Vegas Aces: The Wide Receiver Complete Series

CHAPTER 5 TRISTAN

I don’t want our trip to the store to end, but like everything else in this life, all good things come to an end.

I shouldn’t have put my arm around her. I shouldn’t have set Tiffany into motion. I have no idea the chain she’s capable of these days, and looking back, it feels like it was a mistake.

I don’t want Tessa finding out about what happened between Tiffany and me after she left. It’s something better left in the past—something that’ll only cause confusion and hurt feelings when it was never supposed to be anything at all. I’m still not entirely convinced it was anything at all.

Besides, I can hardly call reconnecting with the only girl I’ve ever loved a mistake . We laughed together. We sparked a new inside joke about eggs and old people watching game shows. We bonded in a new way, and even after just a few hours, I’m optimistic about what the next couple months might hold for us.

Maybe we’ll leave this place with a renewed friendship. Maybe it’ll turn into more.

And maybe we’ll both find answers to questions we’ve had for far too long.

She sets her eggs and bacon on the belt, and I set mine next to hers. She grabs the checkout divider to place it between her stuff and mine, and I toss it back into the little slot where it goes. “My treat,” I say.

“At least let me grab the expensive stuff if you’re treating.” She adds a pack of cinnamon gum to her little pile, and I chuckle.

“Still chewing the cinnamon?” I ask.

“Old habits die hard.”

The scent of her jasmine wafts up to my nostrils, and I can’t help but think how true those words are. I’m falling right back into them in Fallon Ridge with Tessa Taylor by my side.

Our cashier is some high school kid I don’t know, and he glances up as I tap my card to pay.

“Oh my God. It’s really you,” he murmurs.

“It’s really me,” I tease.

“I knew you were from here, but I didn’t think you made it back very often,” he says, and he’s clearly flustered now that he recognized me.

“I don’t,” I admit. “But I’m here now.”

“I’m a huge fan. I play for Fallon Ridge and Coach is always talking about you. We study film from your games. He shows us the stuff he taught you.”

I laugh. “He does, does he? I might just have to pay him a visit.”

“Our workouts start at six tomorrow in the weight room,” he says, and he slides the receipt into the bag then hands the single bag holding two dozen eggs, three pounds of bacon, and a pack of gum over to me. “I’m sure he’d be happy to see you stop by.”

“I might just do that,” I say. I glance at the kid’s nametag. “Nice meeting you, Landon,” I say.

“You too, Mr. Higgins.”

I offer a smile at his formality, and then Tessa and I walk out to the parking lot. She walks beside me all the way to my truck in the back of the lot, but when I pause to get into my truck, she keeps walking.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

She gives me a strange look. “Uh, walking?”

“You walked here?”

She shrugs. “I needed to get out of the house. I was getting jittery.”

“But it’s like fifteen degrees out here,” I protest. Hell if I’m letting her freeze her ass off for the long three blocks toward home. “Get in.”

Her brows crinkle together. “I wore gloves and a scarf, Mother,” she says petulantly. “I’ll be fine.”

“But doesn’t a drive through town with seat heaters sound much nicer than a frigid walk back home?” I ask.

“You’re taking me on a drive through town?” she asks. She shivers a little as a gust of wind passes through.

“If you get in the damn truck I am. You got some other place to be?”

She hesitates, and I can see the question playing in her mind. I’m not going to answer it until she asks it. I have a few questions of my own, and I’m not ready to ask them, either. So for now we play it safe in the zone where we find ourselves, somewhere halfway between catching up and flirting, all the angst and need still ever present between us as it simmers beneath the surface of this new thing we’re building.

She opens the door and slides into my passenger seat as if no time has passed at all, and I point to the seat heater button before I fire up the engine.

Stone Temple Pilots comes blasting from my speakers as my car connects to my Bluetooth. I turn “Plush” down a little, realizing just a little too late that she caught me.

She glances over at me, and I’m glad it’s dark because I feel heat creeping into my cheeks. I don’t embarrass easily, but we don’t know one another anymore. We’re not where we used to be.

“I thought you weren’t a fan,” she accuses.

I chuckle as I play it off coolly. Our playful argument from days long gone was Pearl Jam versus Stone Temple Pilots. As for myself, I preferred PJ, while Tessa favored the Pilots. In all honesty, though, nineties grunge really was never my scene…until she was plucked from my life unceremoniously and it was one of the few ways I could still maintain a connection to her.

I pull out of the parking lot and turn onto Main Street in the opposite direction from Oak Tree Lane.

“Things change,” I say, and we both feel the weight of those words and how true they are bearing down on us.

“That they do,” she murmurs just loudly enough for me to hear over the music that still plays too loudly as the singer talks about feeling it in a chorus of lyrics that have never made much sense to me but in a song I love all the same.

I drive slowly down Main Street. There’s a little bit of snow on the ground that’s mostly slush, but precipitation is in the forecast, which means our town will be blanketed by it soon enough. We both gaze at the different places we used to frequent…places we haven’t been to in a long, long time. Trees line the median, strings of lights twined around their branches, illuminating the street in the magical way they always did.

One half of me wants to stop in the Pizza Joint or at Fallon Tavern just to see what they look like these days. The other half of me just wants to keep driving with Tessa as my passenger while we listen to STP’s first album. It’s not long before we make it clear across town, and I drive the loop by the elementary school and then the middle school, too, before turning back and driving through town the opposite direction. I think about driving to the east side of town and walking by the scenic overlook that used to mean something to the two of us, but since I forced her into my car rather than brave the elements, it would be silly to take her somewhere tonight where we have to get out of the car.

Instead, I pass by our street and drive toward the high school.

Even though we met when we were in middle school, high school seems to be where I have the most vivid memories of our time together.

You always hear that high school signifies the glory days, and in a lot of ways, that holds true for me. We won a state championship my senior year, and it’s where I knew playing football was what I wanted to do for my future even though I had no idea the path it would take to get there.

In other ways, that whole idea of glory days is a total joke.

When I walked into Fallon Ridge High School, I couldn’t have imagined I’d walk out of it with a full ride scholarship to the University of Illinois where I’d play football all four years.

Those days were great, too…but still not what I’d consider my glory days.

I didn’t have time in college to nurture a relationship, but that didn’t mean I was a monk all four years, either. I had a girlfriend for a while, but when she started pushing for more commitment, I bailed. I blamed the game, blamed my coaches, blamed my teammates…even myself, but I never gave her the truth in that I wasn’t over the girl sitting beside me now.

I wouldn’t even consider my first three years in the league as my glory days . I’ve had my ups and my downs, but somehow, after everything I’ve been through, I still feel like my glory days are ahead of me.

And the longer Tessa Taylor sits quietly in the passenger seat beside me, the more firmly I believe that she will be a part of those days.