Chapter 5
FIVE
I say fuck so often that I forget that it offends people. Sorry, fuckers.
—Magnolia’s secret thoughts
MAGNOLIA
I wasn’t surprised to find my child missing from the daycare.
The first day it’d happened, I’d had a minor freak-out.
However, I was so used to it now that I didn’t hesitate on trailing back the way I came.
I should’ve just checked to see if they were in his office before walking all the way down to the daycare, but it’d been so quiet that I hadn’t thought they were there.
But as I got to the office door, I realized why it was so quiet.
They were sitting on the couch eating the small ice cream cones you got out of the freezer section at the store, watching a television program on mute.
Well, Iris was watching it and reading the subtitles.
Beau was on the couch next to her, snacking on his own ice cream, while doing something on his computer.
“I thought we decided no more ice cream?”
Iris shoved the entire cone into her mouth.
Granted, it was quite small, but it was still too much for her mouth.
Beau did the same, but hid it a lot better with his big ass mouth.
His big, kissable, I want to devour the hell out of it mouth.
They both looked at me guiltily.
I barely smothered my smile.
“Is it time to go?” he asked after he finished chewing.
“Yep,” I confirmed.
Iris sighed, as if she was fit to be tied to be leaving before her program was over.
I didn’t usually let her watch television unless it was something informative, which Beau knew.
That was why it was on the National Discovery Channel, which happened to be her favorite.
She signed to me and asked for more time, just like I knew she would.
“Worm…”
Please.
I sighed. “Okay.”
His smile nearly brought me to my knees.
There was only so much control I had, and I was barely hanging on as it was.
Sometimes in my head I had to replay “he’s your boss” on an endless loop to keep my hormones under control.
Not for much longer, my mind said for me today.
I had two more months, max.
And the way it was looking, I more likely had a single month.
We technically had two more games left before finals started. But it was highly likely that we wouldn’t be making finals, and I’d be done.
I already had my job at the hospital lined up for this January.
If we won or not, I was done with soccer.
It was a bittersweet feeling, and one I tried not to examine too close just yet.
“How was practice?” he asked, setting his laptop on the table in front of him next to the copious mini-ice cream cone wrappers.
“Good, considering the loss yesterday,” I admitted.
We were in high spirits.
We knew that we’d won, fair and square.
It was a pity that bad calls had lost us the game, but we knew we were the better team.
“I have a meeting with the league head ref on Zoom tomorrow,” he grumbled. “They’re currently ‘reviewing’ the call.”
It’d been a really bad fucking call.
A handball in the box by the other team. Then a red-cardable offense when the other team’s defense had slammed into Nettie like a double-sided battering ram.
It hadn’t been a good call but the ref hadn’t “seen” it.
It’d been the most replayed play over the last fourteen hours in the entire sports world.
“They should be reviewing that ref’s contract,” I grumbled.
“They are,” he promised. “I made sure of that. But it won’t change the outcome of the game, unfortunately.”
I snorted. “No, but a public apology for seeing it and ignoring it would be nice. I mean, it’s not going unnoticed that they needed that win to move to the finals. Without it they’d have been booted out.”
“They’re seeing it. Because I brought it to their attention,” he griped. “It wouldn’t be surprising if the head ref had something to do with it.”
I stiffened at the suggestion.
And, because we were so aware of each other’s presence, including every nuance of our body language, he noticed.
“What?” he asked.
I scrubbed at my face. “My ex is Eloy Wilkinson.”
He inhaled swiftly. “You were dating the head ref?”
“Was, yes,” I bemoaned. “Fancied myself in love, too. Then Iris happened, and he was all ‘I can’t deal with this’ and took off.”
There was more to the story than that, but it wasn’t something I’d shared with anyone.
Plus, for all intents and purposes, Iris was my child.
The fewer people who knew, the better.
As long as it kept Cain away, I’d do everything all over again.
Even walk away from the man that I loved.
“Sounds like a real prize,” he said. “Iris is a lucky girl to have you.”
I felt something warm inside my cold, dead heart.
“Thanks,” I admitted.
He grinned at me.
The pang in my heart was usually a wild thing.
But in that moment, I realized that that pang that I’d felt after Eloy had left, the one that never really went away, had slowly started to heal.
I thought the worst day of my life was the day that he’d told me that he didn’t want to raise a child with me that wasn’t his.
But then my sister took her life, and I realized that life can always get harder, and never to speak as if it couldn’t.
Karma was a greedy bitch, and she knew how to humble you.
“Magnolia?”
And the reason behind that healing was currently smiling at me. Unrepentant for helping feed Iris’s ice cream addiction.
I stared at the ceiling and contemplated my life.
I’d loved Eloy fiercely.
I’d thought that he was the endgame for me.
He’d been my ride or die since the moment I entered the professional soccer world at sixteen.
Barely twenty-one himself, he’d been just as green around the edges as I had been.
At first, we’d started out as friends.
We’d seen each other at several soccer games that he’d reffed and I’d played.
Over time, that love had bloomed into something I thought was unbreakable and fierce.
He’d shared that one day, he would ask me to be his wife, and I thought that I’d won the lottery.
He was a man that my parents would approve of.
Then, when Iris came home with me that first day to the apartment I’d contemplated giving up so that I could move in with Eloy, he’d rocked my world.
He’d told me that he didn’t like kids, never really wanted them, and he certainly didn’t want a kid that would one day grow up and have no obligation to take care of him.
When I’d pointed out that not even blood relations had the obligation to take care of him, he’d snorted.
In his culture, family took care of family, no matter what the situation. Elderly always knew that they’d have someone to take care of them as they aged.
We’d fought for an hour and a half before Iris had woken up with a scream, hungry and wet.
He’d curled his lip and gathered his things, and that was the last time I’d ever seen him as my boyfriend.
The next time I saw him was at a game.
A game where I was extremely uncomfortable the entire time.
That discomfort was a thing of constant companionship for nearly three years.
Until a grumpy biker who treated team ownership like war.
His rigidity was somewhat suffocating. He was not accepting of weakness. And he certainly wouldn’t allow failure.
But under all of that Marine my way or the highway attitude was a kind and caring man that’d pieced a team back together from the breaking point.
The moment that I’d had him at my back my first game seeing Eloy this season? I’d felt like I had the entirety of the United States Marines at my back.
Eloy, always one to treat me like I was the one who’d wronged him in this relationship, had tried playing his games with me like usual.
Tried to take it out on me on the field.
Then Beau’d come in like an avenging angel blazing with pissed-off fury and wiped the floor so thoroughly with Eloy that he hadn’t reffed a single game of ours since.
It was magnificent and freeing.
“Magnolia?”