Vegas Aces: The Wide Receiver Complete Series

CHAPTER 19 TESSA

“So what did you do?” he asks. He’s laughing, and I can’t help but giggle, too.

“I just said as politely as I could that it was nice visiting with her but that I had to run to the market to pick up a few things. She was about to offer to go with me when I added that I had a few other errands to do and was meeting with another friend.”

“You lied?” he asks, his voice mockingly incredulous.

I shake my head and hold my hands up innocently. “I’m meeting with you right now, aren’t I? I didn’t say what time I was meeting my friend.”

“A friend, huh?” he asks, trying the word on for size. “Is that what I am?” His voice is low and suggestive when he asks.

“I’m not sure,” I murmur. He’s more than a friend, but he’s less than what he used to be. I change the subject in some attempt to cool the heat pulsing between us. “But she’s not a friend, that’s for sure.”

“So you’ve met her once, she friended you all over social media, and she showed up today acting like you’re best friends?” he asks.

I nod, my brows furrowing. “She asked me about you. If you and I are back together.”

“What did you tell her?” he asks.

“That we’re just old friends reconnecting.”

“There’s that word again. Friend .” He glances away from me.

“What would you have preferred I call you?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know, but spending all this time with you…I suspect we’ll get there.”

I think we could get there if I was being honest, but the more time that passes and the longer I keep my secret, the scarier it is to confess it…and the harder it’ll be for him to hear it.

Not just the secrets of the past, what’s going on right now, too. The little girl currently kicking my bladder whose impending arrival is a mere seventeen weeks away.

“Maybe she’s interested in you ,” I suggest. “Maybe she’s using me because she knows I know you.”

“I’m sorry if that’s what it is.” He sighs, and the heaviness in it suggests he’s dealt with this sort of thing before. “Wouldn’t be the first time my connections were used to get to me.”

I raise my brows. “Oh?”

“My dad said he’s been hit up a few times via his company for game tickets. My mom told me she has clients offering up their single daughters.” He lifts a modest shoulder. “Things like that.”

I chuckle as I think of Sue Higgins fending off her small town clients in defense of her son. “You’re a hot commodity, Mr. Higgins.” I play with the frayed edge of the blanket I have covering my legs and my stomach, my eyes down on that as I speak my thoughts aloud. “I want to say that’s all it is with Stephanie, but I don’t know.”

“What are you thinking?” he asks, his voice quiet.

I glance up at him. “I don’t know. She made me feel uncomfortable. She said something about how I’m different than her and the half-brother I met at the funeral because I got to grow up with him while they didn’t.” I’m about to add more—to add how it wasn’t all sunshine and roses, how strict he was and how hard it was growing up as a preacher’s daughter and how he forced me to do heinous things I didn’t want to do that affected the outcome of my entire life.

I leave all that out, though.

“Well…not to state the obvious, but that does make you different. Why do you think he chose you and your mom?” he asks.

“My hunch tells me it’s because he married my mom first. I’m the oldest of all these half-siblings I have now. My mom wasn’t able to have more children after me, and he wanted a big family with lots of kids. He couldn’t have that with her, so he found it elsewhere.” I shrug.

“He didn’t really find the family component elsewhere,” he points out. “Not if you weren’t all together.”

“No, you’re right. And looking back, I think he punished me for my mom not being able to have more kids…and for his own sins.” I pull a thread from the blanket, and it just unravels the next row of thread.

“How?” he asks, and there’s a desperate quality to his voice that makes me think he knows what I’m talking about. It would be impossible for him to know exactly what I mean, but he might be venturing his own guess in his mind.

“Lots of different ways,” I mutter.

“Was it hard?” he asks. He clears his throat. “Losing him, I mean.”

I nod as I glance over at him. Our eyes lock. “Yes. Of course. We were basically estranged, but he was still my dad.”

He twists his lips and looks away from me, and when he looks back, his eyes are filled with pain. “My dad is sick,” he says quietly. “It’s part of why I came home for the summer…to spend time with him.”

