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West disappears upstairs with Bella. The rest of us go to a couple of bars and town is pumping, but it’s the same scenario.
Girls are pushing each other out of the way to get close to me but not one of them is someone I want to spend time with tonight.
Fucking wonderful.
There are a lot of beautiful women here. But not one of them is…her.
I seriously don’t get this.
Gabriel is deep in conversation with a couple of sophomores, who are hanging on his every word, so we leave him to it.
Jake seems to be mired in his own tortured headspace. “We’re just getting into the mindset we need for Saturday,” Jake mutters and I agree with him, but this isn’t like either one of us.
It’s after midnight when I tell him I’m headed out and he seems relieved.
We get back to the house and Jake disappears into his room, slamming the door like he’s as frustrated as I am. His behavior tonight isn’t like him at all. I’ll find a time to talk to him about whatever’s going through his head.
I take a long shower because I’m so wound up I know I won’t be able to sleep.
I’m fucking ravenous—not for food but for something else entirely. Hot, take-no-prisoners sex. Which I’m no stranger to, but what I’m craving is lust on a different level. One that digs in and won’t let go. One that lasts longer than one night, or two.
One that means something. Or everything.
Hell.
I hope Gabriel’s broodiness isn’t rubbing off on me. I used to be more like West. I want to be more like West. Carefree and easy-going. Like I used to be. Instead, I’m losing my mind less than a week before our first game of the season.
Get a grip, O’Shea. Be logical about this.
I’m probably just feeling the effects of the phone call I got this morning from my dad. He called to tell me he’s getting more tests done for his heart problem.
Heart failure, he called it. I told him nothing’s failed yet, so he shouldn’t be using the word “failure.” It’s still beating, Dad.
It’s times like these I wish I was closer to home. My mother died in a car accident when I was three years old. I don’t remember her at all, but my dad has always kept her memory very much alive with the twenty or thirty pictures he has of her, displayed all over our house. My dad raised me and never remarried, so it’s always been just the two of us. I once asked him why he never seemed interested in marrying again, or even dating, and he said he loved my mother so much nothing could possibly compare. He knew from the very first time he saw her, when they were in college together, that she was the one. It’s a story he’s been telling me my whole life. There she was, standing under her own spotlight at a party, like an angel. Absolute perfection. That’s how he described her. He fell in love with her on the spot and, according to him, it didn’t take much for him to convince her the feeling was mutual.
After she died, my dad basically dedicated his entire life to me and my football career. He was the coach of my high school team until the second half of my junior year, when he had his first heart attack. The doctors recommended he quit then but he was stubborn. Two months later he had another heart attack and ended up having major surgery to fix the blockages, which took him a long time to recover from. He retired because he had no other choice. But he was always there on the sidelines, always there to go through the plays, the analysis, the details I needed to improve on.
He’s why I’m here.
I applied to schools in Virginia and got into all of them, but Hawthorne offered me the sweetest deal and I’d watched their team from afar for years. My dad insisted that I think about my future more than his. I finally agreed to take Hawthorne’s offer, on the condition that he’d agree to let me hire home help and a nurse who checks in on him twice a day.
The way he said goodbye before he hung up this morning was sort of jarring. He told me he loved me and how proud he was of me. How I’m the best son a man could ever ask for and how he wished my mother could see me now. Then he said he hopes he lives to see the day I find the kind of true love he and my mother had. How the piece of her that he could see in me every day was the reason he’s lasted as long as he has.
It was sort of fucking heavy.
All right, Dad, go easy, I joked. You’re fine. You’re not going anywhere. And I’ll be back for Thanksgiving. That’s only a couple months away.
I went home a few weeks ago to check on him but I’ve been in Massachusetts all summer, taking classes, training and practicing. We all take our toughest courses over the summer semester—in theory, anyway. That way, we can concentrate on football as much as possible once the season starts.
Before I ended the call, I told him I loved him too and I’d talk to him in a few days.
They aren’t words we usually throw around.
The whole conversation keeps scrolling through my head.
To be honest, it terrifies me. My dad is the only person I have left. I refuse to lose him too, even if it means chaining him to his recliner, getting him round-the-clock care and forcing him to watch football all day while I work my guts out to make it to the NFL, which is exactly what I’m doing.
Before he dies shadows the thought but I shut it down. I refuse to go there.
