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Me: Are you two?
Cranky: You do remember that I own the Falcons, right? That basically means I own your sorry ass. Don't insult me. You may accidentally get loaned out to another team. I hear the East Coast is nice this time of year.
Me: Liar. It's colder than a well digger's ass over there.
Cranky: Take care of her, Jacks. I fucking mean it.
Me: With my life.
It's not an empty promise. I mean that shit. He may be pissed, but he didn't lock her in a closet. He didn't try to stop her from coming with me. I figure that means something. He's trusting me with her, giving me a chance to prove that I'm a man worthy of her.
I plan to deserve every ounce of that trust.
I drop my phone into the console and reach for Gabbi. She glances over at me, smiling as I pull her hand toward my mouth to brush a kiss across her knuckles. Her smile only grows.
Fuck, I can't wait to see that expression on her face every day forever.
I lay our linked hands on the console and close my eyes. Despite what I told her, my head is still pounding. Every fucking time I breathe, a hot poker stabs me through the skull.
Fun times.
Chapter Eight
Gabbi
For a man named Atlas, he has a terrible navigation system. It doesn't reroute us back to the interstate. As he sleeps beside me, snoring and mumbling something about a puck wearing a sombrero, I drive deeper into the woods and mountains, swerving around and bouncing over potholes.
At some point, the woods become a certified forest, the canopy overhead thick enough to choke out what remains of the daylight. Lingering rays pierce through the dense canopy in places, causing little motes of dust to dance in midair. Those few sparkling rays give the scene an idyllic, almost dream-like quality. It's quiet underneath, almost peaceful.
I don't mind the detour much. It gives me plenty of time to think. When Jordan called me early this morning, trying to boss me into backing out of this trip, I refused. For the first time in a long time—perhaps for the first time ever—I did what I wanted to do, not what was expected of me. And it felt good.
He threatened to ship Atlas off to another team. I think I shocked us both when I threatened to follow him to wherever he went. Until that moment, the thought hadn't even entered my mind. Silver Spoon Falls is my home. I don't want to leave here. But for the first time, I think I'm realizing that home isn't a place, it's the people in it.
Since meeting him, Atlas has become one of the people who makes Silver Spoon Falls feel like home to me. He feels like home to me. I don't know what that means for me. I don't know what it means for us. But I want to be the kind of person brave enough to find out. Rome and Jordan are where they are in life because they took big risks.
It's my turn to take one too.
Jordan doesn't have to like it. He can stomp around and threaten to ship me off to convents or threaten to send Atlas to another team all he wants, but I'm not a little girl any longer. If I want something different in my life, I can't stand idly by and wait for someone else to make it happen. I've done that for far too long, letting Rome and Jordan call the shots.
I guess I thought I owed it to them, especially to Jordan. But love is unconditional. Family is forever. Those things aren't contingent upon whether or not I toe the line. Jordan may be worried about me, but I know deep down, that's not the life he'd want for me, either. He's just stubborn and overprotective and unwilling to admit that maybe I don't need him hovering over me anymore.
I think if he admits that I'm grown up, he has to face the fact that Hollie is too. And that's what really scares him. He's in love with my best friend, and he has no clue what to do about it. She was only eighteen when they met. In his eyes, she was just a kid, too young for him. So long as he can continue to convince himself that I'm too young to date, he doesn't have to deal with the fact that she's the same age I am.
I don't envy him. He's one of the most honorable people I know. Grappling with the fact that he's in love with someone so much younger than him is messing with his head. But that's their problem to solve, not mine. And I can't carry that cross for them.
I roll to a stop at a fork in the road, shifting my gaze from the road to the GPS. Dismay courses through me when, instead of directions, all I get is a spinning wheel that says rerouting. My gaze drifts to the corner of the screen, only to see a line slashed through the car's connectivity icon.
We no longer have signal.
I chew on my bottom lip, unsure which way to go. Neither road offers any clues. One looks just as good as the other, which is to say they're both pitted gravel lanes exactly like every other pitted lane I've been on for the last couple of hours.
But we've been going south and west for most of the ride, so I turn the car in that direction and set out. Every few minutes, my gaze drifts back to the navigation screen to see if we've gotten signal back, but it remains completely blocked out.
The sun sinks into its cradle, the last few rays dwindling quickly. The road gradually shifts from cement to gravel, the potholes growing larger. Trees press in closer as the gas gauge slips below a quarter of a tank, branches hanging over the road like spindly little arms reaching down from the inky blackness overhead.
"Please don't scratch his car," I whisper as if they're really listening. Out here, maybe they are. We're certainly far enough from civilization for magic to happen. Or to be eaten by a chupacabra.
The car descends into a pothole, the bottom scraping.
