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“Hmm.”
“Everything we said last night—this morning, whatever—it still stands, right?”
I turn around in his arms. His eyes are bright as he looks down at me, but I don’t miss the slight furrow in his brow or the nervous tick of his jaw. “Yes.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
Maverick keeps his expression perfectly straight. “So…are you my girlfriend?”
There are a lot of unknowns in my life right now, but I’m grateful for this to no longer be one of them. “Only if you’re my boyfriend.”
A grin explodes across his face. He picks me up, spinning me in a circle as I clutch his shoulders and laugh. “Fuckingfinally.”
A split second after he places me back on my feet, I’m in his space, grabbing the back of his neck and covering his mouth with mine.
And for the next several hours, Maverick is all I think about.
Chapter Thirty
Maverick
Thisisadream.
I had reached a point of grudging acceptance when it came to Azalea. No matter what I promised my mom, I didn’treallythink things would work out. I fully expected to spend my life watching from afar as Azalea built hers with someone else. Before Chicago, I envisioned myself as her kids’ fun uncle, showing up to all the birthday parties with the coolest gifts, putting on a brave face and trying not to stare at their mother before going home to the empty mansion my Major League salary would have bought me.
After, when we weren’t speaking, I thought maybe I’d have to watch her life unfold through sporadic social media posts and news from Callie. That was the bleakest possibility of all.
Now that I have her, I can’t believe what I had been willing to accept.
This is a dream,I think every time I wake up to find her in my bed.
This isn’t real,I tell myself as we walk across campus holding hands.
I don’t deserve you,I almost blurt out every time she tells me she loves me, catching myself just in time to say it back.
Being able to tell her I love her out loud and watching her eyes light up afterward…the feeling is unbelievable.
But beneath it all is an undercurrent of unease. All these years of push and pull, watching her be with someone else, almost losing her altogether… it’s hard for me to believe that the painful part is over. I worry about something else going wrong. Some other obstacle being thrown in our way, ready to break us apart.
I don’t know how I would survive losing her now.
TheweekbeforeThanksgivingbreak begins, I have a mandatory meeting with my advisor, a thirty-something business management professor named Bryan who has always regarded me with mild distaste. Every meeting is the same: I sit awkwardly in a chair across from his desk while he scrolls through my transcript on his computer and sighs a lot.
“Okay,” he says eventually. “Youcangraduate in May as planned.”
It sounds like there’s an asterisk next tocan. “That’s what I’d like to do.”
Bryan grabs a sticky note and starts jotting things down. “You’re missing three electives, the analytics class, and the strategy class. Plus the communication class you’re going to fail when grades go final. That’s eighteen hours you would need to take in the spring.”
I feel myself flush at the reminder of my recent performance. Internally, I begin to panic. The electives should be okay, but the others are going to be tough. “I have one more major assignment in the class I’m failing.”
Bryan flicks his eyes at me skeptically. “Have you run the numbers on what grade you’ll need to pass?”
“Eighty-nine.”
He looks at me for two long seconds as the old-fashioned clock in the office ticks loudly. “Let’s plan on registering for it again in the spring.” He raises his eyebrows at me. “Unless you’d like to try for a fall graduation instead. Don’t forget that you also haven’t done an internship and that will put you at a disadvantage when looking for jobs.”
