I giggle at the label. “He’s not a dickwad,” I argue. “He just said he couldn’t do this and walked out. I got your text last night, and I was about to reply in between my sobbing when there was a knock at my door.”
“A knock?” Jackie repeats.
“That sounds positive,” Chip adds.
“Sounds less like wad of dick behavior, I guess,” she agrees. “If it was him. Well, come on, then. Out with it, Monroe.”
I giggle. “Yes, it was him, and he said Cooper told him that since I came all this way to apologize, the least he could do was hear me out. Long story short, I guess on the way over, he realized he basically couldn’t live without me, and we made up.”
Jackie screams. Legitscreams. It’s so loud, in fact, that I pull my phone away from my ear. “You made up?” she asks, her voice all weepy.
“We did. I apologized, he accepted, and we spent the night makin—”
“Don’t say making love,” Chip interrupts.
“I was going to say we spent the night makingup,” I say. “But yeah. That too.”
“After you watched him on the field? What was that like?” Jackie asks, her voice dreamy.
I clear my throat. “Chip, mind your business for a second in the other room.”
“He’s gone,” Jackie says a second later.
“I know he’s not, and he’s just being quiet, but Jackie…holy hell. Wetter than a waterslide if you know what I mean.”
“Jesus Christ,” Chip mutters quietly.
“I told you to leave!” I protest.
They both laugh.
“So then what?” Jackie asks.
I give her the quick summary of everything we talked about and end with, “He said he’d fly me to see you, or fly you to see me, and he’ll do what it takes to make sure I’m not alone.
“If we can’t be together, we still have phone calls, texts, and FaceTime,” she says. “We’ll always be best friends.”
“Always,” I say.
“So it sounds like I should take you off the schedule, then?” Chip asks, and I can’t help a giggle.
“Do you need me to put in two weeks’ notice?”
“You know I got your back, Mills,” he says. “Take care of yourself out there, okay? We’ll miss you like hell, so you better fucking come visit.”
“I promise,” I say.
We hang up, and as I wander around this mansion that’smy homenow, I can’t help but think about how life can throw us curveballs straight out of left field that we never saw coming. I was so sure my dream was to earnthat paid partnership, but when I saw what I had to do to get it, I learned the hard way that some dreams aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
But now I have a brand-new dream, and it seems to me that I’m actuallylivingit. Archer’s right. It won’t always be easy. He’ll be gone a lot of the time, but if we both want this hard enough, and I think we do, we’ll do what we have to in order to make it work.
Maybe I can travel to the cities where he’s playing when the team is on the road. Maybe we can still find blocks of time to spend together. It won’t be traditional, but so much about what we’ve started here isn’t traditional, and maybe that’s just the way it’s meant to be for us.
I open up his laptop and do a little work on the foundations. I make appointments with the people he gave me as resources to start my onboarding. I’m working on getting set up to start my life here.
Archer arranged a car for me to take me to the game, so I head out front when the driver texts me that he's here. This really is not the kind of lifestyle I'm used to. I drive myself everywhere back home, and here I don't have to worry about things like driving somewhere, because it's taken care of for me.
I arrive at the stadium and head to the same suite as last time, where I find Gabby sitting in the bleacher seats watching practice down on the field.
