Vegas Aces: The Wide Receiver Complete Series

CHAPTER 3 TESSA

It might just be the beer, but the cheers around me are deafening at the ruling on the field. I join in, though it’s less than half-hearted. Would that be a quarter-hearted? An eighth-hearted?

Everyone around me is toasting, and we’re in the fourth quarter now, so beer splashes over the sides of glasses as we celebrate. They’re all drunk enough that they won’t notice I’m not cheering as loudly as they are. Maybe they won’t notice I’m not as drunk as they are, either.

The pass was intended for number eleven on the Vegas Aces, and instead, some defender on the Bears got it before eleven did.

Eleven.

Chicken legs , as Coach Beatty used to call him. Not because he had skinny legs, but because the one and the one on the back of his uniform looked like chicken legs, I guess.

My Tristan.

I twist the ring I wear on my right-hand ring finger. It’s a simple silver band with the infinity symbol wrapped around it in glittering cubic zirconia—the gem of choice for high school promise rings.

I realize whatever promises were made back when we were sixteen are null and void at this point, yet I like the ring. I never take it off.

I can tell myself all day it’s not because I’m still in love with him, that it’s just because it’s a pretty ring that goes with everything…but I’m only fooling myself with that line of thinking.

He’s playing today through whatever’s going on with his hamstring, and I can’t help but focus on it as I watch the game. Every wince, grimace, and extra second it takes for him to get up once he’s tackled to the ground might mean something else. Whether or not he was going to play today was a game time decision, and I’m sure fantasy team owners everywhere were struggling with whether or not to play him.

Tristan was literally the boy next door. I knew big things were in his future. We all did. It’s not often to find a kid from Fallon Ridge, Iowa, population twenty-six hundred, with so much natural talent, let alone one who makes it all the way to the NFL.

Nobody in this bar knows that I know Tristan Higgins—including Sara.

Nobody knows that he’s responsible for every single one of my firsts. First kiss. First love. First sex. First heartbreak.

When I moved to Chicago, I vowed I wouldn’t tell a soul. The last thing I wanted was for history to follow me here, to relive the painful memories day after day. I do that already, anyway. I don’t need more reminders.

I started a new life for myself—one separate from the one I lived in another lifetime. My parents still live in Fallon Ridge, less than a three-hour drive from where I reside now in Chicago, and I haven’t been back to visit in the six-and-a-half years since I left.

I can’t. It’s too painful.

I talk to my mom a few times a week, but I haven’t spoken to my father since the day he put me in the backseat, shut the door, and stood there as the car drove off.

I can’t even think about my childhood bedroom anymore without a million memories plowing into me. All the nights Tristan and I stayed up too late talking—not on the phone, but through our bedroom windows since they faced each other. When we got a little older, he’d climb out his window and into mine, narrowly avoiding the lilac bushes underneath my window, and we’d lie together on my bed dreaming about our future.

Our future . Not our futures . Neither of us ever imagined we’d be planning separate futures, and then suddenly we were.

The last time I spoke to him was the day I was forced to leave, the last day of school before spring break began. I wasn’t even allowed a goodbye.

I shake out the memories. I’m here to have fun today, not to dwell on the past.

The Bears score on the first play of their drive after that interception that should’ve fallen into Tristan’s hands. Melissa slaps my hand in a high-five. We’re the two single ladies here at the bar watching the game. Across the table from me, Shane dips Sara and plants a kiss on her mouth in celebration.

I sigh as my eyes edge back to the screen.

I’m glad my best friend is happy. Really.

But that doesn’t mean I want to have her happy ending shoved in my face when I don’t even have any prospects on the horizon.

Just as that thought flashes through my brain, the camera pans to Tristan on the bench. It was Jack Dalton who threw the interception, but it was Tristan who missed the catch. He purses his lips angrily and shakes his head that the other team scored off his miss, and then the guy next to him says something as the game cuts to commercial.

A glint of light catches my eye as the door opens and someone walks in. At first I can’t tell who it is from the bright light behind him in this dimly lit sports bar decorated with all things Chicago sports teams, but when the door shuts and the brightness dissipates, I can more clearly make out his lean form and the dark hair that is always perfectly groomed and the ice blue eyes that fall onto me with indignation most of the time.

My heart sinks.

Why would Cam show up here?

I glance around, and granted, the bar is full of colleagues. The husband and wife team who started our practice sit a few tables away. It was their idea to have a weekly reservation at the bar a few blocks from our office for teambuilding during football season…and then baseball season was added on, too. And basketball, and hockey. We meet every Sunday, actually, and almost everyone from the office shows up from the physician’s assistants to nurses to the medical technicians to the front office staff. Even our child psychologist is here today.

Cam is new. He’s only been with us a couple weeks, and in those couple weeks, he’s never shown up to Teambuilding Sunday.

But he’s here today, and my heart starts racing because I’m a little tipsy after a couple drinks and I don’t know how to deal with this guy on a normal day-to-day basis let alone when my filter has been misplaced by beer.

I don’t even work with him. My provider is Paul, half of the team who owns the practice, and yet somehow I keep ending up as Cam’s punching bag.

He seems nice to everyone else…but he’s got something against me, I guess. He gives wide smiles to patients’ moms. He harmlessly flirts with the other nurses at the office.

I haven’t said anything to Paul. Sometimes I think it’s just my imagination, so I let the little things go.

So he demands a cup of coffee or he throws charts in my direction a little aggressively or he’s condescending because he doesn’t see us as colleagues but rather as my superior. So he’s taken to calling me nurse in that snide tone of his instead of my actual name just to be rude.

These are dumb little things I can move past.

What I can’t move past, however, is him doing any of this in front of the people who are like family to me here at Teambuilding Sunday. This is our break, our getaway, our retreat together. The one hard and fast rule is no office talk.

And somehow it seems like Cam is going to break that rule.

He glances around, surveying the tables and who’s here, and then his eyes slide to mine.

I hold his gaze confidently, refusing to be the one to back down first, and a glimmer of something passes through his eyes and his eyebrow twitches before he looks away.

I’ve taken enough psychology courses in my lifetime to know that the fact that he looked away first means I might make him uncomfortable.

Is that why he’s such a dick?

Maybe an afternoon at the bar is exactly what we need to knock down whatever wall is between us.

Sara looks toward the door and sees Cam standing there, and she looks over at me. She widens her eyes meaningfully in the way that says oh shit what the hell is he doing here without any words at all. She’s the only one I’ve mentioned his behavior to.

I roll my eyes back at her, and she laughs. Paul sees Cam at that moment, and he waves him over.

A pulse of disappointment throbs in my chest.

I’m a little surprised at it as I realize a tiny part of me was hoping he’d come over and start flirting with me. What if he’s a jerk to me because he’s attracted to me the way I am to him? We work together, and it would certainly be complicated, but it’s not like I have a hundred other prospects banging down my door.

It’s my own fault. I’ve tried, but I always back out because even after all these years, I’m still broken over what happened.

But I can’t keep pining away for the boy who holds my heart. Tristan is in Vegas living his dream. He’s married now. He’s part of my past, and it’s time to move forward. He sure did…but he doesn’t even fully know what he moved on from .

I think about calling him and telling him all the time, but no good will come of it. It’s buried in the past, and as has been drilled into me, that’s where it should stay.

It doesn’t matter that it changed who I am as a person. What’s done is done, and it’s more than time to move on.

Maybe a little beer and some flirting with the newest doc on the block will help push me in that direction.

Or maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow with regrets.

I won’t know unless I give it a try.