Vegas Aces: The Wide Receiver Complete Series

CHAPTER 3 TRISTAN

I hear the garage door start to open, which means either my mom or my dad is home. While I don’t want to cut short this reunion with Tessa, I have to. My parents are a huge part of the reason I came home, and I wasn’t expecting the surprise next door.

She’s here.

Open ended.

There’s a lot standing between us, but there’s also a chance that we just might be able to reconnect. If nothing else, maybe I’ll get some answers about the mysteries of our past, but I already feel it after this first conversation with her. I can see us easily falling back into old habits, except this time with guards up.

I can’t fall for her again only to have my heart ripped out in the end when she disappears on me again.

I’m not sure I’m strong enough to handle that twice in one lifetime.

“Someone’s home,” I say quietly.

She nods. “I should get back to my mom, too. I was supposed to be unpacking.”

My mouth lifts in a smile. “You’re not unpacked already?” I remember her penchant for having her bags unpacked twelve seconds after she walked in the door—usually I climbed into her window and sat on her bed while she busied herself with her tasks and I watched her flutter around her room. I’d wait patiently for her to finish, or im patiently, and when she was done, she’d straddle my lap and kiss me. Sometimes that led to more.

Usually that led to more.

Those days were so simple.

The Taylors didn’t take a lot of vacations since Mr. Taylor’s busy day at work was Sunday, but occasionally they took the three hour drive up to Wisconsin Dells for a couple nights during the summer, and I remember how I missed her with a vicious ferocity. Her dad wouldn’t let her have a phone, so when they were out of town, that meant I had no contact with her while she was gone. Once in a while she’d sneak her mom’s phone when her dad was busy and she’d call my mom’s phone to say hello.

I lived for those phone calls back then.

She glances over at her bed as if the memory of unpacking in front of me just creeped up on her. She smiles back at me. “Not yet, but I didn’t have my usual motivation.” She shoots me a wink, and I laugh as she stands. I do, too.

“Well maybe I can stop by later to, you know, help motivate you.” It’s forward, but the flirting feels light and fun. Like old times. I raise a brow and offer my slyest smile.

She starts to smile, like she wants to flirt back, but then something seems to shift as her expression slips and her smile fades as if some thought plowed into her telling her that would be a bad idea. “Um, anyway…I’ll talk to you later.” She hurries out of her room, and I’m left to wonder what I said that caused her to run.

I head out to the kitchen and find my dad staring into the refrigerator. “Hey, old man,” I say, and he jumps, startled.

We both laugh.

My dad is nearing retirement age, but he loves his job with the same sort of passion I’ve found in mine. As a carpenter who creates furniture from blocks of wood, his life’s work is creating something out of nothing. From the dresser in my bedroom to the coffee table in the living room, he’s built most of the furniture in our home as well as the homes of our neighbors.

The local Pizza Joint contracted him to create custom booths and tables for their restaurant when they opened nearly thirty years ago, and that’s what made him a name in the community. He’s always worked for a manufacturing company based near Davenport, and I always wondered why he didn’t go into business for himself.

My mother also creates beauty in her line of work as a hairstylist. She loves what she does, too, and she shares a space with a few other ladies in town who specialize in different aspects of beauty from manicures and pedicures to waxing and scrubs and massages. For a town of our size, their spa is nearly always packed full of clients, and my mom brags about how much she loves what she does.

So how did two creative people like Russell and Sue Higgins end up with a boy who plays football for a living?

I wanted to create my own mark to leave on the world. My dad taught me a lot about woodworking, and while it’s definitely something I enjoy doing with him in my free time, it’s not my passion the way competition and winning are.

“Get over here, kiddo,” he says, and he pulls me into a hug.

“How are you feeling?” I ask. The surgery was successful, and the doctor did a dose of radiation before closing him up. We’ve talked every day, and he mentioned the doctors don’t think he’ll need more radiation.

“Pretty damn good all things considered.” He shrugs. “Immediately after the surgery was rough, as you know, but we’re a month out now and everything’s going about as good as it could.”

“That’s fantastic news,” I say, giving him a light clap on the back.

“I’ve been keeping busy to keep my mind off things. Want to see?” He nods toward the garage, and I follow him out.

The garage has been completely transformed into a woodworking studio. It doesn’t even look like the garage I used to know—the one with exposed two-by-fours instead of drywall, the one with pipes running across the ceiling instead of an actual ceiling. It’s a totally new space. The air is warm in here despite the freezing conditions outside on this February evening, and my eyes fall onto a small space heater.

