Page 75 of Kiss Me Tonight

“You faked it well all those years on Sports 24/7.”

My brows shoot up in surprise. “Don’t tell me you watched every episode.”

Levi pretends to fight for possession of the oar I’m holding, sending the kayak rocking back and forth. Laughter seeps out of me, chasing away the cold bite of the water when she drops her head back with a heavy sigh.

“One episode,” she admits, as if it pains her. “Only one.”

“Yeah?” I inch my hand up the oar, until my fingers graze hers and she’s gasping at my icy touch. It might be early June, but the bay is still cold as shit. Ignoring the wrinkled sensation of my fingertips against the silk of her skin, I push for more information. “Which episode?”

“You’re going to tip me over.” Her thumb hooks around mine, a subtle warning for me to cut it out. “And it was about a year ago, maybe a little before that. You hosted a top-ten countdown of college players who showed potential to make it to the NFL but didn’t for whatever reason.”

I vaguely remember the one she’s talking about. During my four-year stint with Sports 24/7, I rarely had the opportunity to throw my own ideas into the mix. Screenwriters held the upper hand and, as I learned early on, I was nothing but a well-paid face for the show. The episode Levi’s referring to is a segment someone in the production room thought would be a major hit with our audience.

It wasn’t.

“I waited for you to say my name.”

At her ragged confession, my legs momentarily stop moving and my weight dips down, the salty water rushing up my nose. I power kick and spring back up like a released buoy. But the near drowning doesn’t stop me from asking—no, demanding: “What did you say?”

“I sat there on my couch, you know. Topher was at practice and Rick, for once, was actually picking him up.” Her shoulders shake and I’m not sure if she’s feeling chilly or if the memories are too much to handle. “Anyway,” she says, bending her knees to her chest and wrapping one free arm around her legs, “I knew it was unlikely I’d be mentioned. My insecurities rose up and I remember . . . I remember thinking to myself,God, Aspen, the only reason you were noteworthy to begin with was because you’re a woman playing a man’s sport.”

A woman playing a man’s sport.

My gut twists unpleasantly and suddenly staying afloat feels that much more impossible. “Levi, I didn’t know.” How thehelldidn’t I know? Watching her on the field with the Wildcats, it’s clear to anyone that she knows the sport well. Too well, some might say, for someone who only coaches the game. “I don’t—”

“You didn’t know for the same reason your show didn’t mention me, Dominic. It’s the same reason that Deegan Homer guy came and interviewed us and he spent forty minutes questioningyouabout your career. I was an accessory. On your show, I wasn’t even that. I’m not going to say you all passed me over because I’m a woman, but I won’t lie and say the thought didn’t enter my head a time or two while I counted down the top ten right along with you.”

Shame and fury squeeze my lungs. “No,” I growl, using my weight to dip the kayak and force her to look at me. Not out at the bay or down at her knees—atme.“Don’t ever use that word again.” When she only stares back at me, clearly confused, I spit, “Accessory. Toy.” She’d used the latter at the Golden Fleece when she warned me against messing with her emotions. “You’re not either of those things, Levi.” Squeezing my eyes shut, I loosen my tight grip on the kayak. “I feel like a self-absorbed prick for not realizing you played ball in college.”

“Dominic, you are somewhat of a—”

“An asshole,” I finish for her, recognizing the teasing lilt to her voice and taking no offense. I deserve that jab and any others she throws at me because I shouldn’t have assumed her knowledge of football was anything but personal experience showing itself on the field. Once again, she’s surprised me. That in and of itself shouldn’t be surprising. There hasn’t been a single day since I met Levi that she hasn’t proved me wrong in some way or another.

Call it my own intuition but I’m getting the feeling that the reason she was so upset about being left out of the top-ten countdown isn’t only a matter of being pushed out of the sport because of her gender. With rust coating my every word, I order, “Tell me what happened.”

She hangs her head, shame inscribed in her every feature. “I was stupid back then, Dominic. Naïve. Entranced by the idea that this mega-powerful general manager of a well-respected football team wantedme.”

I want her out of the kayak and in the water with me.

I want to be able to read the emotion in her gaze when she bares her soul.

I want her to know that even when you feel like you’re drowning, all it takes is one second of reminding yourself of mind over matter—that one’s head will always be smarter than the fickleness of one’s heart—to know that you won’t plummet to your death.

Aware that I sound way too gruff but unable to help it, I give it to her straight: “Levi—Aspen—he took advantage of you. That’s what guys like Clarke do. You weren’t naïve and you weren’t stupid.” Rick Clarke was a slick, older guy who’d preyed on Levi’s innocence. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together. I bet he romanced her real nice with dinners and parties and gifts—nothing too extravagant because Levi isn’t the sort to be impressed with flashy things. He hooked her before she even knew she was being baited, and if I weren’t swimming right now I’d be up in that kayak pulling her into my arms. Wanting to make sure she heard me, I repeat, “You weren’t stupid, Levi.”

She shakes her head. “When our marriage went south, I used to wonder what it was about me that first attracted him. And it wasn’t for years that I realized that he liked only theideaof me. When I played for Boston College, I broke stats left and right. Local newspapers loved to talk about me—the first female kicker the NCAA had ever seen. They debated how the NFL would react to a player like me, someone who was just as good as any of my male counterparts.” She grips the oars, rowing them once like she’s so agitated that she can’t sit still. “I was an anomaly and Rick liked that. He liked to take what didn’t belong to him—whatever caught his fancy—and bend it to his will, offering promises he would never keep and the sort of support that would make any twenty-one-year-old girl’s head spin.”

As much as it pains me to admit it, I’m not surprised that I didn’t realize Levi played for BC.

She’s two years older than me, and at eighteen, I was solely focused on leaving my shitty reputation behind and focusing on the end goal: getting drafted by the NFL. If a school didn’t play mine on the regular, or at all, I paid it no attention. If you weren’t in my face day in and day out, living and breathing the same air as me, I didn’t pause to give a damn or learn anything more.

Classes. Practice. Games.

There was no room in my life for anything else to exist, even on the periphery.

“I dropped out of college when he knocked me up.” At her confession, my heart sinks even as I train my gaze on her face. “All those years of putting in the work—gone. All those practices where I had to deal with the guys on the team giving me the cold shoulder, and making me feel like I was an outsider, and telling me that I didn’t belong—none of it ended up mattering at all.”

“Jesus.” Gripping the oar, I tug it out of her grasp so she can’t try to outswim me. “How the hell did your parents allow you to marry a prick like Clarke?”

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