Page 18 of The Problem with Players

Good rebuttal.

I rubbed my hand on the back of my neck. “I was hoping we could talk.”

“Talk?” she grumbled. “By the trash bins?”

“To be fair, you didn’t want me at your bar counter,” I replied.

She didn’t find humor in anything I said. She stared blankly at me for a few moments before returning to the door and pounding against it. “Hey, open up the door!” she shouted. “Let me in!”

No one came, and I felt pretty shitty about it.

I glanced around the area to see if there was an easy way out, but it was enclosed by a fence that went higher than my wannabe Spider-Man self could climb.

Avery gestured toward me. “Do you have your phone? Call your brother.”

“Yeah, of course.” I reached into my back pocket and patted it, only to find no phone. I’d placed it on the table beside my beer before taking the shot with my brothers. “Actually…”

“Oh my goodness,” she groaned as she slapped her hand to her face. “I’m the only one working tonight, Nathan, and the bar is unattended. Do you know how much trouble I could get into for this?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to?—”

“To what?” She cut in. “Disrupt my life? Because it seems you’re on a nice campaign to do exactly that.”

I grimaced as she said those words. Sure, I hadn’t made the best impressions over the past forty-eight hours, but the last thing I wanted to do was cause Avery any trouble. If anything, Iwanted to make things right between us. Yet somehow, I’d managed to keep screwing that up.

“Yeah,” I said. “That.”

She rolled her eyes. “I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re the same as you’ve always been.”

“I’m not the same boy you knew back then, Avery. I’m better than that.”

“No, you aren’t. People don’t change. At least not for the better.”

“So you’re telling me that you’re the same person you were when you were eighteen?”

“No,” she disagreed. “I’m a lot harder and a lot more distrusting. That’s what life does to people. It makes them cynics.”

“Not everyone,” I argued.

“Most.” She tugged on the door again, as if the more she pulled, the more likely it would open. She then pounded against it with her open hand, mumbling something under her breath. Probably a few cuss words. With a weighted sigh, she groaned and surrendered from pounding.

“I’m sorry,” I said as I watched her defeated body fall against the cobbled wall.

She shut her eyes and tilted her head up toward the sky. “For what? Getting me locked out here or taking my job? Either way, I don’t forgive you.”

“For both,” I offered. I stood beside her, resting my back against the building. “I didn’t mean to make things harder for you, Avery. That was never my plan. And to be clear, the school district informed me that you were on board with me taking the head coach position. They even made it sound like it was your idea.”

“Does that sound anything like me?”

“Well, looking back on it, no. I just thought…” I didn’t know what I thought. I suppose I didn’t think it through at all. All I saw was a chance to get back into at game that I loved and amend things with the woman I once loved. Sure, I knew it wouldn’t be easy to get in her good graces, but such a big part of me wanted to prove to her that I wasn’t the selfish, hurtful kid I had been. One of my biggest regrets was how I ended things with Avery all those years before.

Yet now I felt as if I had only dug a deeper hole with her on my path to forgiveness.

She glanced over long enough for me to catch her rolling her eyes. “Just forget about it, Nathan. I don’t care, okay? I’m probably going to lose this job, too, thanks to you. My boss is going to kill me when he realizes I got myself locked out by the trash bins.”

Add that to my pile of screwups.

The list kept growing.

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