EMORY
“Mo!”
I see my name leave his lips and hear it in his voice at the exact same time.
My hands grip the rail so hard my knuckles have gone white. My fingers are numb. I can’t feel anything except the impossible way my chest seems to cave in and expand at the same time.
Jake is standing below me in full pads, helmet off, sweat shining on his face, breathing hard, looking up at me like I’m the only thing he sees while the stadium loses its collective mind around us.
Cannons fire. “Yo Ho, Yo Ho” blasts through the speakers. His leap into the end zone flashes across the jumbotron with TOUCHDOWN stamped in giant letters while grown men chest bump and strangers hug and somewhere behind me a woman screams loud enough to qualify as an emergency siren.
And somehow all of it feels far away.
All I see is him.
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
Shocker.
Ten years ago, this man looked at me and said I love you. And I said thank you. Because I am historically, spectacularly bad at the moments that matter most.
Not today.
Please, God. Not today.
He’s looking at me the way he always has. Since before I understood what it meant. Since long after I pretended I didn’t.
“What are you doing here?” he calls.
A nervous laugh breaks out of me, tangled up with a sob. “I’m choosing you,” I shout.
The words come out of me so fast they almost knock me off balance.
“I should’ve said it then,” I call down to him, voice shaking now. “I should’ve said it in the lighthouse. On the island. On the dock. In the boathouse. I should’ve said it a hundred different times in a hundred different places, and I didn’t.”
I stop, take a breath, and press one hand flat to my chest like that might slow me down.
I don’t want to rush this.
Because I finally have the words.
“But I’m saying it now.”
I look him straight in the eyes.
“I love you, Jake Wheeler,” I say, loud and clear.
“I have loved you since I was twelve years old and too stupid to know what it was. I loved you at twenty when I was too scared to say it. I loved you every year after that when I was too ashamed to fix what I broke. And I love you right now, standing here in your jersey, in this stadium, with mascara running down my face and thousands of people probably wondering why there’s a woman having an emotional breakdown in the end zone. ”
A laugh catches in his throat.
Jake carries things instead of crying about them.
He carried losing his parents. He carried me leaving. He carried a decade of loving me without once asking anybody to feel sorry for him.
But his eyes are tearing up.
He drops his head and presses his fist hard against his mouth like he needs a second to get himself together before he looks back up at me.
The sight of it knocks the strength clean out of my knees.
When he lifts his head again, I see he’s trying to hold on to the control that has held him together for years.
“Get down here,” he says, voice rough.
“I can’t. There’s a wall.”
“I don’t care about the wall.”
“Jake, I’m not exactly built for scaling stadium infrastructure. Plus, there are cannons. And pirates with swords.”
He reaches up anyway. Both hands open. Reaching for me without hesitation.
Waiting.
I know how many times I’ve been offered something real and precious and stepped back because I didn’t trust myself with it.
Not this time.
I swing one leg over the railing. Then the other.
I lower myself awkwardly, very much not gracefully,
and jump.
His hands are on my waist before I’m even halfway down.
I dangle there for one breathless second before he easily lowers me to the turf.
My feet hit the ground, but he doesn’t let go.
I’m standing in front of him with my hair blown to hell and my face looking like a hot mess.
And he’s looking at me like I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
“Say it again,” he says.
“I love you.”
His hands flex at my waist. “Again.”
A shaky laugh spills out. “I LOVE YOU, JAKE WHEELER.”
He slides his hands up and cups my face. His thumbs brush under my eyes, catching tears I didn’t realize were still falling. Then he leans in and rests his forehead against mine.
“I love you, Emory Donovan,” he says quietly. “I have loved you every single day. The days you were here. The days you were gone. The days I told myself to stop. Every day. Every damn one.”
My legs are shaking so much I have to grab fistfuls of his jersey to stay upright.
“I know,” I whisper. “I know, and I’m so sorry I—“
“Don’t.”
“Jake—“
“You’re here.” He tips my face up until I have to look at him. “That’s what matters. You’re here.”
He doesn’t punish me or make me crawl over broken glass for what I should’ve said years ago.
Just Jake. Still meeting me with both hands open.
Then he kisses me.
The stadium erupts again, but it may as well be happening in another universe.
All I know is his lips are on mine. His hands on my face. And he kisses me with the kind of relief that feels like all the years of loving me finally found what they’ve been searching for.
When he pulls back, he doesn’t go far. Just enough that I can see his eyes. They’re still wet.
He’s smiling now in that wide, open, nothing held back way that always ruins me.
The dimple.
That devastating dimple.
It hits me so hard I almost laugh.
“Mo,” he says.
“Jake.”
His smile deepens. “Just one more thing.”
My breath catches. I brace for whatever’s coming.
“Thank you.”
That word has lived inside me for ten years like a splinter. A sharp little souvenir of the worst thing I could’ve said in the best possible moment.
And he just handed it back to me with a dimple.
I stare at him. Then I bust out laughing. Fresh tears spilling for a completely different reason.
“You are such an ass,” I say.
He laughs too, his forehead dropping to mine again.
I shove both hands against his chest plate. “You’ve been waiting to use that.”
“Ten years.”
“Ten years?”
He shrugs, grinning. “It was memorable.”
I laugh harder.
Then the sound around us swells again, and I realize it never actually stopped. If anything, it’s louder now.
Jake glances up.
I follow his gaze.
The jumbotron.
Oh no.
My black streaked, tear soaked, red nosed face is approximately sixty feet tall.
“Jake,” I say slowly. “We’re on the jumbotron.”
Wayne and Ryan come barreling toward us from the center of the field, both of them laughing.
“Before you start dirty talk,” Wayne says, “you might wanna lose the mic.”
I go wide eyed. “The what?”
Jake mutters, “Oh shit.”
He reaches under his jersey and yanks a wire free from his shoulder pad.
I look at it.
Then at him.
“You were mic’d?”
He winces. “Yeah.”
My stomach drops straight through the turf. “Everything I just said—”
“Went through the stadium speakers,” Wayne says.
“And probably the broadcast,” Ryan adds.
I close my eyes.
Of course it did.
Of course my emotional breakthrough had surround sound.
“I just told an entire stadium that I love you and that I was too stupid to know it.”
Jake’s mouth twitches. “You did.”
I cover my face with both hands.
I am going to die right here in the end zone.
Both ironic and iconic.
“Mo.”
“I’m going to die.”
“You’re not.”
“I might.”
Jake gently pulls my hands back down, one finger at a time.
But loving him out loud is not a humiliation.
Even if I do look like ass.
So I start laughing again.
He pulls me into him, arms wrapping tight around my back, and I bury my face against his chest plate, which is hard and smells like sweat and grass and is very uncomfortable.
I could not care less.
“This was in my chart!” Wayne yells.
“I hate that I know what that means,” Ryan says.
A coach appears behind Jake and claps him once on the shoulder. “Wheeler. Media.”
Jake turns just enough to acknowledge him, but his eyes stay on me. “Yes, sir.”
Then he takes my face in his hands again, thumbs brushing my cheeks.
“Don’t move.”
I catch his wrist before he can step back. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He goes still.
It’s only a few words, but I see the exact moment they get past everything steady and controlled in him and hit somewhere deeper.
“I promise,” I say quieter now. “I’m not leaving.”
For one second, he just looks at me. Then he leans in and kisses me once more before starting to jog backward toward the sideline.
Halfway there, he points at me and mouths, You love me.
I laugh and call after him, “I love you.”
I love Jake Wheeler.
Turns out it’s the easiest thing I’ve ever said.