Page 148 of The Problem with Players

It’s three in the morning, and they are about to vote off my favorite player.

Nathan

Yup. He’s gone.

Nathan

I’m FREAKING OUT.

Nathan

Oh crap. It’s five in the morning. Good night.

Nathan

Or, well, good morning.

Nathan

If we happen to cross each other’s paths today, please bring coffee.

Later that afternoon, I found myself standing on Nathan’s front porch. I rang his doorbell, and an extremely exhausted Nathan approached the door. He was shirtless, rubbing the exhaustion from his eyes.

“Ave. You okay?” He yawned, stretching his arms out, revealing every muscle resting against his body. “What’s going on?”

I held a cup of coffee out toward him. “Crossing your path. Good afternoon, Coach.”

His tired, lazy smile spread as he took the coffee from my hands. “Good afternoon.”

I sat across from Rebecca,my therapist, nervously fidgeting with my hands in my lap. I still wasn’t used to expressing myself in this fashion. Yet Rebecca was patient with me. She never pushed me to dig deeper, which somehow made it feel like a safer place to dig deeper.

“So you wereengaged,” she asked me.

I nodded. “Yes. We were together for three years. It didn’t work out. We weren’t a match.”

“Three years is a long time, though, yes?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

She smiled. “But within those three years, how much did you actually open your book to your partner?”

I laughed and shook my head. “I don’t really open my book to anyone.”

“What about the person who you were connected to over the past few months? From what you’ve told me, it seems that he may have read some of your pages.”

“Nathan,” I said, nodding. “Yes. That’s because he had a way of figuring out how to undo the lock on my book.”

“Was it good? The two of you?”

“Yes.” I nodded. “So very good.”

“Which is why you shut your book so swiftly,” she explained.

I arched an eyebrow. “Huh? Why would I do that? Why would I shut my book when it felt so good?”

Rebecca sat back in her chair with a smile. “Because sometimes in life, we get triggered by the idea of letting someone else read our books, having someone else see our messy, dark chapters. Love only triggers us more. Sometimes we believe it’s easier to shut said book and mark it as a ‘did not finish’ instead of moving through the hard chapters toward the happily ever after. This is because we fear losing said love. But this Nathan, do you think he liked what he read of you?”

“Yes,” I confessed.

---