“I could have given you my jacket,” the poor, poor dad beside me piped in, breaking my trance of love.
Dallas’s attention instantly moved toward the man, and as the words “She’s fine” came out of his mouth, he turned that tall, muscular body and parked himself in the tight space between both of us. He didn’t fit. Not at all. His elbow pretty much landed on my lap and most of his thigh and calf were pressed and aligned to my matching body parts.
I shifted to my left an inch and the length of his leg followed me, his elbow staying exactly where it was.
What the hell was happening?
“How’s it going, Kev?” Dallas asked the dad, still smothering me but somehow his attention elsewhere.
Hmm. Shoving my hands into the pockets of his jacket, the back of my left hand hit something crumpled. Paper. Making sure he wasn’t looking at me, I pulled what I figured were balled-up receipts out, being nosey and wondering what the hell he’d bought.
But it wasn’t recycled white paper I pulled out.
They looked like Post-it notes. Plain, yellow Post-it notes like I’d seen in his truck. That just made me more curious.
Both men were talking as I started opening the notes as quietly as possible, really not caring if he caught me in the act by that point. But he didn’t turn to look at me. He was too busy talking about who he thought the Texas Rebels were going to try and recruit next season.
The ball of paper was really two square-shaped notes stacked together.
I read one and then I read the other.
Then I went back and read the top one and followed it up by reading the bottom one.
I did it a third time. And then I balled them back up and stuffed them where I’d found them.
I didn’t need to look at them again to remember what was on each.
The first one, in small, neat handwriting that was crossed out with hard dashes across the letters, like he’d changed his mind, had said: YOU ARE THE LIGHT OF MY LIFE.
The second one… I sucked in a breath through my nose and made sure not to glance at Dallas even out of the corner of my eye.
It was the second one that had me feeling like a twitchy crackhead. The words hadn’t been crossed out like the first one, and there was a smudge on the corner of the Post-it that went straight to my heart. It was a smudge like the ones I always spotted on his neck and arms.
I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT YOU.
I can’t live without you.
The first time I read it, I wondered who the hell he couldn’t live without. But I wasn’t that stupid and na?ve, even though my insides felt like they were on the verge of exploding.
He wasn’t… there was no way….
What exactly was it that I had told him and Trip in my kitchen during Josh’s sleepover what felt like forever ago?
“Tia!”
I sat up and looked around, recognizing Louie’s voice instantly. Dallas must have too, because he shot to his feet and scanned the area. But I found the blond head instantly; beside him was Josh. It was the woman in front of them that had me zeroing in like an eagle on the hunt for an innocent mouse for breakfast. Of all the women it could have been, it was Christy.
Fucking Christy.
The notes forgotten for now, I swiped my bag off the bleacher and left the rest of my shit where it was, that second of hesitation giving Dallas a head start on the route toward the boys. He made it before I did, and that was when I noticed that Josh had his arm around his brother’s shoulder. The last time he’d made that kind of protective gesture had been at Rodrigo’s funeral.
Which meant someone was about to die because Josh and Louie should never feel threatened by anything.
“What happened?” Dallas asked immediately, his hand reaching out toward Louie. I didn’t miss how Lou took his hand instantly.
“She called me a brat,” Louie blurted out, his other little hand coming up to meet with the one already clutching our neighbor’s.
I blinked and told myself I was not going to look at Christy until I had the full story.
“Why?” Dallas was the one who asked.
“He spilled some of his hot chocolate on her purse,” it was Josh who explained. “He said sorry, but she called him a brat. I told her not to talk to my brother like that, and she told me I should have learned to respect my elders.”
For the second time around this woman, I went to ten. Straight through ten, past Go, and collected two hundred dollars.
“I tried to wipe it up,” Louie offered, those big blue eyes going back and forth between Dallas and me for support.
“You should teach these boys to watch where they’re going,” Christy piped up, taking a step back.
Be an adult. Be a role model, I tried telling myself. “It was an accident,” I choked out. “He said he was sorry… and your purse is leather and black, and it’ll be fine,” I managed to grind out like this whole thirty-second conversation was jabbing me in the kidneys with sharp knives.
“I’d like an apology,” the woman, who had gotten me suspended and made me cry, added quickly.
I stared at her long face. “For what?”
“From Josh, for being so rude.”
My hand started moving around the outside of my purse, trying to find the inner compartment when Louie suddenly yelled, “Mr. Dallas, don’t let her get her pepper spray!”
The fuck?
Oh my God. I glared at Louie. “I was looking for a baby wipe to offer her one, Lou. I wasn’t getting my pepper spray.”
“Nuh-uh,” he argued, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Christy take a step back. “I heard you on the phone with Vanny. You said, you said if she made you mad again you were gonna pepper spray her and her mom and her mom’s mom in the—”
“Holy sh—oot, Louie!” My face went red, and I opened my mouth to argue that he hadn’t heard me correctly. But… I had said those words. They had been a joke, but I’d said them. I glanced at Dallas, the serious, easygoing man who happened to look in that instant like he was holding back a fart but was hopefully just a laugh, and finally peeked at the woman who I’d like to think brought this upon herself. “Christy, I would never do that—”
The pain in my ass had some balls to her because, even though she had one foot set to the side like she was prepared to take off, she still managed to clear her throat and bring her attention to Dallas, her mouth pursed. “Dallas, I feel like that’s grounds for kicking them off the team. It isn’t sportsmanlike.”
“Neither is making someone cry, and we already addressed that, didn’t we, Christy?” he replied to her in that cool voice that now had me imagining him in his dress whites. “Drop it. It was an accident, he apologized, and we can move on from this.”
She blinked so fast, it was like she was fluttering her eyelashes. Seeing her up close again, Christy wasn’t ugly. She had to be in her mid-thirties, she was in good shape, and when she wasn’t making ugly faces, she wouldn’t be horrible to look at. A memory from the tryout nudged at my brain… had those moms said something about Christy liking Dallas?
“Drop it?” she asked in a squeaky voice.
“Drop it,” he confirmed.