Troy called me the next night. It was late in Arizona, and I knew that meant it was later in North Carolina. I felt a swell of panic rise in my gut as I hit the answer button. “Is everything okay?”
“Check your email.” I could hear the urgency in his tone through the phone line, and I didn’t hesitate.
I put him on speaker phone and pulled up my email on my phone. Milo looked up from the game he was playing on hisphone, one eyebrow raised in curiosity. I shrugged as I found the email Troy had sent me. There were only two words:see attachment. I scrolled past his too long signature and found the attached PDF. I opened it, and my eyes went wide.
It was a contract. “Four years, sixty million?” I asked as I read the details. “Holy fuck, is this right?” It was three million more a year than the contract they’d picked up from the Foxes.
“Look at the bonuses.”
My eyes drifted down to the bonuses. He’d worked in a nice signing bonus, bonuses for different milestones I could reach over the course of a season, bonuses for making the All-Star team. “Holy fuck, Troy, this is—”
“Are you signing?”
“I’m signing. Tell them yes. Now.”
“I’ll book a flight. See you next week at the signing.”
I heard the click that said Troy had disconnected the call, and I looked at Milo. His eyes were wide with happiness and shining with what looked like tears. “You’re staying?”
“I’m staying.”
My husband threw his phone onto the couch and tackled me, kissing me hard on the mouth.
My future was secure.
Notes
Yes, I know in fanfiction I could’ve changed it. I could have made them win and taken them all the way, but let’s be real. We needed to have some touch of reality. The Scorpions making it to playoffs was enough of a miracle, and we got that in real life. Maybe next year,they’ll go further. Until then, I will stick to the reality of my team. Better than getting my hopes up for a championship ring, right?
20
Notes
This is it. The last chapter. It’s basically an epilogue, so it’s short. Sorry about that. And look, it’s only a day late. Why is it a day late, you may be asking yourself. Because I was up late last night. Liam Lowe texted me again, and then I kind of had to spend the next few hours dissecting every moment with one of my best friends and next thing I knew, it was two AM and I had to go to bed for work in the morning. #Priorities.
But it’s only a day late! Improvement in the eleventh hour is still improvement!
Milo
Five Months Later
“Introducing, not for the first time, Mr. Milo Tobitt and Mr. Rowan Rangecroft,” the DJ shouted into the microphone as Rowan and I walked hand-in-hand to the ballroom we’d rented for the celebration of our wedding.
It had been five months since our season ended, five months since I comforted Rowan in a hotel room in Syracuse. It had been five months since he signed a long-term contract with the Scorpions. I’d like to say that a lot had changed in the past five months, but it hadn’t. The biggest change was the contents of my kitchen cabinets, because when Rowan’s sister sent his things after he moved in, we pretty much got rid of all of mine.
His supplies were better quality, and he was the one doing most of the cooking. For some reason, he didn’t trust my cooking. You start one small kitchen fire while making dinner and suddenly, your husband thinks you’re a liability. I think he was using it as an excuse because he’d not trusted my baking since the very first day and my failed attempt at protein cookies.
We’d also spent the past five months planning this day with Aunt Ethel. We tried different cakes at what felt like every bakery in Tucson, and Rowan tracked all of them on an intricate spreadsheet that gave me a headache every time I looked at it. We toured different venues before settling on one of the nicer hotels in town.
We had a small ceremony ahead of the reception, one that we could remember where we pledged our love to one another in front of our friends and family. We’d just finished taking pictures with our families and our best men, Jonesy for me and Troy for Rowan, and were finally on our way into the party we’d spent so long planning. We just had to wait for everyone to be seated and for the DJ to call our names.
Music played as we burst through the double doors.
Our guests were standing and applauding, and my cheeks hurt from smiling. Rowan and I walked to the small table in the front of the room. We’d decided against the whole formal wedding party table since it wasn’t technically a wedding. That and it seemed kind of cruel to separate Troy from Raina and their kids or Jonesy from Liam. Instead, it was just the two of us at the head table while everyone else sat at other tables around us. (Rowan had, once again, used his organizational skills to make a seating chart, and it looked like everything had gone to plan.)
Dinner, speeches, and the cake ended, and we were called onto the dance floor for our first dance.
Rowan and I had argued for over a month over the perfect first dance song before we found some old love song we both liked. He held me close in the middle of the dance floor, his muscular arms wrapped around my waist and my head rested on his broad chest. I breathed in the familiar and comforting scent of leather and wood, and I knew what home felt like. I knew what family was.
