Chapter 23 #3
Dre set the phone facedown on the desk and stared at it like the call had left something behind. I stood against him, feeling the tension in his body and the want he was not ready to name.
I looked around the office again at the trophies, the photographs, the ring, then back at the man.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He turned toward me fully and pulled me into him. Not playfully. Not with that easy confidence that usually made my body forget I had sense. His arms came around my waist, and his face lowered toward my neck for one breath.
Then another.
I held him.
After a while, he lifted his head.
“Coach offered me the running backs job.”
“I gathered that.”
His mouth almost smiled. “You eavesdropping now?”
“You were on speaker in a room full of trophies. I assumed privacy had been waived.”
That got a little smile from him.
Then it faded.
“They need an answer.”
“What do you want to do?”
He looked toward the ring again.
“I don’t know.”
I believed him.
Mostly.
But I had watched him watch the Forge. I had felt his body tense under my palm every time a running back missed a lane he saw from a couch. I had heard the frustration when he said they didn’t see it.
“You do,” I said softly.
His gaze came back to mine.
“I think you do.”
His jaw tightened.
“It’s not that simple.”
“I know.”
“If I take it, everything changes. My schedule. My travel. My time. Coaching means being there. Facility. Practice. Film. Road games. Injuries. Young men carrying too much ego and not enough fear.” His voice lowered. “It means going back into that building and not being who I used to be.”
My hands slid up his chest until they rested near his shoulders.
“You don’t have to be who you used to be.”
His laugh came once, quiet and rough. “Everybody says that like it’s easy.”
“It isn’t.”
“No.”
“But it might still be true.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then my own fear rose.
He must have seen it in my face.
“What?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Mani.”
“If you take it, you’ll be on the road. Busy. Tired. Back in that world.”
“Yes.”
“And Cleo wants me traveling more. After Malibu, she thinks Saint Aurelia needs me in more rooms. New York. L.A. Maybe London. Paris if the partnership works out.”
His expression changed carefully.
“That’s good.”
“It is.”
“You earned that.”
“I know.”
“But it feels familiar,” he said.
I looked at him.
He understood before I had to explain the rest.
His arms tightened around me.
“Come here.”
“I’m already here.”
“Closer.”
I went.
He held me in the middle of that office, his awards around us, his future waiting on the desk, mine hovering somewhere between diamonds and departure gates.
“I’m not twenty-two,” he said near my temple.
“I know.”
“And you’re not either.”
“I know that too.”
“We’re not going to lose each other because our lives got big.”
“I want that to be true.”
“It is.”
“Dre.”
“No. Listen to me.” His hand moved up my back slowly. “We messed up before because we didn’t talk. Because I thought loving you meant letting you go quiet, and you thought choosing yourself meant you had to do it alone. That ain’t this.”
I breathed against his chest.
“It can’t be this,” he said. “You travel, we talk. I travel, we talk. We miss each other, we say that. We get scared, we say that too. We don’t make decisions out of old pain and call it maturity.”
My eyes burned.
“You make it sound simple.”
“It’s not.” His mouth brushed my temple. “But it ain’t impossible either.”
I let that sit.
His heartbeat was steady beneath my cheek. The office was quiet around us now, all that proof of who he had been surrounding the man he was trying to become.
“What if I’m gone too much?” I asked.
“Then I miss you too much.”
“That’s your solution?”
“That’s my first draft.”
A laugh broke through the tightness in my chest.
He kissed the top of my head.
“We’ll figure out the rest.”
I lifted my face. “You should take the job.”
He went still.
“I’m not saying that because it doesn’t scare me,” I said. “It does. But I watched you Sunday. I heard you. The game still speaks to you, Dre. And those men need what you know.”
His throat moved.
“You need somewhere to put what you know too.”
He looked away, but not before I saw it.
The impact.
The want.
The grief that came with wanting something from a place that had already taken so much.
“I need a few days,” he said.
“I know.”
His eyes returned to mine.
“But you think I should take it.”
“I think you should listen to the part of you that already leaned forward when they called.”
His mouth curved, barely. “You sound like Camille.”
“Insulting but accurate.”
This time his smile stayed a little longer.
Then he pulled me tighter, and I let myself rest against him.
The fear had not disappeared.
Tomorrow might bring contracts, flights, meetings, team calls, road games, press questions, and calendars trying to swallow us whole. The lives we had built separately were not going to shrink just because we had found our way back to each other.
But I was standing in his house with the code to his door, his arms around me, and the truth between us instead of another silence neither one of us could survive.
That had to count for something.
Maybe more than something.