“Thanks.” I probably would have liked the teal color a lot more than I did, in any other circumstance, but I was so pissed and disheartened, I couldn’t find it in me to care my hair was now like something straight out of Candyland.
“You all right?” he asked, moving to take a seat on the edge of my bed just a couple feet away from where I was kneeling.
Reluctantly, I kicked my luggage the rest of the way under the bed frame and got to my feet. “Yeah.”
“You sure?”
Shit. “You heard all that, huh?”
“I heard,” he confirmed with a blink of those wonderful blue eyes.
Of course he had. I’d been pretty much yelling toward the end. “He gets on my nerves so easily sometimes, I don’t understand.” I took a seat right next to him with a sigh.
“I know.”
“He doesn’t care about anyone but himself.”
“I know.”
“Then he gets mad when someone is disappointed in him,” I grumbled at the floor.
“I know,” Zac agreed again.
“I didn’t beg him to go with me. I just mentioned it. I would have been fine if he’d said he was too busy.”
“I know.”
“Why is he such a pain in the ass?”
In my peripheral vision, Zac held out his hands. “The world will never know, darlin’.”
I snorted and shifted my gaze over to him finally. “No, probably not.” I nudged his elbow. “You wouldn’t have backed out on me, would you?”
“No way.” He nudged me back with his thigh, drawing my attention down to the reindeer print pajamas he had on. “Bad trip home?”
I hadn’t told him much about my family situation in the time we’d known each other. Besides a few casual mentions of how I wasn’t close to my mom, how much of a pain in the ass my sisters were, and possibly bringing up my foster parents in passing once or twice, I’d never gone into too much detail with Zac. But he knew enough.
Drawing my gaze up, it settled on the stubble he’d let himself grow out over the course of some time; he usually shaved that baby face every day. Light blue circles were nestled under his eyes and his cheeks looked hollower than they had two weeks ago, making me feel like a self-centered asshole. Some people had real things to worry about, and here I was losing it over people who didn’t care about me.
“Yes.” That was an understatement. I shook my head, bottling up the argument with Susie and her husband for the time being. “It sucked. A lot.”
Zac fed me a pity smile that I ate up. “Why do you think I haven’t gone back home?”
Ahh, hell. “I hear ya.” Tilting my head to look at him, I took him in. “I’ve been worried about you, you know.”
He made a dismissive noise in his throat. “I’ll be fine.”
How many times had I not said those exact same words to myself when it felt like the world was falling apart on me? Reaching over, I put my hand on his thigh. “Of course you’re going to be, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to worry or wonder what you’re going to do.”
That sandy head dropped back and his sigh seemed to fill my room. “I don’t fucking know, Vanny,” he admitted to me in a tired voice. “I have no idea what I’m going to do.”
Maybe I couldn’t fix the situations with Aiden, my sister, and Diana, but I could try to help Zac as much as possible now that he finally wanted to talk about it. “Do you still want to play?”
He chuffed. “Of course.”
That was easy enough. “Then you know what you’re going to do. You’re going to start training again, and you’re going to get your agent to find you another team to join. Maybe not this season, but at least next. No if, ands, or buts about it. Don’t give yourself another option,” I told him. “What about that?”
Zac’s sock-covered toes tapped against the floor and the sound of his steady puffing told me he was there. His hand came to rest over mine and I elongated my fingers upward to link through his.
“Maybe things won’t work out, but maybe they will. You’ll never know unless you try, and if you don’t try, you’ll probably end up an old geezer wondering what would have happened if you hadn’t given up,” I warned him before letting go of his hand and reaching around to give him a one-armed hug.
That had him snickering.
“You’re okay on money?” I wasn’t rich by some standards, but I had my savings still, and I was proud of how much I’d set aside all on my own.
“I’m okay,” he assured me.
I figured he was. He wasn’t extravagant. “If you decide to stay, I’ll even let you run this marathon in February with me if you’re a good boy,” I added, pulling him into my side for another side hug.
His back stiffened. “You’re going to run a marathon?”
“Why do you think I’ve been running?”
“Because you’re bored?”
I’d done more research on the training process that was suggested for people running their first marathon, and I couldn’t see anyone doing it because they were bored. “No. I just want to do it. I haven’t had time to train for one before, and I like the idea of it being a challenge.” Plus, I wanted to prove something to myself. Do something for my poor knee. I wanted to remind it that it could do whatever it wanted to. That it wasn’t anyone’s bitch.
I wanted to know that nothing was impossible and give my sister a big fuck you for what she had done to me.
I leaned into his side and let out a shaky breath, suddenly feeling overwhelmed over the entire weekend. “Are you in or what?”
The long Texan let out a deep sigh.
“What? You’re going to be a loser and back out?”
His face angled slightly toward me. The corner of his mouth hooking up. “What do I get out of it?”
“The same thing I do—personal satisfaction that you did something you couldn’t do before.”
The smile that came across Zac’s face wiped out any lingering resentment I had right then over Aiden’s behavior, at least. Those blue eyes twinkled and he radiated something awesome. “You are just a ray of sunshine, aren’t you, darlin’? Do something you couldn’t do before. Well, fuck it. Count me in to this trial of terror.”
Yeah, I might have squealed, surprised he’d actually taken up my offer. “Really?”
“Yes, really.” Just like that, his smile drooped a little. “How many miles is a marathon again?”
I winced, not wanting to kill our agreement before it even got started. “You don’t want to know, Zac.” Sliding my arm off, I gave the middle of his back a solid pat. “You don’t want to know.”
“Fuck me, huh?”
“Basically.”
He grinned and I grinned right back at him.
“Are you going to be okay?”
I nodded. “I’m always going to be okay.”
* * *
An hour or two later, I was lying in bed with one of my favorite movies on, the volume on ultra-low—I had the captions on—when three soft knocks tapped on my door.
Three. It was Aiden.
After a moment, three more low, low, low knocks hit the door.
I kept my mouth shut and went right on watching Independence Day.
He could take his real wife and shove her up his ass.
Chapter Sixteen
“You’re up early,” I noted dryly as Zac dragged his feet behind him into the kitchen.
The big Texan raised two sleepy eyebrows in my direction. If I didn’t know any better, the expression on his face would lead me to think he was drunk, but he was just really tired. “Mm-hmm.”
Okay. Someone wasn’t in the mood to talk, and that was fine by me. It wasn’t like I’d woken up in a fantastic state of mind. It didn’t help that the first thing I did after I was awake was call Diana’s brother so I could tell him about what I’d seen the day before, only for him to let me know that one of his sons had already told him about them a couple days ago.
“I tried talking to her, but she said she hit her hip,” he’d explained.
So she was keeping her story straight; I still didn’t believe it. “I don’t believe her.”