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I could hardly wait to see her again.
“Dr. Aster,” Mickie’s dad said, interrupting my thoughts as he swung open the wooden screen door and stepped outside.
I held my hand up to wave before hopping up the brick steps with my duffle bag to shake his sturdy hand. “Tim, correct? Mr. Smith, I mean,” I instantly correctly my rudeness. I didn’t need to give her family any more reasons to be unimpressed with me.
“Tim is fine,” he said. I could tell the man appreciated my nervousness, facing him after I’d hurt his daughter.
“Okay, Tim it is,” I returned. “And please, call me John.”
“Alrighty, then,” he answered. “Well, I see your bag,” he looked with confusion at the duffle I’d thrown some jeans, shirts, and necessities into, “but Mickie said you’d be staying in town. I can set up my den for you if you want to stay with us?”
“That won’t be necessary, Dad,” Mickie interrupted, and her cute expression, while being sassy and trying to keep me in my place, made me grin. “John will stay at the hotel he reserved.”
“The hospitality here is awesome,” I teased her.
“You’ll find it even more enjoyable once you have some of my wife’s sweet tea, enjoy a bowl of her dumplings, and cut into the apple pie she made last night,” Tim said. “If you both will excuse me, I’m going to sneak into that pie before everyone runs it over.”
“Mom always makes a second pie for you, Dad,” Mickie rolled her eyes at her dad’s excuse for leaving us alone.
“This house is beautiful,” I said, stepping into the entryway and seeing a sweeping staircase built against the far wall leading to the second-floor landing.
“Thanks,” Mickie answered. “Here, put your bag in the front closet. There’s room in there, and you can grab it on your way out.”
“Mick,” I smiled at her.
“Mickie,” she corrected me. “Mick is a name I allowed you to call me too freely before, but if you want to use it again, you’ve got to earn the privilege back.”
“You’re going to put me through hell, aren’t you?”
“You’re the one who wants to try and get back what we had. I was fine with keeping things professional,” she said. “I don’t mean to be a bitch, John, but I’m not getting hurt again. Most people would probably go easy on you, but?—”
“The Olympian is going to force me to bust my ass to get back on the team?”
She smiled, “Something like that. I’ve realized I do not like being left high and dry.”
“I’ll never?—”
“I thought you never would the first time. I thought that if you were done, I’d at least have gotten the memo. However, you just fell off the earth, and I was clueless,” she clasped her hands in front of her like a tour guide, giving me the facts. “I deserve more than a man who can just disappear for months on end, leaving me feeling like I meant nothing to him. Even if he said I did. Now, I’m beyond words. I need action.”
“Challenge accepted.”
“We’ll see,” she shrugged. She wasn’t angry or mean or even indignant. She was perfectly pleasant, as friendly as she always had been before we got involved, but she was keeping me at a distance and had every right to.
“My cousins are here and can’t wait to meet you,” she said. “Oh, and John?”
“Yeah, baby?—”
Fuck. I said it without thinking, and it hit us both sideways. I saw a flicker of sadness in her eyes that hurt my heart. I’d fucking destroyed this woman with my selfish actions, and it was written all over her face in an instant. I wasn’t a fool. I know what I saw, and I felt it, too.
I deserved every ounce of pain she could muster for breaking her heart the way I did, for failing to be the man I said I would be for her. The pain flashing in her eyes was enough to let me know that I was willing to take the fucking heat even if it meant I didn’t win her back.
She was a precious gem and a treasure, and I treated her like she was a fake diamond.
I didn’t deserve to be in her presence, yet she was granting me the pleasure, and I wasn’t going to fuck it up.
“Jesus, this house smells like a Texas barbecue,” I said, walking past the kitchen and seeing heaps and mounds of food spread over the counters in deep aluminum trays.
“We don’t use the word Texas in this house,” a linebacker-type man said with a laugh. He must’ve been six-and-a-half feet tall and nearly as wide. “Coach Tim ain’t havin’ that shit around here.”
