Chapter 6 #4
I bury my face in the side of his neck because there is nowhere else to put a heartbreak this large.
Drew’s hand slides up the back of my head.
Into my hair.
Then down again.
Long stroke.
Then another.
His other hand moves slow circles between my shoulder blades.
Not sexual.
Not even close.
Just there.
Warm.
Steady.
“Hey,” he murmurs near my temple.
That does me in worse.
Because he says it like he’s already here inside the storm with me and has no intention of leaving until it passes or kills us both.
“It hurts,” I choke out.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
The protest is weak.
Childish.
Immediate.
His hand never stops moving.
“I know enough.”
The fire pops softly.
Rain rattles against the tall windows.
The house keeps holding us in its warm yellow light while I fall apart in his arms like I’ve never fallen apart in anyone’s life before.
My words come ugly and messy between sobs.
“I loved him.”
That one feels like glass coming out.
Drew’s arms tighten.
Not enough to trap.
Enough to hold.
“I know.”
“He picked her.”
The words shake.
So does everything in me.
“I know.”
“I wasn’t enough.”
That one gets a reaction.
His hand stills once at the back of my head.
Then resumes, slower.
“Don’t do that.”
I laugh and cry at the same time, the sound ruined beyond repair.
“It’s true.”
“No,” he says quietly. “What’s true is he was unfinished where she was concerned.”
I squeeze my eyes shut.
“He was my…” I can’t even say it properly at first. “He was my best friend.”
That hurts more than anything else.
Not the kisses.
Not the almost-relationship.
Not even the public humiliation.
That.
The fact that I lost the person I texted first.
The one who knew my schedule.
The one who sat through my rehab appointments and Sunday breakfast and Saturday-night Netflix on the floor when I couldn’t do stairs right and coffee dates and all those ordinary little companionable things that become part of your nervous system before you realize they’re not permanent.
“He was my coffee date,” I whisper brokenly into his shoulder. “My breakfast buddy. My—my steady person.”
Drew’s breathing changes.
Not jealousy.
Not irritation.
He just holds me tighter.
And in a voice so low it almost disappears into my hair, he says, “I know, baby girl. But it could’ve been me. Should’ve been us. When he was going around breaking your heart—you were slicing mine.”
I cry harder.
Because no one has ever held my heartbreak like this before while being honest about theirs.
No fixing.
No speeches.
No rush to silver lining.
Just a warm, massive body around mine and rough hands in my hair and on my back, patient enough to let me bleed all over the night.
Eventually the worst of the sobbing burns down into shivering breaths and hiccupping silence.
I stay curled against him anyway.
Too tired to move.
Too emptied out.
Too selfish to wonder how he’s feeling in all this.
Drew shifts only enough to pull a thick knit blanket from the back of the couch and wrap it around us both without dislodging me.
The fire keeps cracking.
Rain keeps falling.
His thumb keeps moving slowly just under my shoulder blade.
I don’t know how long we sit like that.
Long enough for the cold to leave my skin.
Long enough for the ache in my chest to stop feeling like active violence and start feeling like aftermath.
Long enough that I can hear his heart under my ear, slow and heavy and real.
When I finally speak again, my voice is wrecked.
“You were right.”
The words taste awful.
His hand pauses in my hair.
Then, very gently:
“Yeah.”
No gloating.
No victory.
Somehow that makes it worse and better at the same time.
I let out a breath that shakes all over again.
“I hate that.”
“I know.”
I pull back just enough to look at him.
His face is softer in the firelight.
Still broad and rough and absurdly male.
Still all those hard planes and big shoulders and callused hands and cut-off-hoodie neanderthal nonsense.
But here, like this, there’s something else too.
A steadiness I didn’t expect.
A patience I didn’t ask for and somehow got anyway.
His thumb brushes one damp piece of hair back from my cheek.
“You don’t have to be okay tonight,” he says.
My throat tightens again.
Because everyone else in my life—my mother, my teammates, coaches, trainers—always wants progress. Composure. Recovery. A timeline.
Drew just gives me permission to be ruined.
And that might be the kindest thing anyone has ever done to me.
So I nod once.
Tiny.
Broken.
And let him pull me back against his chest.
He strokes my hair.
My back.
The space between my shoulders where everything still feels too tight.
Outside, the rain keeps washing the world clean.
Inside, I sit in a giant old football T-shirt in the arms of the last man on earth I ever pictured being safe.
And slowly, through the wreckage and the wet and the ruin of wanting the wrong boy for too long, one truth begins to settle like warmth back into my bones:
I did lose him.
But I’m not alone in the losing.
Not tonight.
My phone starts vibrating somewhere under the blanket.
I ignore it.
It keeps going.
Then stops.
Then starts again.
