Page 47 of Her Football Star Ex

Wait, he had a therapist?

Had I heard him right? Maybe he’d said something else…a thera___. Well, I couldn’t exactly think of another word that resembledtherapistat the moment. So I moved on to the next surprising thing in that sentence.

Vincent was reading.

And not just the children’s books Jaxon begged us to read, but actual personal development books.

That was new.

Why did the thought of him reading in his room at night suddenly make me even more attracted to him than I’d been earlier?

Deciding to ask about the less charged topic of the two, I asked, “What got you interested in reading?”

When we were married, he was the guy who joked about waiting for the movie version of a book to come out instead of reading it since he hated reading so much. And now he was actually reading? Of his own free will and choice?

He stood straighter and walked out of the closet area. “I started for a couple of reasons.” He leaned against the bathroom counter, supporting himself with his hands in a way that made his forearm muscles flex. “First, because I needed to work on some things.” He looked at me through his lashes, telling me his therapy had something to do with the divorce and everything leading up to it.

“And then I just wanted to get better at reading.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve always used my dyslexia as an excuse not to read before, since it took me so much longer than everyone else to make sense of it all. But my therapist helped me realize that some of the insecurities I had in the past came from my embarrassment about being dyslexic and having trouble reading. So he suggested I start reading aloud to myself. The personal development books were the smallest ones in the bookstore, so I kind of got on this personal development and minimalism kick and became a better reader all at the same time.”

“I never knew you were embarrassed about being dyslexic,” I said, seeing a different side to him that he hadn’t let me see before.

He shrugged and looked off to the side for a second. “I didn’t exactly like to bring it up,” he said. “I mean, you are this genius lawyer who graduated from college two years early. And I’m just an athlete who barely made the grades to not get kicked off the team. I didn’t exactly want to remind you that you could have married someone smarter.”

And when he met my gaze again, there was a vulnerability there that I had never seen before. It was like he was opening the darkest corners of himself up to me and just hoping I wouldn’t reject him.

As I realized how much he was trusting me in this moment, the intense feeling that burned in my chest left me feeling weak.

I leaned against his closet door for support and just took him in. Here was this giant of a man who was in the top one percent of all the athletes in the whole world, and he had been ashamed of a reading disability he was born with?

Enough that he hadn’t even felt safe talking about it with his wife?

Had I really been that hard to talk to back then?

I just watched him for a moment.

“I’m sorry if I ever made you feel less than for not being into the same things as me,” I said, searching his eyes so he’d understand that I meant what I was saying. “I always thought you would wake up one day and realize I didn’t belong in your world of football and fame. That you’d see me for what I was. Just a nerdy girl who you felt you had to marry because we slipped up and I got pregnant.”

18

Vincent

I blinkedmy eyes a few times as Emerson’s confession hit me.

She thought I’d only married her because we’d gotten pregnant with Jaxon?

“How could you think that?” I asked. Because until this exact moment, the thought had never crossed my mind.

Not one single time.

Sure, we had hurried to Vegas and gotten married quicker than I’d originally planned, but marrying her had always been part of my endgame. I had just been waiting for the right moment to ask her and hadn’t found it before she took the pregnancy test.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged and looked down at her feet. “Just the way you wanted to rush through everything made it seem like you cared more about maintaining your good-boy public image than the actual marriage vows.”

And when she put it like that, I guess I could see how she had seen it that way.

And I may not be able to fix everything between us, but I could try to at least fix this.

So I stepped closer and lifted her chin with my fingers and said, “I’m sorry I made you feel that way.” I paused, looking into her beautiful green eyes and willing her to understand me. “I shouldn’t have reacted like I did back then. It was wrong of me to rush the wedding like that. It had to feel pretty crappy to have the day you probably thought about since you were a little girl be turned into a spur-of-the-moment weekend trip.”

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