Page 47 of The Comeback

“Hey,” Ava says from behind me.

I turn and take her hand to pull her into my arms. “Thanks again for today.”

She leans back and shrugs. “You needed it. If your mom had been brave enough to vault out of the stands, it would’ve been her.”

I laugh at that visual.

I don’t let Ava go, even though I should. “I miss you,” I say softly.

She nods and swallows, then bites her bottom lip in a way I know means she’s holding back emotion. It strikes me that she did that right before she told me she was leaving Reno.

“Yeah. Me too,” she finally says, her voice shaky. “What do we do?” she asks in a soft voice.

We stare at each other for a long time, my longing building with each passing second. My hands press into her lower back, and the feel of her arms around my chest is so familiar but intense, all at once. It feels as new as the first time I kissed her, at the end of our first date, because I already knew. And yet it’s as comfortable as our first night together in Reno, when she came over to my apartment and we snuggled and smiled because we were finally together again.

I want her, as badly as I did the night she left. I want to cling to her, to hold her against me, to know she’ll never leave me again. I’m fighting a losing battle in trying to forget how much I loved her. How quickly I’ve fallen for her again.

I love her. And it’s hard to say whether I ever truly stopped.

She leans closer, her eyes full of worry, maybe over the fear in my expression that must be warring with my need. “Jett?” she asks in a soft voice.

I shake my head because I can’t fight this anymore. Not after all these weeks of pushing it away, trying to ignore it, pretending the sparks were there with Hayden when that was only a candle next to a bonfire.

I pull Ava closer and lean over her, bringing my lips down onto hers. The moment they touch, a relief washes through me that makes it obvious I’ve been wanting to do this since I saw her again. She snakes her hands around my neck, pulling herself up and into me. Her lips move with mine in a slow, familiar way. She’s coming home.

That’s when I notice the way I’m gripping her as though she’s going to escape me somehow. I’m kissing her like no matter what I do, she’ll slip away. I break off the kiss, swallowing and breathing hard.

She tilts her head at me, gently cupping my cheeks with her soft hands. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.” I drop my hands from her waist, but she doesn’t move away, peering at me with her head tilted. “I don’t know how to trust you again.”

She presses her lips into a thin line, then draws in a long breath. “I’m sorry for leaving. I know how much it hurt.”

She’s speaking from her own experience, clearly. So why doesn’t it feel like enough for me to get past, knowing that we both suffered?

Because of how worried I am that it could happen again. “What’s going to happen when things get hard again?” I confess to her, maybe hoping she has some kind of magic answer that will fix it all. “It’s not going to be easy just because I’m playing pro now. Today is proof of that.”

She takes a step back, her entire body tensing. “That’s how it’s always going to be, isn’t it?” she asks, and her tone stings with accusation. I’m defensive immediately. She’s accusing me? For being honest? “I left,” she goes on. “That’s it. The end. There’s nothing else for you.”

I fold my arms and lean back against the railing. “How else am I supposed to see it?”

She lets out a short huff of air that’s maybe supposed to be a sharp laugh but doesn’t quite land. “You were talking about quitting football, Jett. I couldn’t make rent and tuition was coming due, and you were saying you were going to get a job, and if you had to, you’d quit. I left because you were throwing away your dreams.”

“For you,” I protest. How can she not see that? “Football was never worth anything without you.”

“You’re not mad because I left,” she says. “You’re mad because I made the sacrifice instead of you. I couldn’t bear to be the reason you quit football, so I let you go. I sacrificed you to save that, hoping that someday you’d understand. That maybe we could make it back together. I gave up on that little by little over the years, but I believed it in the beginning.” She shakes her head and turns away. “If you quit, that was it. I sacrificed you; you wanted to sacrifice football. Why do you get to be the noble one?”

I turn to the railing, squeezing the wood in frustration. “You made the decision for me, Ava. We never talked about it. One day you just told me you were leaving.”

“I know what that conversation would have been—you deciding to give up what you loved for me. Jett, your whole career is proof that you know how to get what you want. Keeping me meant walking away from the dreams you’d had your whole life, to pay my rent. There was no point in trying to have that conversation with you. I could not be the one to take football away from you.”

I spin back around to face her. She stands still and tense and now several feet away from me. “I would have been fine without football. I haven’t been fine without you.” I don’t want to admit this, but the lack of real relationships the last few years, Claire’s insistence that I’ve turned into a grumpier version of myself, Jenna’s words about how she hasn’t seen me as happy since then—they all force me to admit it’s the truth.

Ava shakes her head more vehemently than before. “You don’t know that. It would have changed everything.”

I throw my hand out in the direction of my brother’s house just down the road. “Look at Devin and Jenna. They’re happy, much happier than we are. Devin is fine without football.”

She backs away even farther, and I want to reach out and reel her back toward me. I can’t stand to watch her leave me again. “You’re not Devin,” she says fiercely.

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