To the sky each night
You’re my guiding light
Bridge
That hill will never be the same
Lonely echoes of your name
I won’t ever be the same
I won’t be whole again
Chorus #2
I know you can’t give
Me the answers
But your love burns
In the stars so bright
An eternal flame,
You make me whole once again
When I look to the sky each night
You’re my guiding light
You’re my guiding light
You’re my guiding light
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
When Cory blew his coach’s whistle the next day, Jamie rued not sleeping a few extra hours on a rare free Saturday morning. Yet, there he was, willingly torturing himself with sit-ups.
He dragged his bare torso from the grass, squeezing his fatigued abs and wringing out the last drop of oxygen from his lungs.
“That’s one hundred,” Cory barked, grinning as he leaned over Jamie’s bent knees. “A little slow on the pump, and your speed drills are dogshit. But not bad for an old-timer.”
Cory wailed on the whistle thrice more, the shrill peaks cleaving through Jamie’s heaving breaths. “Let’s go, round two.”
Jamie fell against the turf, the pool of sweat from his forehead stinging his eyes worse than the mid-morning sun bearing down on the practice football field. When Jamie wasn’t on tour, he and Cory worked out together at the Anderson Training Facility, where his friend’s day job was to whip nineteen-year-olds into prime NFL picks.
Between Cory’s masochistic drills and the physical cracksand creaks of no longer being nineteen, it was grueling. But Jamie wouldn’t trade this time with his oldest friend for anything.
Still, that whistle was as pleasant as sand wedged between every crack on a beach day.
“You blow that thing again, and I’m whooping your ass,” Jamie said, once he got his breath back.
Cory outstretched a hand and peeled him from the ground. “I don’t think you could catch me.”
He tossed Jamie an icy water bottle from a cooler before they trudged down the sideline. “C’mon, let’s walk it off.”
Jamie simply nodded, still too winded to function. He drained the bottle in two gulps.
