Page 135 of Only Between Us

You and me.

The hopeful question in his voice threatens my precarious façade. I’m just a woman put together with glue sticks and silly putty. Any more of that hope and I’ll crumble.

“You deserve every bit. I’m so proud of you.”

His body tenses and the silly putty goes first. Melting away, leaving jagged cracks and open sores all over.

“They want us to come to terms tonight. And for me to report back to camp tomorrow.” I can hear him swallow. It takes a few tries, and then he whispers, “Please don’t break up with me.”

The glue holding the last pieces of me together goes, and I just shatter.

It starts as a wave of dry sobs, these pathetic little sounds like my body doesn’t quite remember how this goes. Tears fill my eyes so fast they don’t even teeter on the edge of my eyelids. They spill free and fast down my cheeks. After a heartbeat in which Brooks goes still, he crushes my shuddering body against him.

“B-Brooks.” I’m fighting the sobs as hard as I can, gulping down air so that I can get these next words out. So that I can do this selfishthing I’ve fought for weeks, and just hope he’ll forgive me for it one day. “Please don’t sign it.”

Brooks pulls back to look at me. I fist his shirt for courage, tears still pouring. “I need you to sign with the Tigers. Okay? If they make you an offer—whenthey make you an offer—I need you to take it. Because—”

Brooks opens his mouth, but I interrupt him with a shake of my head. I wipe my cheeks with a trembling hand, but it’s no use. My face is soaked again.

“Let me get this out. Because it’s long overdue, and I need you to know that I love you. And that I don’t want to be without you. And that I want everything you want in life with the family, and the kids and the dogs, and I want it all with you. So, I need you to sign with the Tigers and not be an entire country away from me, because Brooks? I’m a survivor. I’ve been a survivor since I was a kid but I’m pretty sure that being without you would slowly kill me, and there’d be nothing I could do about it. So, please say you will.”

It takes me a second to decipher the look on Brooks’s face, because it looks like none of the expressions I’d imagined. He doesn’t look angry I’ve asked this of him. He doesn’t look happy that I just confessed my feelings.

Brooks looks devastated.

And that there should be my sign that this isn’t going to go my way. But the stupid, reckless hope in my chest refuses to die until the moment he opens his mouth and says, “I can’t.”

My entire body sags. My brain goes empty. I back out of his arms to sit on the edge of the bed. “Oh. Okay.”

“Siena, I’m so sorry.” He crouches at my feet and goes for my hands, but they’re bundled so tightly together he grips my ankles instead. “I can’t because… the Tigers aren’t going to sign me. I called Josh the night we landed in LA, after we got back from our swim. Iasked him to go to the Tigers for a contract. But they want nothing to do with me anymore.”

I think of the dark circles around his eyes the first morning of camp. This is what kept him up?

“What happened? Why don’t they want you?”

Brooks’s shoulders lift and drop. “They’re not happy with the spread.”

“The spread… inAround the League?” I frown at a copy of the magazine on the dresser off to the side of the room. Brooks’s stunning face stares up at the ceiling, the picture of understated confidence. And then it clicks. “Because I wore the Rebels jersey.”

Brooks nods. “Josh tried everything, but the way they see it, I’ve publicly humiliated them. It was widely known that they were courting me, and then…”

“And then your girlfriend wears a rival team’s jersey in a national publication.”

“I had Josh reach out to every other team on the East Coast, and they all feel the same way. It’s the Rebels, or it’s nothing.”

An odd laugh gurgles out of my throat.

Because my nosy ass went digging through Brooks’s closet that day. Found his old Rebels jersey and thought,Wouldn’t it be funny to watch him sweat if I wore this and nothing else?

And now…

Why the fuck can’t I stop laughing? The dry, pathetic sound echoes around us. Brooks gives me a sad smile.

I snort into a fresh peal of laughter, because I’ve done some truly stupid things in my life and they all pale in comparison. Anyone with half a brain cell could have seen this one coming. Meanwhile, that stupid magazine holds photographic evidence of my own obliviousness.

I chuckle into my hands, truly blown away by my own ability to self-destruct. “I really fucked us good, didn’t I?”

“Siena…”

---