Page 27 of Chasing Football Dreams

I pulled my shirt over my head and brushed out my hair. “You deserve happiness. With all the fools you had, you deserve a gentleman who cares about your needs,”

Her smile slowly faltered until it looked like she wanted to cry and I thought she was going to say that she didn’t want this but her confession was worse than I expected.

“I got a phone call from my mom today,"

Chapter Thirteen

“Did she say what she wanted?”

Duncan invited the team over after the game for a barbeque. Eliza and I took a walk towards the lake, wanting to get away from the noise. It worried me that her mother called her after all these years after they told her she was a mistake.

“She wants to meet for coffee,” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.

“You find her timing odd,”

Eliza nodded, focusing her gaze on the stars. “I agreed to meet her but only if you are allowed to come along,”

“She was probably not impressed,”

Eliza shrugged her shoulders. “She has no choice. No, Zoey. No meeting,”

“Are you sure that you want to do this, though?” I don’t trust this.

Eliza shook her head. “But you know how I am with the suspense of not going and not finding out what she wanted,”

“Yeah. You won’t be able to let it go if you don’t find out what she wants,” She was going to pick at it until the wound became fungus.

“You know me way too well,” She dropped her gaze, meeting mine. “But what about you? What are you going to do about your parents snooping around at the orphanage?”

Having them show up there out of the blue shocked me. I was afraid for a moment that they were there because they found out that I am their daughter. I was disappointed when weren’t there for me. At one stage that fear turned into hope. “I don’t what I am going to do when they find out. A part of me wants it to be a natural occurrence while the impatient side of me wants to tell them. It’s me. I’m your daughter. I have been alive for the last sixteen years,”

“Who thought our year could turn out like this? Twelve months ago, we were living day to day, keeping our heads down and wishing upon stars,” She noted. “Here we are underneath the same stars, our lives taking a completely different turn. All this time you had a 6,3ft football player crushing on you and I was being too delusional to see that I opened my legs too easy for everyone,”

“I don’t know how I am going to react if somehow we find out that the orphanage is involved in my kidnapping,” I admitted, staring at the lake.

“We will make sure that no other child goes through what happened to you,”

“How? We are just two girls with wild imaginations?”

She smiled at me. “You are the quarterback for the boys Varsity football team. You have been invited out to your favorite sports channel for an interview. Our imaginations might be wild but it’s only fair since we were forced to believe that the world is too big,”

“We will do what we always do. We will figure it out,”

I watched her strip out of her clothes until she was only standing in her underwear. “Eliza, what are you doing?” I asked, looking around.

“I am going to take a dip in the lake and you are going to join me,”

She walked away before I could form words and watched her dive into the lake. She resurfaced, letting out a scream. “Come on, Zoey! We promised to live our lives to the fullest,”

Ah, dammit. I striped out of my shirt and slipped down my shorts. I inhaled a deep breath before jogging towards the lake and cannonballing into the lake.

Eliza cheered and shrieked as the splash of water hit her as I hit the surface. “It feels good, doesn’t it?” She asked, floating on her back and kicking her feet.

“Yeah, until the boys find us,” I didn’t feel comfortable flashing my teammates.

“You act like we are naked,” She snorted.

I rolled my eyes, falling backward, and drifted on my back taking in the clear skies above us. “Coach Shane thinks I am good enough to be drafted for the NFL,”

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