Page 99 of How to Prevent a Fumble

“What’s on the agenda for today?” I ask them both. It’s Monday, and Elara will be picked up in two hours by Heidi for school.

“I have to go to the facility,” Leo sighs, stabbing his pancake a little too aggressively before shoving it into his mouth.

“Not looking forward to it?”

The guys lost yesterday. It definitely wasn’t pretty. It had been a bit of a struggle the entire game, but the last few minutes were heartbreaking.

“No. We knew we would lose at some point, but everyone forgot to play yesterday. I was just hoping for a nice easy Monday.”

When a team wins a game, usually Monday consists of some workouts, but otherwise they’re generally left to hang out and have a super easy day before their day off Tuesday. If they lose though, Mondays usually consist of going over tapes and team meetings to figure out where they fucked up. After yesterday's game, I can confidently say that everyone was to blame, and I’m not even a coach.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, frowning.

“It is what it is,” he says with a wince. Leo has always been hard on himself, of that much I know. These men are always hard on themselves after a loss, but quarterbacks are looked at as the face of the team. The team’s loss is always going to be blamed on them, even if they did everything perfectly. The defense utterly failed? Why didn’t the quarterback just score more points? The defenseandthe offensive line sucked? The quarterback should have dealt with it. A tight end dropped the ball five thousand times? Quarterback should have fixed the problem.

Football is a sport that you really shouldn’t be playing if you don’t love it more than anything, and for that I look up to the players. You can’t say they don’t have heart. And that’s especially true of the quarterbacks. To have that kind of pressure on them? I wouldn’t be able to do it.

“Well I hope it goes well,” I tell him with a small smile.

I’m still not over everything that happened, and I think that’s okay. I also haven’t decided whether I’ll be keeping the car I was given. The office? Sure. That’s one thing. One thing that was super nice and heartfelt, and I genuinely appreciate, though scary all the same. But a car that’s worth over one hundred thousand dollars? I don’t think I can accept that.

I could buy a house for that. Well, a really, really terrible house that’s falling apart, or a tiny shack, but I could do it.

Elara finishes her pancakes at record speed as we talk, and in an instant she’s dropping her plate into the sink and zooming down the hall.

“Where are you going?” I call after her as Champ follows.

“Getting ready for school mom, duh.”

Sighing, I turn back to face Leo, his eyes trained on mine so intensely I rear back.

There’s something about his eyes that always leaves me uneasy. Like they read me far too well for me to feel comfortable being the subject of their stare for too long. Like if I lethim sit there and look at me likethatfor even a little longer, every single secret I’ve ever kept will come out.

“I’m sorry for how I reacted,” I tell him gently, rubbing my hands together.

He tucks his bottom lip under his teeth, not saying anything.

“I appreciate it, Leo, I really do. But I just, I don’t know. I just don’t think that you can throw money at things and have every problem go away.”

“I wasn’t trying to make any problems go away, Briar. I was just trying to make you happy.”

But I can’t accept that as an answerI want to say. I just can’t. Who spends that kind of money and doesn’t expect anything in return?

“I know that everything that happened last season is resolved, but it scares me to let you spend this money thinking that you’ll have some kind of hold on me,” I tell him.

Leo’s issue with my brother lasted weeks and almost resulted in my brother and Isla never officially dating. They had been seeing each other casually for a while secretly, and then when Leo found out, shit hit the fan. It wasn’t until the Super Bowl that they both ended up together with or without Leo’s permission.

Leo lets out a breath, his shoulders slumping. “And I regret the pressure I put on them. I’ve regretted it every single day since, Briar.”

“Then why?”

He looks around and clears his throat.

“I wanted what was best for her. I had done everything I had done for her benefit, and I wanted to make sure she had the ability to live life for herself and not feel like she was living in someone’s shadow for longer than she had to. I knew how she felt about growing up with me.”

“But you made it worse, you realize that, right?”

Leo stands, takes a few steps back, and leans against thecounter. Crossing his arms, he lets out an apprehensive sigh. “For most of my life, everyone knew that I was going to be something. My parents spent a small fortune on my success, and my sister paid for it. I knew that I wanted to give back to her.

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