Page 39 of Kellan & Emmett
Then he asked, quiet but deliberate: “You think you could see yourself doing this every summer?”
My head came up. His face gave nothing away—just a casual question, like he was asking about the weather. But my chest tightened anyway, because I heard what he wasn’t saying. Could you stay? Could you stay where I am?
I forced a shrug, eyes on the swirl of my coffee. “It’s just for this summer.”
“Sure,” he said, leaning back, but there was a note in his voice I couldn’t name. Something that lingered.
The table between us suddenly felt too small. His hand slid across it, passing a napkin toward me. Our fingers brushed—warm, solid, sparking heat that shot straight through me. I jerked back, muttered a thanks too fast, and tried to hide the way my pulse spiked.
Emmett’s eyes lingered on me a beat too long, then he cleared his throat. “You know, I never asked. Football—how far’d you take it after you left?”
My laugh was low, sharp. “Far enough to blow out my knee.”
His brows lifted, waiting.
I stared down into the mug, watched the coffee ripple as if I’d shaken it loose. “Junior year. ACL. Heard it snap like a gunshot.” My throat worked, memory flashing too vivid—the turf rushing up, the silence after the crowd’s gasp. “Scouts stopped showing up. Just like that, it was over.”
Silence stretched a second, then Emmett said quietly, “That must’ve gutted you.”
“It gutted my dad,” I said, voice rougher than I meant. “Me? I think part of me always knew I was on borrowed time. But him—” I blew out a breath, forced a smile without humor. “He’d already mapped out my rookie season, you know? Had me wearing an NFL jersey in his head.”
Emmett’s jaw ticked, his gaze steady on me. “And when it didn’t happen?”
My hand tightened around the mug. “He left. One suitcase, no goodbye. By the weekend he was gone.”
The words hit the table like stones. Emmett’s fingers flexed against his cup, like he wanted to reach across but didn’t.
“I shouldn’t have been surprised,” I went on, softer. “He’d been living through me since I was twelve. Friday-night lights, scouts, scholarships—he saw me as his ticket. The second the ticket got torn up…” My chest squeezed. “He punched out.”
“Jesus, Kellan.” His voice was low, threaded with anger that wasn’t for me.
I shrugged like it didn’t matter, but my throat burned. “Mom tried, though. Even with her lupus—setting two plates instead of three, pretending her hands weren’t shaking. She was…she was the one who kept me grounded.”
Emmett’s face softened, eyes unblinking. “I remember. She always treated me like I was hers too.”
The memory caught me off guard, pulled a knot tight in my chest. “Yeah. She did.”
I swallowed hard, but the words kept coming, like once I cracked the lid, everything spilled. “Her health got worse. Stress sped it up. By senior year, she was in and out of the hospital. And the day she…” My voice faltered. “I wasn’t there. I had an exam. Thought I had more time. Four damn hours it took to do my exam and get back to her, and she…”
The rest stuck in my throat, jagged as glass.
For a long moment, neither of us spoke. The hum of the café wrapped around us, muffled, like we were underwater. Emmett’s hand shifted, knuckles brushing the table closer to mine but not quite touching.
“You were a kid,” he said finally, steady and sure. “Carrying weight no one should’ve asked you to carry.”
Heat crawled up my neck, part shame, part gratitude. I wanted to believe him, wanted to lean into it, but the guilt had teeth, always had.
I dragged in a breath, sat back, tried to break the heaviness with a thin smile. “Guess I didn’t exactly live up to the golden-boy hype, huh?”
Emmett didn’t look away. He just sat there, steady as stone, while I tried to smirk my way out of the wreckage I’d laid on the table.
“You’re still here,” he said again, firmer this time. Like he meant to nail it into me, the way a coach drives a play into your bones.
Something cracked loose in my chest, sharp and aching. I didn’t trust myself to answer. I curled my fingers tight around the cup so he wouldn’t see them shake. And God help me, even in the middle of all that emotional weight, I felt it again—that pull toward him, the one I’d been fighting since the day I came back.
And then his hand shifted. Just a small thing—his fingers sliding across the table, brushing against mine.
It should’ve felt like nothing. Just skin on skin for a second. But it lit me up like a live wire. Heat shot up my arm, down my spine, left my breath snagging in my throat.