Drew’s hand slows in my hair.
“You should probably check that.”
I shake my head against his throat.
“No.”
He doesn’t push.
Just reaches one long arm out, blindly feels around the couch cushion, and finds the phone where it’s half trapped between the blanket and my discarded hoodie.
He glances at the screen.
Then down at me.
“It’s your mom.”
That makes me want to cry all over again.
Because of course it is.
Because mothers always know somehow.
Or maybe heartbreak just puts out a signal only they can hear.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
His hand comes up and cups the back of my head, big palm warm there.
“Yeah, you can.”
I let out one broken laugh.
“I am literally in pieces right now.”
He looks down at me with rain still drying at the edges of his hair, face softer than I’ve ever seen it.
“Then let her hear the pieces.”
That should not be the thing that makes me answer.
It is.
I swipe the screen with fingers that still won’t stop shaking.
“Hi, Mama.”
Silence.
Then my mother’s voice, smooth Texas honey with steel under it:
“Oh, sweetheart.”
That’s all it takes.
Fresh tears spill instantly.
I press my hand over my eyes and fold deeper into Drew’s chest like maybe I can hide inside his warmth and not have to explain any of this out loud.
My mother doesn’t make me.
“He told you,” she says quietly.
Not a question.
I swallow hard.
“Yes.”
Drew’s hand starts moving through my hair again.
Slow.
Steady.
Like he understands instinctively that being on this call doesn’t mean I’m no longer falling apart.
My mother exhales softly.
“Are you alone?”
I almost laugh.
The sound comes out wrecked.
“No.”
There’s a beat.
Then:
“Who’s with you?”
I pull the phone away just enough to look at the ceiling.
“Drew.”
Another tiny silence.
I can practically hear her recalculating from twelve hundred miles away.
“The football boy?”
Even now, even sobbing in another man’s lap while wearing his shirt, I feel a faint stab of annoyance.
“There is more than one football boy.”
“Not if one of them sent you a florist and enough chocolate to trigger a sugar embargo.”
That actually startles a laugh out of me through the tears.
Drew feels it.
His hand stills once at the back of my head.
Then keeps moving.
“Yes,” I whisper. “That one.”
“Hm.”
I know that hum.
That is my mother filing things away for later while prioritizing the current emergency.
Then her voice changes.
Less soft now.
Still loving.
Sharper underneath.
“So tell me exactly what happened.”
And because I’m too tired to guard it now, I do.
My mother is quiet for so long I think maybe the call dropped.
Then, in that low Southern drawl she only uses when she’s done being gentle and is about to go full campaign manager on my emotions, she says:
“He did not choose her.”
I blink into the dim room.
My voice comes out small.
“What?”
“He did not choose her,” she repeats. “He chose himself.”
Drew’s hand pauses again in my hair.
Just for a second.
Then continues.
I swallow.
“Mama—”
“No, baby, listen to me.” Her voice firms. “Those are not the same thing.”
I stare at the fire.
At the rain-smudged windows.
At the soft blur of Drew’s living room lit gold around the edges.
“He didn’t run to her,” my mother says. “He didn’t leave you and go put a ring on Stella Cortez’s finger under the library lights. He didn’t choose her and he didn’t choose you. He stepped back.”
I hate how fast that lands.
Because it opens something.
A tiny, stupid door in the middle of all this pain.
And I do not trust doors like that.
My fingers twist in the front of Drew’s shirt without meaning to.
“It doesn’t matter,” I whisper. “He still said it’s always been her.”
My mother is quiet for one beat.
“And what did he do after saying that? Run straight to her?”
No.
The answer is no.
And the fact that I have to admit it—even silently—makes my whole heart do something ugly and hopeful and dangerous all at once.
I don’t answer.
I don’t need to.
My mother hears it anyway.
“That’s what I thought.”
I close my eyes.
Because of course she would hear what I don’t say.
She raised me.
Built half the machinery that makes me impossible to kill cleanly.
“Mama, please,” I whisper. “I can’t do this tonight.”
“Yes, you can.”
That lands because she says it with such total certainty that for one awful moment I almost believe her.
Then she goes full mama bear.
“Isabella Calloway, you have never given up on anything in your life.”
Drew’s hand stills completely this time.
I can feel the tension move through him.
Not anger.
Not exactly.
Just the awareness of hearing a battle cry given over my bent head while I’m still breaking apart in his arms.
My mother keeps going.
“You did not fight through rehab and a boot and a season ending before you were ready just to roll over because one confused, emotionally expensive basketball prince had a crisis at a library.”
A wet laugh breaks out of me.
Completely involuntary.
Drew huffs one too, low against my hair, like he hates that she’s funny and can’t help respecting it.
“Mama.”