Page 45 of My Best Bet

Her eyes searched mine. “How do I know you’re being serious?” she whispered.

“I promise I will neverevermake you cry,” I vowed while rolling us around so I was on top. I kissed her before putting my forehead to hers. “Hundred bucks, baby.”

“Okay, okay, back it up!” Kappy yelled at us from across the fire.

“Relax, grandpa,” Piper chided him.

“No! I ignored it when they were laying there, but now they’re literally rolling around in the snow. Let’s keep it PG, y’all. Don’t make me an uncle before 25 please.”

“Hate to say he’s right, but he has a point,” Piper said.

“Thank you! I’m not old enough to be an uncle.”

“Not about you,” she snapped at him. “Mer needs to make it to the Olympics first.”

Mer cracked up laughing, and I couldn’t help but crack a grin.

“I love you, Meredith Bennett,” I whispered to her.

She had my whole heart. I’d never feel this way about anyone else, I was sure of it. What we had was rare and real, and I wasn’t letting it go. I wasn’t lettinghergo. We just had to accomplish our dreams and then we’d have our after.

“I love you, Colt Conover,” she whispered back.

9.Mer - Déjà-vu

On Monday morning, I dropped Piper off at the airport so she could join Patrick for the next couple weeks in Montreal. Apparently they had choreography sessions booked with a pretty prominent coach and she was excited about it.

“Just don’t overdo it. Listen to your body, okay?” I warned her when she was yanking her huge designer suitcase out of my beat up, old Escape. Piper had a bad case of compartment syndrome in her legs from overtraining a couple years ago, and I didn’t want her to re-injure herself. “And if the coach is too demanding, tell him to screw off.”

“Oh, you know I will,” she said, blowing me a kiss.

I waited for her while she checked her bags outside of O’Hare, but when she finished, she didn’t run into the terminal, instead she darted back to my car and plopped in the shotgun seat. She pulled down the mirror to fix her lip gloss.

“What are you doing?” I asked, laughing at her. “You’re gonna be late.”

She took in a deep breath, then turned to face me. “I know, it’s just… Before I go, I wanted to say, we’re totally different people than we were a decade ago, ya know?”

My eyebrows drew together, trying to figure out what she was getting at. “Okay…?”

She tucked her pale blonde hair behind her ears and looked a little nervous when she said, “So maybe the guys are too.”

“Piper,” I warned.

“I just think that maybe there’s a reason the two of you were thrown back together again. Maybe this is the universe telling you that you two belong together.”

I started to argue, but she held up her hand.

“I just want you to stop jumping to conclusions and stop blaming yourself for everything that went wrong, okay?”

My shoulders fell. “Piper, itwasmy fault. Maybe I didn’t fully break us, but I was the one who–”

She shook her head. “You weresoyoung, Mer. You need to forgive yourself.”

I closed my eyes, trying to steady myself, wondering how she could read me so easily. She somehow always knew what I really needed to hear. For some reason, I needed permission to forgive myself.

“And now I’m going to give you homework,” she said, sticking her chin in the air. “I want you to focus on who you are right now. I know that because you saw Colt, you’re gonna start ruminating on the past, and I get it, okay? I know how tempting that is. But don’t. Because you’ll mix up details and warp things in your mind. Leave it all behind. Stop thinking about the 21-year-old version of yourself. That’s not who you are. That girl went through so much, and it’s easy to wallow in past emotions and past hurts and to linger in all that pain, but to backslide would be dishonoring her. You are the strongest person I know, and I want you to be proud of that. And if a certain someone wanted to talk again, you don’t have to be that old version of yourself. You don’t even have to revisit what happened or what you went through at all. Be who you aretoday,okay? You can’t go back anyways, so just move forward. Got it?”

I rolled my now teary eyes. I was usually an expert at bottling up my emotions, but seeing him again seemed to snap that ability inside of me. “He’s not going to want to talk to me again, P. And he shouldn’t, he might be with someone else. He could be–”

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