking because the thought of walking away from this made me feel sick.
Tell her it’s already too late for me.
Tell her I’m not halfway in this anymore, no matter how quiet I’m being about it.
Instead, I sit down beside her.
She studies my face. “Everything okay?”
“Everything’s good.”
She keeps looking at me like she knows there’s more sitting underneath that answer. Then she settles back in the chair, takes another bite of ice cream, and holds the carton toward me, smiling.
I take it and lean back in my chair. I dig my spoon into the place hers just was. Hank twitches in his sleep and lets out another muffled bark. Beside me, Mo pulls the sweatshirt sleeves over her hands against the breeze.
I don’t know what she’s going to do.
I don’t know if she’s going to stay.
I only know that somewhere along the way, without saying it out loud, I built a future around the possibility that she might.
And if that’s stupid, it’s already done.
Because I can feel it now, plain as anything.
If she leaves, it won’t just break my heart.
It’ll rip through every ordinary part of my life I’m already imagining with her in it.