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Charlotte buried her face in the pillow to hide her grin. “When you told me that ...” Her voice trailed off, and she shivered slightly.
“What?”
She sneaked a quick kiss, pulling back before I could deepen it. “Hot. Very hot.”
“Yeah?” I tugged her closer with a hand low on her back. “Wanna show me?”
Charlotte laughed. “I’m too tired to show you anything right now. I hope you’re okay with driving tomorrow because I’m sleeping the entire way back.”
We lay quietly for a few minutes. Not sharing a bed had been smart for all those weeks. Distance had allowed for a certain amount of clearheadedness. There was no distance between us now, and it was shocking how quickly infatuation and attraction could grow into something more permanent. Something life altering.
“Tansy wasn’t really mad at you, was she?” she asked sleepily.
“Nah. Once the surprise wore off, she enjoyed the sight of his bloodied nose about as much as I did.” My hand curled over her hip, and she inched closer. “She left him after that.”
She blinked her eyes open and studied my face. “That must have been hard.”
“It was. But I promised her I’d always take care of her and the kids. That’s why I kept playing.”
“You mentioned that yesterday. It’s hard to wrap my head around,” she admitted.
I let out a slow sigh. “I’ve never really loved it. Some days I enjoyed it more than others. Chris helped me with that. I loved the guys I played with. But I lost a lot to that game. I sacrificed a lot—some of it good. Some of it not. When I hurt my knee, I was ... relieved.”
Disbelief had her brow furrowing. “Really?”
“Chris was the only person who knew that,” I admitted quietly. “The last time we talked on the phone was a couple of weeks before—” My throat tightened. “Before.”
She pulled my fingers up to her mouth and kissed my knuckles, clutching my hand to her chest while I kept talking. The words were just there. I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know what had changed in my head to allow them out.
My dad had never seen it. He’d just pushed me to be better and work harder and give everything to this one area of my life.
My ex-wife had never seen it either. All she’d seen was a single-minded focus on something that always put our relationship second. Put her—what she wanted out of life—second.
Even Tansy hadn’t.
And, for some reason, I wanted to know that there was someone else who could understand this about me. Charlotte’s presence in my life might be fleeting, but I’d always have this. I’d have parts of her story, and she’d have some of mine.
She’d given me so much of herself, and I didn’t want to reach the end of our time together with her feeling like I hadn’t met her in the middle.
“It was never my dream,” I told her. “It was his, and I just ... kept going because I was good.”
Her eyebrows bent in a concerned V. “That makes me sad for you,” she admitted.
I kissed her forehead. “Don’t feel too bad,” I told her. “They did pay me a lot.”
She laughed. “I know, but ... didn’t anyone ask you what you wanted?”
The irony was so thick, I could’ve choked on it.
That was the entire foundation of my problem. With everything.
I’d worked so hard for everyone else my entire life. I wasn’t even sure how to untangle what I wanted in the midst of that.
What I wanted—what I was willing to sacrifice as a result—was the thing that kept my life in a holding pattern.
Instead of taking the subject any further, I kissed her slow and sweet.
“There’s this redhead in my life who can’tstopasking me what I want,” I whispered. The redhead in question grinned. “And she’s very tired.”
