Page 20 of Taking It To Overtime
“You’re going to tell me we were spotted at the airport.” Vera sighs and moves her hands to her hips. She drops her chin to her chest and her cherry coke hair swings forward, just scraping the tops of her shoulders. I fist my hands to stop from tucking the strands behind her ears. I nod.
“I thought so.” This time she tips her head back and sighs up at the tree canopy. Her hair shifts again, sending the scent of lemon and roses to engulf me in flames like sparked kindling. “I don’t know how your team typically handles these things. We typically stick with no comment unless we want to confirm a relationship, but I’ll call Portia later today.”
“You aren’t mad?” I ask, and she shakes her head.
“Nope. Just took me a minute to make the connection.”
I’m not sure why I rushed over, other than to appease Spags’ nerves. It should have been common sense to me that this wouldn’t be a big deal. I knew that. I did. And I dropped everything and sprinted here like my ass was on fire. It’s not like I haven’t followed her press releases, campaigns, and any gossip rag mention of her. I know she hasn’t been photographed alone with a man since Gibson Hawke, lead singer of the up-and-coming rock band Cast & Prey.
Vic caught me staring at that blurry, far-away shot of the two of them cozied up in a dark booth at some club. The rocker had his shirt open to the waist, pale skin on display, and his arm stretched out behind her on the bench. One of her hands had been on his thigh as she leaned into his personal space, laughing. I couldn’t look away, not from the spray of freckles across her bare shoulders and back. Not from the angle of her chin or the pink of her lipstick. She’d been wearing a tiny purple dress covered with feathers. They looked like they were sprouting from her cleavage, and I had committed each pixel of that photo to memory even as Vic took the phone from my hands and closed the website.
So yeah, Vera isn’t a stranger to having her photo taken. I should have just stayed home. My overreaction will not help. It’s just going to make things weird. At least my old memories of her were happy ones. Now I’m going to remember her telling me theequivalent of “my people will call yours.” The brush off to end all brush offs.
Why did I drive over here? It would probably be less awkward to throw myself in the creek and climb out on the other side. I think we’re even with the Albertson’s yard. I can send Spags back for the car.
Probably, the voice in my brain reminds me, because you would have taken any excuse to see her again. Vera Novak. In Kimmelwick.
“My mom was a little weird about it though,” she admits, “But I think it was just a lot at once. I didn’t tell them I was coming. I wanted to surprise Dad for his birthday.”
“Weird?” That’s probably not the part of the conversation I was supposed to grab on to, but here we are. “Weird how?”
Vera shrugs, “Like it wasn’t quite getting through when I told her we weren’t together. I think the photo just threw her for a loop. She asked if you’d dropped me off.”
“My mom asked if I’d brought you home,” I say, and her brows smooth out as she smiles at me. It’s a real one, not like earlier at the airport. A smile mixed with a healthy dose of disbelief and confusion. This is my girl smiling at me the way she used to. My stomach flips. “She thought the photo meant we were back together, too.”
“What is with these moms? They need a book club or something as an outlet.” She looks suitably outraged. It’s adorable. Even after all these years, the sight of her cheeks pinking up with emotion, her eyes flashing as she gets fired up, they all heat my blood. She’s still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. “Mine was almost upset with me. Like chill lady, aren’t you glad to see me? Your child? Don’t you think I’d have texted if I was getting back together with my ex?”
“Getting back together.” My brain glitches out. Seriously. There is nothing between my ears but white noise and crickets. She’s not saying we should get back together.
She’s not saying we shouldn’t. My mind supplies.
“Mad at you?” I sound like a damn parrot repeating everything she says.
“Frustrated,” Vera corrects. “I almost said we were just so she’d move onto something else.”
“Almost said we were dating.” There I go again with the damn repeating, but my neurons aren’t firing right. Everything is just out of reach, like after a nasty hit. Even with a helmet, the ears still buzz after going down hard.
“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad?” Vera’s trying to kill me. She might not know it, but she is. “I’m sorry,” she says, “that’s a horrible idea, right?”
I shake my head. I’ve gone mute. Where the fuck are my words? Tell her it’s a good idea. The best idea.
Except she’s going to leave at the end of the week. She’ll get on her plane and go back to the land of the sun, and I’ll head back to Quarry Creek for preseason. Sixteen years ago, I knew that staying together meant she’d follow me. I’d have put a ring on her finger and had her at the altar before anyone could have talked us out of it. She’d have followed me into the draft and down to Atlanta. She’d have put my dream ahead of her. And I’d have never forgiven myself.
Now, she’s followed her heart. She’s one of the most recognizable models of our generation. And it means that her life is now thousands of miles away from mine. That is not a gap I know how to bridge without breaking both of us. If I always hoped that one day we’d come back together, I can hold out a little longer. This isn’t our time yet. It can’t be.
“What if we just let them think it? That we’re back together? Just while I’m home?” She looks out over the water, the sameplace we used to come race sticks and stick our feet in the cold current. Where we used to catch salamanders and pick the catkins off of pussywillows. “I just don’t have it in me to argue again. She seemed so happy when she thought we were reconnecting.”
She bends down to pick up a flat stone from the creek bed, and I’m a dog, but I look at the heart-shaped curve of her ass and the long line of her legs. I close my eyes to avoid the reaction in my shorts. She’s not proposing we actually get back together, she’s asking to pretend. That kind of relationship does not require a stiffy.
“Sorry,” she says, tossing the rock into the creek. It hits the water with a satisfying thud, before it sinks below the dark surface to the silty bottom. “That’s so inappropriate of me. I shouldn’t have asked that. Not after our history. I just… I don’t know.”
“Yes.” I say, holding my hand out to her…to shake? To hold? I’m not entirely sure. “You’re in town for a week?”
She nods.
“Let them think what they want to think.”
Vera slides her hand in mine.
