Page 63 of Good Guy Gabe

Or maybe it’s the quivering in my bottom lip.

He raises his hand and levels his voice out. “I just want to help. Those stairs are going to be a nightmare for you. They’re too narrow to carry a car seat up so you won’t be able to bring it upstairs. You won’t be able to drag a stroller up, either. If we build that balcony, we can add a ramp or even a lift, whatever you want. Please let me do this.”

I want to say no. I want to scream at him and tell him I don’t need his help. I definitely can’t tell him that I’ve always hated those stairs and cursed whoever took that porch off, and I don’t want to tell him I could never convince myself I needed such an expensive and extravagant renovation.

I close my eyes, wishing I could vanish from this moment.

And Tilly and Cora come to my rescue, filling the space between us again, that space that would have been so easy for me to fall into and vanish, as he’s allowed me to do within his arms so many times. Tilly steps into me, gently coaxing me back inside the barn, while Cora takes Gabe’s arm and accompanies him back to Jeff.

Before Tilly gets the door closed, I hear Cora say, “We’ll need to work out a schedule for this. You are hurting her being here.”

And I hear Gabe reply with, “And I am suffocating without her.”

But I can’t care about that. I can’t.

Chapter 27

Gabe

THERE’S THIS MOMENT, a fraction of a second, where I hesitate. My arms go still, my elbows locked on either side of me, my knuckles white-fisted, the bar pressed against my chest, and I stop.

A normal place to stop. It’s a transition. I’ve brought the bar down, and now I have to push it back up. And at three hundred pounds, it’s a place where most men, even others in this weight room, would struggle through the transition. They would need this time to find that oomph, that extra strength, that adrenaline that seems to come from nowhere to push through it.

But not me. This isn’t easy by any means, but this is what I lift. Not even. There are two more sets of plates waiting to be added to this bar to make this a serious challenge. The last month’s been rough. I’ve taken some bad hits on the field in recent games. I probably won’t add the last set of plates today. But it’s not the strain that has me pausing.

I stare up at the ceiling, the rows of neon lights, the constellation of dimples in the panels of the drop ceiling. The random note cards Blaise has jammed into some of the corners, their messages a mix of crude drawings, random insults, and highest praises. I feel the weight of the bar on my ribs, the padding of muscle, fat, and flesh doing only so much to buffer the pressure. I imagine the weight I feel in my hands transferring to that thin line across my ribs.

And I stop.

An eternity frozen in one breath, just the expansion of my chest, constricted by that cold, thin bar of steel.

The industrial overhead lights are enough to blind a man who’s staring too intensely at them. When they suddenly vanish from my sight and the world goes dark, it’s like an eclipse. With a glow of fiery red along the rim.

Nope, that’s Allore’s hair as he leans over me and grabs the bar on either side of my hands.

“I’m good,” I tell him, snapping back to the moment, hating how raw my voice is and how bad my eyes burn from staring at those lights.

He keeps his hands next to mine as he says, “You’re not,” his voice low enough that the guys who are busy on the machines a few feet away can’t hear him. But he lets me lift that bar myself, his hands merely hovering.

As soon as the bar’s back in the cradle, he does take hold of it, pushing down to prevent me from attempting to lift it again.

“I’m fine,” I insist. “I just . . . needed a breath.”

That’s dumb. That sounds really dumb. That sounds like exactly the reason why I shouldn’t be bench pressing anything right now and also why I should be seeing the docs for them to work their magic so I’m upright for the game in two days.

Except I’m not sick, of course. I’m not out of breath. Not in a way that can be fixed with Vitamin C and a shot of something we don’t question since it doesn’t flag on drug tests. I just

I just can’t

breathe.

Evan continues to stare down at me from above, his face upside-down and distorted, although with Evan, it’s probablynot the angle so much as the struggle of big thoughts that has his face screwed up. We test each other, playing an invisible tug-of-war with that bar, me pushing at it until he forgets and leans back enough that I can move it in the cradle, only for him to slam his weight back down on it.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Not even a little bit.”

“Dude, you looked like you were about to do some unaliving nonsense, and we were going to have to rescue your ass, and then we’d all get stuck filling out incident reports, which suck.”

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