“Oh, Tristan,” I say softly. I know how close they are. “I had no idea.”

He presses his lips together. “He told me on my favorite golf course in Vegas. Like I’ll ever be able to play there again.”

“How bad is it?”

“It’s metastatic melanoma.” His voice is a little robotic as he says the words, almost as if he hasn’t allowed himself to really feel the words at all. “He had surgery back in January to remove it and it sounds like they got most of it. The five-year survival rate is sixty-five percent, so right now he’s in the range with the majority.”

“That’s great news,” I say.

He nods, his eyes down on the hem of his sweatshirt. “It’s just…terrifying.”

My instincts tell me to go over there. To hug him. To be close to him.

But if I hug him, he’ll know the truth. He’ll feel baby bump growing beneath the huge sweatshirts I’ve been wearing to hide her.

My instincts tell me to open my window a little wider, slip on my slides sitting beside my window, climb through my window, and walk a few feet across the line separating our houses.

My instincts tell me to link my arms around his waist and rest my head on his chest as his arms encircle my shoulders and he rests his cheek on the top of my head. He’s six feet, five inches tall, and I’m not short at five-foot-eight, but he would still tower over me the way he always did.

My instincts tell me that standing in his arms, breathing him in, holding him as he holds me…it would be absolute perfection. It’s where we’re both meant to be, and I firmly believe that truth more than anything I’ve ever believed in my life.

But I can’t do it.

“I’m so sorry for what you’re going through, Tristan. I don’t care if we’ve been apart seven minutes or seven years, though. I will always be right here if you ever need to talk about it—about your dad, or your career, or your wife…about anything.”

He sighs. “That goes the same for you. I don’t care how many years have passed. We’re T and T.”

“We’re dynamite,” I sing, and he laughs.

“I, uh…” I begin at the same time he says, “Listen—”

We both chuckle awkwardly, and then I speak first. “Can I ask you a question?”

He nods.

“What effect do you think the past has on the present?” I ask it in a way that doesn’t necessarily give anything away. I could simply be asking whether he thinks we can be together now, but what I really mean to find out with this conversation is whether I should tell him about the real reason why we were forced apart all those years ago.

I hate keeping something so huge a secret from him, but the other half of me still wants to protect him…to protect us . It’s a painful reality I’ve held onto for all these years, and while I personally believe honesty is always the best policy, in this case, sparing him the pain of the truth to protect him feels like the right thing to do.

Telling him we have a living, breathing child out there being raised by somebody else…all it would do is kill a little part of his soul. He deserves to know, but I don’t know if I have the courage to tell him.

And his next words only tell me to listen to my gut.

“You know, that’s something I think about a lot. We’re shaped by our history, which makes it important, but it’s still in the past. Our future is shaped by what we’re doing right now , you know? I think we grow and we change and we adapt, which makes the present way more important than whatever went down in the past. What happened a long time ago doesn’t matter. How we move forward does.”

“So you’d rather live for the moment than dwell on history?” I ask.

He nods.

“Me too,” I say softly. I realize we’re talking about two different things here, and he could never actually guess my hidden meaning, but this feels like an important conversation.

It feels like the type of thing that will play on my mind over the next few days, or weeks, or months…maybe for the rest of my life as I wrestle with whether or not to tell him.

I yawn. “I should go to bed.”

“Okay,” he murmurs, and he doesn’t try to hide his disappointment. “Hey, want to go see Coach Beatty with me? I told him I’d run drills with the team when the weather breaks and I’m meeting with him at six tomorrow morning for workouts and to go over the practice schedule. We can chat about what we can use the boys for at the festival.”

I nod and smile. “Sure. I’d love to.”

“Great,” he says. “Goodnight, Tessa.”

My chest tightens at the sound of my name falling from his mouth. “’Night, Tristan,” I say, and I wave before I close my window and my drapes.

And then I sit with my hand on my belly as I ponder his words and regret more missed opportunities. I type those words in a note in my phone so I can refer back to them whenever I need to.

What happened a long time ago doesn’t matter. How we move forward does.