One side of the garage has a huge workbench completely customized to fit every tool, bit, fastener, and piece of hardware in existence. The other side of the garage has a project table. Currently sitting on top of it is a large wooden project made of different panels with the Vegas Aces logo carved into it. It’s partially painted, and black and red paint cans sit beside it as if it’s waiting for the next step.

“Your mom has always enjoyed painting, so we’ve been working on a lot of custom décor together. Last week we sold a set of Adirondack chairs with the Bears logo to the Hamiltons.”

“These are incredible,” I say, studying wooden footballs he’s working on with different team logos carved on top and names carved on the bottom. Projects fill what used to be a two-car garage, from smaller décor like the footballs to larger projects like cornhole boards. It’s clear as I look around the garage that he’s running out of space.

“Have you thought about finding a bigger space?” I ask.

He glances around. “Nah. These are just my side projects.”

“Yeah, but Dad, it’s packed in here. You hardly have room to turn around, let alone create more,” I point out.

“I’ll move this stuff out soon. I’m just a little behind because of the surgery.”

“I can help while I’m here,” I say, and an idea starts to form. Knock out a wall there, build an extension…it shouldn’t be that hard given what I know about woodworking and building.

Besides, I was sort of hoping to turn the garage into my own personal home gym while I’m here. I had no idea he’d turned the entire thing into his workshop.

I offer up the idea and disguise it as wanting it for myself since I know how presenting it as something for him will garner an immediate no . “What if we knock out this wall and build an extension? I was hoping to put a treadmill and some weights in here while I’m home. Would that be okay?” And then when I head back to camp, you can keep the equipment and use the extension for your side projects.

I leave out that last sentence.

He studies the wall I’m referring to. The extension would take up some of the backyard, but it wouldn’t have much effect on the usable backyard space. In fact, we could add on a fairly sizable extension without it really affecting the use of the backyard at all.

“We’d need a permit to do something like that,” he says, stroking his chin as he thinks about the possibilities. “But Hank is the one who approves them, and he’d speed up the process for me.” Hank is one of my dad’s golf buddies, the third man in the foursome that used to include Bill Taylor as well.

I nod. “Let’s sketch up a design and get it moving.”

“How big you thinking?” he asks.

We both look at the wall, and then we use the back door and head out to the yard. I glance over at the house and walk over to where the house ends. “You could go parallel with the house and take it out to here,” I say, pointing.

“That would be nearly two hundred fifty square feet,” he says, raising his brows with a quick estimate.

I lift a shoulder. “Should be plenty of space, though the weight room I’m used to at the Complex is over nine thousand square feet.”

He laughs. “Then go back to Vegas, kiddo.”

My chin dips as I cringe. “Two fifty sounds just fine.”

“Hey, is it that bad in Vegas?” he asks.

I stare down at the ground. “I love Vegas. I love the Aces. I love my job. I love everything about my life there…I just can’t stand my wife.”

“She’s biding her time for May fourth,” he says flatly, and I nod.

May fourth is the deadline for teams to accept or decline the fifth-year option for players who just finished the third season of their rookie contract, and if the Aces choose to keep me, I’ll be guaranteed a one-year contract worth nearly seventeen million dollars. It’s rumored they’ll keep me, and it’s further rumored I’ll know well before the May fourth deadline.

Still…seventeen million is quite the raise from the four million dollar deal I signed my rookie season—plus my signing bonus and roster bonus, which in the end totaled a little over nineteen million over four years. Considering half of that is taken for fees, taxes, and by Jimmy, my agent, among other shit players have to pay for…well, the money dwindles quickly.

I’m lucky that I found Jimmy when I did. He takes good care of me, and I took his sound advice to pack my money away until I get my real payday to heart. That’s why I rent my house in Vegas. It’s why I don’t have a collection of fancy vehicles—just the one truck. It’s why I’m staying at my parents’ house over the summer.

And it’s why I have the money to pay for things like an extension on my parents’ house…or my dad’s medical bills, something I haven’t mentioned to him yet but that I’m planning to tackle while I’m here at home.

But it’s also why Savannah is sticking around the way she is. She can pretend to care about me all she wants, but if May fourth comes around and the Aces decline my fifth-year option, my guess is she’ll scamper off in search of another victim fairly quickly.

Which is why I have such mixed feelings about actually getting that fifth-year contract. I want it, of course. I love my organization and I love my job. But getting that deal means fighting harder to get rid of Savannah, and after everything she’s done to suck the life out of me…I’m just not sure I have that big of a fight left in me.