CHAPTER 4 BEN
I navigate onto Luke’s driveway and spot Kaylee’s white BMW. Most twenty-two-year-old first-year teachers don’t drive such nice cars, but most twenty-two-year-old first-year teachers don’t have an inheritance worth ten million in the bank and two brothers who play pro football.
I’m the last to arrive, which isn’t necessarily out of the ordinary.
I was busy doing basically nothing except playing video games with my dad, who lives a half mile from me.
He’s rented a place in every city where I’ve played so he can attend all the home games, and aside from Jack, he’s my best friend.
He’s one of the few people in this world I trust completely.
“What did Cal want?” Jack asks when I saunter into the kitchen. My eyes find Kaylee, and my chest tightens when I find her gaze already on me.
Fuck.
I’m in trouble.
A fucking boatload of it, too.
“Apparently some dumbass kid in Iowa wanted to be like his hero—me…only he gave himself a concussion playing Detonator,” I say. “And now his family wants me to pay his medical bills. Me! I don’t even know this kid, yet I look like an asshole if I don’t. Calvin told me to take care of it.”
Jack shakes his head. “That’s Calvin for you.
” If anyone knows the extent of that man’s dickheadedness firsthand, it’s Jack…
the guy who knocked up Cal’s daughter and is now facing the lifelong sentence of having Calvin as his kid’s grandfather.
At least Jack escaped the prison sentence of nearly marrying Cal’s evil daughter and ended up with his perfect match instead.
“If it makes the team look bad, it makes him look bad, and that’ll get you on his shit list faster than you can get called for a false start. ”
Luke laughs. He just barely escaped Calvin’s daughter, too, when she claimed the baby that ended up being Jack’s was his. He shakes his head. “Classic Calvin.”
“What’s Detonator?” Carol, the Dalton’s mother, asks.
“I’ll show you.” I glance at Luke, who’s standing by the fridge. “Gimme a beer.” He tosses me a can, and I chug it before I smash it against my forehead.
“Classy,” she says, pursing her lips.
I glance at Kaylee, who looks…unimpressed.
My brows draw down. Smashing cans on my head isn’t impressive?
I’d like to see her try it.
“Dinner’s ready,” Luke’s wife Ellie announces, and we all head toward their dining table.
It’s the same thing every week no matter whose house we’re at.
It’s an oval table, and Jack, Kate, and Jack’s kid JJ sit at one end.
Luke, Ellie, and their kid Nolan sit near them with Carol sitting between her two grandkids.
Ellie’s brother Josh, who’s a receiver on the Aces, and his wife Nicki are here, too, along with their kid, Warner.
Kaylee and I are relegated to the other end of the table next to each other and across from Josh and Nicki, who always place their complete and full attention on their baby.
Sometimes other guests swing by and slightly mix up the order, and Josh and Nicki don’t come every week, but for the most part, this core group has been getting together nearly every Monday night for dinner since October.
“How’s school going, Kay?” Jack asks from the other end of the table.
She sits up a little straighter as she starts to answer. “Fourth quarter now, so we’re nearing the final—”
“Oh my God, did you hear that?” Kate interrupts, laughing as she watches JJ. “I swear he just said carrot.” She glances around. “Did you hear?”
“Carrot,” Carol says to JJ.
“Carrot,” Jack repeats.
Soon everybody at the other end of the table is saying carrot to a very confused little boy. His innocent blue eyes stare up at everyone like they’re all nuts as they keep repeating the same word at him. I glance over at Kaylee.
“—countdown,” she says, finishing her sentence quietly as she sags back into her seat a little.
“Has your first year gotten any better?” I ask, definitely more interested in making conversation with Kaylee than the big carrot celebration at the other end of the table.
She shrugs. “No. My students all badger me about my brothers, my department chair hates me, and in general teaching is nothing like I thought it would be.”
“Are you planning on staying there another year?” I ask, and I try not to read into why I’m so inquisitive tonight. I’m simply making conversation with my best friend’s kid sister.
Even though she’s not a kid.
Those tits certainly aren’t.
Neither’s that sweet little peachy ass. The monster starts to harden as I think about that sweet view I had the other day when she was bending down in the fridge.
Damn.
She shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, shit,” Josh says as Warner spits up his entire meal down the front of his shirt and onto his tray.
He and Nicki jump into action, getting him out of his chair and to the bathroom, and that leaves Kaylee and me alone at our end of the table while they clean up their child.
I assume they’ll come back and decide to call it an early night.
“Do you think it’s a first-year thing or something else?”
“I was at a point in college where I needed to declare a major, and my dad thought I’d make a good teacher.
I like to read so I picked English. And now I feel like I need to stick it out.
It’s what he would have wanted.” Her tone is full of regret, and I think about how hard losing her father a year and a half ago must be on her.
I can’t imagine losing mine, though a morbid thought tells me it’s inevitable.
I bump her knee with mine as a friendly gesture, but I leave my leg there when the feel of her skin in the one inch of space where our bodies are touching seems to radiate enough warmth to extend through my entire being. “I don’t think he would have wanted you to be miserable, Kaylee.”
She glances over at me, and I get the feeling she’s been very hard on herself over this first year of her career.
“If you don’t like it, you have the power to change it.” I shrug. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never known.” She shrugs.
“My brothers were into football, and they were good, so I was expected to be a cheerleader. I was expected to get good grades. I came along a full decade after Luke, so everybody already knew my brothers had talent at that point. I was an afterthought, and what I wanted didn’t really matter.
I guess my entire life, I’ve just blindly done what I was told since I wasn’t really given the space to matter. ”
My chest tightens as I think about her words. “Do you really feel that way?”
She nods toward JJ. “They’re more interested in carrots than allowing me to finish my sentence.
And it’s fine. It’s a milestone. But it’s also a reminder that I’m down here at this end.
If they had a kids’ table, they’d stick me there.
I’m just the baby sister. I’m the innocent one.
I’m the easy one who goes with the flow. ”
“The easy one?” I tease, and I glance over at her.
Her eyes meet mine, and she raises a brow. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Yeah, I would. More and more every goddamn time I see her.
I hold her gaze a beat longer than I should, and then I lift a shoulder and offer her the smile that usually gets women to drop their panties before I can say condom.
“Do you want me to know?” She laughs, and I change the subject before I get myself into trouble…
but it’s definitely the sort of trouble I want to get into. “What are your summer plans?”
She shrugs. “I’m thinking about going back to Michigan to visit my friends, but they all work full time so I’m not sure when yet. Probably planning for next school year, looking over what went well and what didn’t from this year.”
“Why are you going back if you don’t like it?”
She shrugs, and I get the feeling nobody has ever asked her that question before. “What the hell else am I going to do?”
“I’m at a bit of a crossroads myself, so I know where you’re coming from.”
Her brows dip. “You are? In what way?”
“I’m thirty-two. I don’t know how many more years I’ve got left in me and I’m not sure what comes next.” I’ve never admitted that out loud before. Not even to my dad.
“You’ll have a zillion offers, I’m sure. Endorsements, broadcasting, coaching…you’d be good at any of them. You really should plan for what comes next. You can’t flail your way through a successful future, you know?”
I grab the bowl of carrots in front of me and spoon a little more onto my plate as I ignore her words. I’m just not really a planner like she is. “It’s a good thing you teach English and not math.”
“Why’s that?” she asks.
I glance over at her. “Because zillion isn’t a number.”
She laughs and smacks me in the arm, and somehow this conversation feels like a lot more than some guy posing as a big brother figure.
It feels like she’s letting me in on her secrets…and I’m letting her in on mine.