A somber shadow crosses over his face. “Ava, we talked about this. I’m not going to talk to him. Yet.”
I tilt my head. “Oh, did I hear ayet? That’s progress.”
“Only you would think that’s progress.”
“I’m desperate here, you big grump. Neither of you will talk to each other, even though it’s obvious you both want to—”
“Untrue.”
“Try again. It’s very true. I see it.” I gesture to the whole of my face. “Drake looks like a kicked puppy behind the frown, and you look like someone took your favorite mitt.”
“Glove.”
I roll my eyes. “I will call it a baseball mitt as much as I want.”
“Okay, but remember, you just barely won over a group of MLB players, and if they find out you’re betraying them like this, it won’t go over well. Griffin—who has the true mitt—will be offended.”
“He’s not capable of getting offended.”
“Oh, he is, and he pouts worse than me.” Ryder grins, and I’m pretty sure my insides melt a little. “And the rest of the guys will ban you from the field.”
I laugh and start to stare out the window before I snap back to attention. “Nope, we aren’t done.” Ryder groans like his brilliant plan fell apart. “Don’t think your little baseball tangent distracted me from what we were talking about. I’m trying to tell you that I’m feeling torn. Drake has no idea what’s going on with us, and I sort of feel like I’m lying to him.”
Ryder rests a hand on my knee. “Then tell him. We’re adults who want to be together, and I don’t care what he thinks. I don’t care what he says. You’re mine, Ava.”
Well, well. How deliciously alpha. The feminist in me wants to curl over and die at the idea of being ‘claimed’, but the seductive growl of his voice is overpowering everything. At this point, I’m positive if he tattooed his name on my forehead, I’d be cool with it as long as he keeps talking like that.
Ryder drags his thumb across my knee in small circles. “You’ve always been who I wanted, Tweets. I never could completely let you go. You’re the reason I am where I am.”
“Meaning?”
He hesitates. “When I told you to stay back from Washington, it was partly because . . .”
“Ryder.” I squeeze his hands when he pauses. “You can tell me.”
“I truly believed I needed to be more than I was before I could deserve you. I still don’t think I deserve you.” He laughs. “But back then, I really didn’t think I did.”
“Why? We’d been together for two years at that point.”
His jaw tightens. A tell-tale sign he’s avoiding something. I have every suspicion the fallout with Drake has something to do with it.
“After everything, I convinced myself you could do better,” he says, covering whatever blank space in the story he has yet to tell me. “But when I got to school, I was reeling without you. I made the mistake of reaching out to Mitch.”
The groan slips out involuntarily. “You didn’t. Why?”
He shakes his head. “I think I was desperate to find a new foundation. Mitch still lived in Washington. You can imagine how it went. We were adults, but he still liked to get into my head. It made everythingIwas thinking about me, about us, get worse. I hated the idea of you . . . settling.”
A rush of anger floods my chest. I could go my entire life and never hear about Ryder’s bully of a cousin again.
“Why was it not enough to know what I thought of you?”
“I was spiraling,” he admits. “After everything, it felt like my heart had been burned. You get it, right?”
I nod. I knew the dark places I went; the worries I had, the feelings of inadequacy after we went through the loss we did, then the treatment for my ovarian cancer left me worried if I’d ever get another chance. I’d been depressed, and it had taken a solid year of therapy to help me work through the intensity of my feelings.
“I didn’t do anything but train and study,” Ryder says. “I wanted to get here, to the MLB. In my head, it was the only way I could prove I’d made something of myself.”
My brow furrows. “I would’ve taken you any way you’d have let me.”
