Chapter 13
thirteen
brIDGET
After we finished the first movie, the TV moved onto Leap Year. This house thinks it’s clever, but I’m picking up what it’s throwing down. Both movies have a theme of falling in love in short periods of time.
Like under two weeks.
I’m not amused.
Any flutterings of feelings I have toward Weston are directly related to the fact that we’re pretending that we’re a couple when we’re outside this house.
Or maybe it’s that we’re not not pretending . I can’t tell anymore. He’s not wrong that it’s complicated.
Our lives are so vastly different that it wouldn’t work even if I were to have actual feelings.
Which I don’t.
Sure, he’s attractive. And he can dance. He’s funny when he’s not trying to drive me insane. He’s different—somewhat—than he was when we first met, but once he’s all healed up and back to football, he’ll be the same shameless flirt he was before.
Even as the words dance across my mind, I don’t believe them. He’s not the guy I thought he was and I know that.
I sigh and squeeze my eyes shut. I’m letting the mess of my life bleed into everything else, and that’s not fair to him. He’s not the one who cancelled a wedding, or turned out to be someone completely different from who I thought they were.
That’s one thing I can give Weston: he’s unabashedly who you see. There’s no hidden agenda or attempt to pretend to be someone else. Even in this ‘fake’ relationship, he’s the same person he was back in October.
The room is filled to the brim with sudden silence and I startle. Weston finally found the remote and has it gripped in his hand, his eyes focused on me from the other end of the couch.
“What would you grab?” he asks.
The question hangs between us for a moment while I scramble for context. I’ve seen this movie so many times I stopped paying attention to deep dive into my thoughts.
“What do you mean?”
His gaze is intense, almost pleading. I desperately want to ignore the upward tick of my heart rate at the sight of this tall, gruff looking man hugging a blanket. This is a vulnerable side to Weston I’ve never seen before, and I’m not sure what to do with it.
He nods toward the television where he’s paused the movie. “In a fire. What would you grab?”
I sigh and tug my blanket closer to my chin. Weston is the last person I want to be vulnerable with, despite the fact that he seems to see straight past all my masks anyway. “You’d probably grab all the football awards, right? A signed pigskin by your favorite player. Or the game ball.”
“I’ve already told you to stop getting all your football knowledge from movies, Goldilocks. Not all of us are like Joe Kingman.” He rolls his eyes. “I’m not even a quarterback.”
“So you don’t live in an obnoxious penthouse with a shrine to Elvis? Or drive a super fancy car? What about fancy jewelry? Surely there’s a championship ring in there somewhere you can’t live without.”
“Forget I asked this question,” he grumbles.
“I knew it. You do have a shrine to Elvis.”
“You’re so strange sometimes.”
There’s zero punch to his words, and I swear there’s a hint of a smile mixed in with his annoyance.
“Fine. I’ll drop the obsession with Elvis. What would you grab, then?”
There’s a low rumble in his throat that I’m trying to find unattractive. Paired with his deep, velvety voice, I’m losing. I blame the fact that I’m lonely with this unexpected movie marathon and all the things we’ve been doing together.
Forced proximity at its finest.
“I asked you first, Spitfire. What would you grab? Your planner, maybe? Can’t have a disaster without having a color-coded evacuation plan.”
I press my lips into a hard line. Ouch. “Weston?—”
“No, that’s not it.” He shifts, so he’s facing me more squarely. “Your shoe collection. You can’t even handle a little mud. Can you imagine the way they’d look after smoke damage? The horror.”
“Stop.”
“So you can dish it out to me, but I can’t dish it back?”
“I just don’t want to play this game with you.”
He pauses and I squirm under the scrutiny of his gaze.
“Do you even know what you’d grab?” he asks, quietly. “I don’t think you do. You’ve tried so hard to be whatever people want from you, you don’t even focus on you. You probably don’t even know what you want.”
I gasp, the sound sharper than I intend.
“That’s—” My voice falters, the rest of the sentence dying on my tongue.
Not fair. Not right. I want to argue with him, but I can’t.
It is unfair, but only because there’s so much validity to his statement it hurts.
It’s unfair that he sees so much of me when he hardly even knows me. Andrew and I couldn’t spar like this because we didn’t show this side of each other. Everything had to be perfect.
And my mother has always expected the same.
It doesn’t matter what I’d grab in a fire—if I even knew what that was—because it’s none of his business.
He at least has the decency to look concerned at what my response might be, like he knows he just threw a lit match into grass that hasn’t seen rain in far too long.
I wrap my fingers tighter around my blanket like it’s my life preserver, and I contemplate yanking it over my head like a petulant child who just wants to disappear.
“Let’s just turn the movie back on,” I finally say.
Weston doesn’t say a word. He just leans back into the couch, his expression unreadable. A heavy sigh escapes me, like I can breathe again now that he’s not trying to stare into my soul.
I can’t focus on Matthew Goode or the tension and banter I usually enjoy from this movie because I’m spinning toward an existential crisis.
What would I grab? There’s nothing that comes to mind.
And the thought of not having something that means that much to me, right off the top of my head, is depressing. There’s probably something. Yet in the back and forth of keeping my mother happy as a stellar wedding planner, keeping my former fiance happy as his arm candy, I’m not sure that I know who I am anymore.
Nothing in my life feels real enough, or stable enough, to run toward flames.
And even though Weston hardly knows me, he called me out on it.
“It wouldn’t be the trophies,” Weston says, pulling me back into the moment. He almost looks pained, and despite my best efforts, I feel a piece of my wall tumble to the ground.
I blink, unprepared for this shift. “What?”
“Things I’d grab in a fire. It wouldn’t be a championship ring, or trophies, or a game ball. Not even a signed pigskin—which I don’t even own, by the way.”
“Then what would you grab?” I ask softly.
I’m not sure why, but I genuinely want to know his answer. A peek inside the Weston he keeps hidden away.
For a second, I think he’s going to yell “psyche!” like the overgrown man child he sometimes is. But then, without looking at me, he says, “A shoebox.”
“A shoebox?” I repeat.
“It’s got a lot of important stuff in it,” he shrugs. “Things I can’t replace.”
“Like what?”
“Photos. Ribbons from school. Tickets from high school and college games. Keepsakes. Newspaper article from my first draft. Stuff from my first professional game. Things that make me happy.”
It’s so down to earth it almost knocks my breath away, I feel bad for teasing him so much. Once again, Weston is surprising me.
And I doubt it’ll be the last time.