Page 50 of Hometown Touchdown
“I meant it, you know,” he says quietly.
I frown. “Meant what?”
He doesn’t turn around. “I like you. Still. Even if I shouldn’t.”
And then he leaves, just like that, and the silence he leaves behind is suffocating.
I stand in the kitchen, my head a chaotic mess of what just happened. My arms come up around my waist, holding myself like maybe I can keep everything in if I just squeeze hardenough. But the quiet floods in, wraps around me, presses hard against my ribs.
And then the spiral hits.
Because kissing Knox again—letting myself feel that much again—it opens a door I thought I’d boarded up for good.
Back when we were just two wide-eyed kids who thought forever would wait for us, he used to talk about the future like it was already mapped out. Coaching football. A little white house on a quiet street. Two kids and a golden retriever in the backyard. He wanted to be the dad who showed up to everything, the one in the stands with the loudest cheer and the biggest heart. Just like his own. He said he’d teach his daughter how to throw a perfect spiral and terrify any teenage boy dumb enough to show up on the porch.
And I used to picture all of it with him.
But somewhere in the time we spent apart, that picture shifted. The edges blurred. The colors changed. Not because I stopped loving him—I’m realizing now that wasn’t the problem—but because reality caught up to me in the harshest, quietest way possible.
I left because I thought I wasn’t enough for the life he was building. That he’d outgrow me the second the spotlight found him. But it isn’t just fear or selfishness. Now it’s this thing that lives in my bloodstream like a warning bell. My diagnosis—premature ovarian insufficiency. A mouthful of a phrase that reshaped everything I thought I knew about my own future. About what I could give someone.
He thinks I ran to Seattle because it was shiny and new, and maybe part of me did. But I was scared of not being enough. And now I fear that more than ever.
I exhale, slow and shaky, the taste of his kiss still clinging to my lips.
I need to tell him. The truth. All of it.
Because if he still wants the picture he used to paint—the football games and backyard and tiny feet running down the hall—then I owe it to him to be honest.
Even if it means I lose him all over again.
Chapter twenty-three
Knox
Thequietistooloud.
I’ve been pacing the living room for the last twenty minutes, the TV muted, a beer untouched on the coffee table, and Priscilla tracking my every step from the couch like I’m one wrong move away from shattering. She can read me like a book.
My brain’s been playing a highlight reel of that kiss on a loop. Brynn’s mouth on mine, her fingers in my hair, the sound she made when I pressed her against the counter. I can still taste her. Still feel her in my hands.
And God help me, I want more.
But then the other half of my brain rears up. The bruised, cautious, battle-worn side. The side that remembers what it felt like to watch her walk away. The silence that followed. The calls she never answered. The way I had to pretend she didn’t exist when every part of me knew better.
So now I’m split in two. Half of me stuck in the past, the other half clawing toward something that might already be doomed.
Priscilla gives a soft huff from the couch and nudges her nose against my leg like she’s had enough of my nonsense. I drop to my knees in front of her and bury my face in the scruff of her neck.
“What am I doing, Priscilla?” I murmur.
She responds with a low, contented grunt and nudges me again, licking at the edge of my jaw like she can fix it.
“You’re the only girl I can trust not to screw with my head,” I say, giving her a rough pat. “But if you ever learn how to text, I’m in real trouble.”
That gets me a tail wag.
I’m halfway through considering just going to bed when my phone lights up on the counter.
