Page 42 of Wicked

“We do?” I say out the side of my mouth.

“I like our talks, Harper.”

“That’s what text is for.”

“Not the same.”

Lucky for Ryker, the kids are all for it.Huh. They must be warming up to him. Usually, they’re tugging me inside the jump area. We’d run and bounce on the stretch of trampolines lined up back to back.

We take up the bench in front of the trampolines. The kids bounce past us and wave. We wave back.

“They’re good kids.”

“They are,” I say.

“How’d you all meet?”

“There’s eight of them.”

He laughs. “I can count, Harper.”

“What I meant is this can take a while.”

“Short, long, I don’t give a care what version you give me. I’d like to hear the stories.”

“You memorize plays for football, right?”

“Rules, too. If we players do something wrong, we cost our team yardage. Understanding and following the rules can mean the difference between a win and a loss.”

“Okay, give me an idea of your power of observation. What do you notice about the kids other than they’re warming up to you?”

“They are?”

“Don’t play coy,” I say, smiling. “You’re well aware they are, especially the girls.”

His massive shoulders shake. I glance sidelong at him, smiling wider. Quiet or loud, I love Ryker’s laughter.

“The girls have always liked me.”

Not modest at all, which begs the question, “Ever had your heart broken?”

He’s quiet. Not the contemplative kind that I like about him, but a dead silence that implies the question might have been too personal or the topic too painful for him to revisit.

“If you don’t want to tell, I’m fine with it, Ryker. Your past is none of my business.”

“The summer of my freshman year,” he finally says, his voice low, but his tone sharp as steel. “There was this girl . . .”

He threads his fingers through his hair. Puffs out a breath.

“My high school sweetheart. I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with her. We had plans. She’d come with me to Prescott U and continue to be my biggest supporter. But she couldn’t do it.”

“Was it the pressure of being a . . . a well-known athlete’s girlfriend?”

“Well-known?”

“I looked you up,” I confess. “The news media ran stories on you. In your senior year, you were voted one of the top ten local athletes to keep an eye on, that you’ll make it big. Had already made it big when you were accepted into Ivy League schools and top colleges for football. But you stayed local?”

A statement that turned into a question.

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