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I stop talking when he straightens up from his car.
When he grabs his jacket and rolls his shoulders, his dense thick shoulders, and takes it off. He takes his jacket off as he stares at me, letting it fall on the ground.
Just like that.
“There. It’s gone,” he says, his jacket lying at his feet, his biceps corded and naked in his V-neck light-colored t-shirt. “Are you going to come here so we can go?”
“But you’re cold.”
"I’m fine.”
With parted lips and a heart that won’t stop pounding, I watch the veins on his wrists, on the back of his hand, thick and beautiful. I watch the arms that he uses to pick me up as I practice.
To help me.
I watch them and ask, “What about your practice?”
“What?”
I look at his face then. “It must be brutal now, right? At college level.” His eyes narrow. “Ledger can barely come home these days. He’s always at the gym, always on the field, practicing. He wants to be like Shep. Who got picked in the first round of the draft. You know that, right? That Shep got picked. Stellan would’ve been too but he never wanted to go pro. Not like you.”
His chest is moving up and down, pushing at the fabric of his thin t-shirt. “Get in the car.”
I shake my head, standing my ground. “So is it? Is it brutal? Is your coach riding you hard?”
“Get in the car.”
“You’d easily be picked up in the first round too,” I say and almost lose my courage but I have to keep going. “J-January, right?”
The next breath he takes pushes out the fabric so much that I think it’s going to get torn apart. Reed is going to tear apart his t-shirt in one long breath and God, I can’t stand it.
I can’t stand his agitation. I can’t stand what he did.
What he had to do.
To get me free.
“Are you fucking getting in the car or not?” he growls.
“No.”
“What?”
I shake my head as my eyes sting. “I’m not going with you.”
“You’re not going with me.”
I shake my head again. “No. Not until you tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“What you did,” I say, fisting my dress. “Not until you tell me what you did to save me from your father.”
As expected, the word save triggers him.
It makes him shift on his feet, assume a battle stance, as a thunderous expression crosses his features. “Are we back at that again?”
“Yes.” I swallow. “Tell me. Tell me what you did, Reed.”
He begins to walk toward me then.
Stride over to me.
And as always, I stay put. My legs won’t move.
I watch him, his thighs, rippling, shifting under his jeans, dripping with power. I watch them in all their majestic beauty and my heart twists.
It wrenches and pulses and cries out for him.
When he reaches me, he backs me up.
He crowds me with his body and makes me walk backward, his shoes clashing with my flats, until my spine bumps into something. A tree, rough and edgy.
Like him.
He dips his face toward me, his shoulders hiding the world from my eyes, and I crane my neck up, not wanting to see anything else in this moment anyway.
“What do you know?” he growls.
“Everything.”
His jaw is hard. “Tempest.”
“I made her,” I tell him hastily. “I forced her to tell me. I saw those files in your car last week. Jackson Builders. And so I called her and practically pried it out of her.”
He bends down even more.
Putting his hand on the tree by the side of my neck, he lowers himself over me, his chest still heaving. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? You pry and pry and stick your nose in things that are none of your business.”
My ballerina toes go up and I stretch myself as much as I can to bridge the gap between our heights. “But it is my business. Because you did it for me. To get me free.”
“I told you —”
“You did, didn’t you?” I cut him off because I’m not letting him deter me. “That game. That championship game, that was so important to you, that you needed to win. That was your last, wasn’t it? That was your last game.”
I’m watching his face. I’m watching all the angry, violent things pass through his features and yet I can tell that he’s digging his fingers into the bark.
I can tell that he’s almost clawing at it.
“That’s what you did,” I continue, my neck still tilted toward him. “That’s what you had to do to get me free. You had to give up soccer. You don’t live in New York either, do you? Because your dad asked you to come back. Because you work for him now, at his company. The place where you never wanted to end up at. But you did. Because of me. I stole your car and you had to give up soccer, something that you loved to —”
