Page 146 of Only Between Us

“Just a quick round-trip across the country, huh?” She sits her chin on my chest. “Can you come inside with me? I need your help with something.”

“Lead the way.”

Siena takes my hand and we weave through the crowd, Pete bringing up the rear. We pause to say hi to my delighted parents on our way inside the practice facility. It’s quiet in here, away from the excited voices and blaring music, with only a couple of security guards manning the entrance.

“Thank you for the flowers last night.” Siena squeezes my hand and leads us down a quiet hall, toward the team parking lot. “I can’t tell you how much I needed it.”

“I wish I could’ve been there with you.”

She stops me, then lifts onto her toes to kiss me. “It was like you were.”

“How long do I have you here?” Pete circles around us, looking for an opening to join the embrace. I pat him on the head. “I’ll get my ass handed to me if we leave this event now, but I’m willing to risk it.”

Instead of answering, Siena tugs me a few steps down the deserted hallway… to where three person-sized suitcases sit along the wall, so stuffed they’re practically bursting at the seams.

“Siena.” I stop dead. My heart picks up its pace. “You should know my hopes just flew through the roof. Please tell me this means what I think it does.”

Because that looks like more than a weekend’s worth of stuff. And I’m suddenly ready to run ten laps around this building, this city, this fucking country. It’s gameday levels of adrenaline. Jump-through-a-brick-fucking-wall levels of adrenaline.

“It means what you think it does.” Siena stares down at her own bags like it’s still surreal. Like she hadn’t packed them, flown them over here herself.

“How?” is the only word I muster. I’m pretty sure that if I activated my vocal cords any longer than that, I’d end up roaring victoriously.

“I spoke to my mom. I told her everything, and she was…” Her eyes go wet, and I hate it, not seeing the usual light in them. But I sense there’s a new comfort with the tears—this woman, who normally fights crying with everything she has. “She was pretty fucking angry I took so long to tell her how I was feeling. But it was nice to finally let myself ask for that validation. To let myself ask for help. And to have so many people happy to come through for me.”

I thumb the tears running down her cheeks. “I’m so proud of you, baby. I know how hard that must have been. How unnatural it must have felt.”

“I couldn’t stop shaking all night. And we don’t have it all straightened out, but… Carla and Evan are looking into whether they can take it on as an additional business. Dad had apparently planned to propose the idea in the first place. They’re going to oversee the shop now, while we figure out if we can make it work.” With a deep breath, she dries her cheeks with the back of her hand and smiles. “It felt wrong not to figure it out for myself, but all night I kept thinking… if someone as good as you thinks I’m worthy of that kind of love and support, there’s no way I can’t be.”

I nod sagely. “Because I know everything.”

Siena gives me my favorite sound in the world: that husky laugh I’ll never get enough of. “You know what? I think you might. Remember the night of the Tigers’ gala while we were talking in bed?”

“Vividly. It was like a switch flipped that weekend, and there was only you.”

Those eyes smile up at me. “That’s the night you started falling for me?”

“Sweetheart, I started falling for you the moment I quite literally fell for you on that field. Stupid me, trying to break your fall like a hero. Only to realize that I wanted you to fall for me more than anything.”

Siena reaches for the chain around my neck, fingers the blue-gray stones. “That weekend, I said I thought Dad put me on that field so I’d have some way of fixing everything that was going wrong in my life. And you said… you said maybe things went wrong to bring us together.”

“You laughed when I said that.”

“And you said you didn’t believe in things being meant to be.”

“Which proves I know absolutely nothing.” I didn’t believe it,then. The things I’d gone through two years prior, the injury, the cheating, the dark hole I’d dug for myself in the months after… They were too harsh to accept that I was put through them for a reason.

But I think I was.

I think it was one long, rough road to bring me right where I needed to be that day. On that field, down on my luck, trying to save the future love of my life from an errant ball.

I went through what I did to understand what I deserve from a partner. What I deserve out of life. And in came Siena, blowing my expectations right out of the water. She’s raised my standards to a level I never aspired to.

And Pete. I got Pete out of the deal, too.

I hold her face between my hands, admiring the way my palms mold to the apples of her cheeks as she smiles. “You’re really moving here?”

She nods, practically shuddering with excitement. “I’m sad to leave home, and Mom, and Shy. And leaving the shop does feel like losing an arm in a way, because I’ve been there half my life. But I think Dad would have loved this for me. You, me, Pete, and Sophia. With our house on the water and midnight skinny-dips with sharks. You winning a hundred Super Bowls and me sailing a hundred ships.”

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