Vegas Aces: The Wide Receiver Complete Series

CHAPTER 11 TRISTAN

I have a pounding headache when I wake up for the final day of OTAs the next morning.

I have regrets.

Many of them.

It was stupid to drink the way I did last night. Stupid to try to get information out of Savannah. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

But…at least I woke up alone this morning. Could’ve been worse, I guess.

I force myself to make it through workouts, but I have to run out of the weight room midway through my first morning session to puke up half a gallon of whiskey.

I’m dehydrated, but Adrian is there with electrolytes to help me get back on track. Travis laughs at me, along with Jaxon, and I don’t know what Cory did last night but he looks even worse off than me. He and Jaxon weren’t at Victor’s charity event, but if everyone was there, nobody would’ve been at the club, so I assume that’s where they went.

I wasn’t able to get anything out of Savannah, but I planted the seed. Maybe it wasn’t as stupid as I thought when I first rolled out of bed.

The day feels incredibly long, but as it winds to a close, the wide receivers meet with Coach Jeff in a classroom then make plans to head to the restaurant across the street to grab a bite for dinner. Everyone’s here, and all six rostered wide receivers from last year came back to play for the Aces again.

It’s like seeing family as we sit down at the barbecue joint across the street like we did once a week last season, and I realize how much I’ve missed these guys while I’ve been away in Iowa.

It’s so strange to feel like half my world is here and half of it is somewhere else.

I’m suddenly starving after staying away from food the majority of the day. By this point, I’ve sweat out any remaining whiskey, and I’m feeling much better.

Travis sits beside me, and Cory’s on my other side. Across the table from me is Josh, and on either side of him sit Cason and Damon.

We catch up, chatting about what we’ve been doing in the off-season, but I sit as a quiet listener today rather than contributing much to the conversation.

In fact, I don’t say anything at all until Josh directly asks me. “What about you, Higs? What have you been up to?”

I lift a shoulder. “Divorced, engaged, interrupted wedding, pregnant girlfriend I broke up with after the ex-wife brought some information to light.”

Everyone just sort of stares at me a minute, and then Josh lets out a nervous laugh. “Sounds like you’re ready to get back on the field.”

I blow out a breath. “It’s been…interesting. I’m definitely ready to have the stability of the season back.”

I say the words, but I’m not sure how true they are. I’m not sure about much of anything at this point.

If I’m on the field, I’m not with her. But I haven’t been with her for the last three weeks, either.

I still don’t know how to trust her, and I’m still not sure I’m ready to go back.

But I also don’t want her to be alone as she navigates the last weeks of her pregnancy. I know she’s not alone. She’s got her mom, and my parents are right next door. My mom told me Tessa has been staying at Janet’s, and a certain sadness fills me that the house on the corner is sitting empty.

It’s my fault. I never told her to go there, or maybe she doesn’t want to be alone.

It’s a good thing she wasn’t alone last night when she fainted.

“Higs? Higs!”

I hear Josh trying to get my attention, and I finally snap to it. “Sorry. What?”

“Are you okay, man?”

“I don’t know,” I admit, and I feel heat pressing behind my eyes.

Are you fucking serious right now?

I’m not about to fucking cry in front of my teammates, but I can’t stop thinking about what could’ve happened if she had been alone last night.

If her mom hadn’t been there.

Why the fuck I wasn’t there.

Why I’m letting this thing from the past hover over me as I allow it to keep us apart instead of letting her talk to me about what happened.

Savannah is winning because I’m letting her win.

I can’t let her win.

I press my palms to my eyes in some attempt to make it look like I’m just tired rather than about to cry. I draw in a deep breath through my nose and let it out slowly, and then I chug a little water. When I glance around, all five of my teammates are staring at me wordlessly.

“Yeah,” I finally say. “I’m okay. I just have some mistakes I need to fix.”

“We’re here, man,” Josh tells me.

“I know.” I glance around, and nobody’s really within hearing distance of our table. We’re set in the back for privacy anyway, and the music’s loud enough that if I lower my voice, this will stay between us.

And then I proceed to blurt out the entire story to my brothers.

“Long story short, I just learned my high school girlfriend left our senior year because she was pregnant. It turns out the baby was mine and her dad sent her away to have it and give it up. I never knew about it until Savannah interrupted my wedding to the same girl to tell me about that baby. And now…I don’t know how to feel. It’s like it’s all coming full circle. She’s pregnant, knocked up by another dude who wants nothing to do with it, and I vowed I’d raise that kid as mine. I proposed to her. I want to spend my life with her. She agreed to move out here, but how can I trust her when she could keep such a big thing from me?”

Travis sits silently beside me, already knowing the story—hell, being a part of the story since he was there—but the others stare at me as if I’ve grown two heads.

I expect them to tell me to run far, far away, to just find women willing to be in it for one night because it’s easier than dealing with relationships…but they don’t say that at all.

Instead, it’s Josh who steps up first. Josh, who happens to be Ellie’s brother and who also happens to be married to Ellie’s best friend. Josh, who is a father now, a guy who is eight or nine years older than me, who I watched on television his rookie season and cheered for since he played for the Bears, the team I cheered for. Josh, a man who I respect and consider a mentor.

“Maybe I’m an eternal optimist, but I like to think everyone’s just doing the best they can with what they have, you know? Do you know why she kept it from you?”

I shake my head. “Not really. She said something about how it wouldn’t have changed anything, and how she was going to tell me after the baby was born. I kept telling her not to stress, not to worry about the past.”

“So she was just doing what you told her to do?” he asks.

I shrug. “I guess.”

Damon pipes in with a question next. “Has she ever done anything else to give you reason not to trust her?”

I think back over our time together, and while my immediate gut response is that I never knew her at all if she could keep this from me, I can’t really think of another time when she broke my trust.

Josh’s words replay in my head. She was just doing what I told her to do.

I told her not to tell me what happened when we were apart. That was on me because I wasn’t ready to tell her about Tiffany or Coax.

Am I any better for keeping things from her?

Or am I setting a huge double standard where I expect her to tell me every detail about our past but it’s okay for me not to share?

“No,” I finally admit. “But she left me once, and it broke me.”

“Because her dad made her,” Travis says. “She admitted that much. Didn’t she tell you she wanted to get in touch, but by the time she was able to, you’d moved on?”

I nod.

“Think about what she’s been through, man,” Josh says.

“I have,” I protest, but while I’ve thought about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever really tried to place myself in her shoes. I suppose I allow myself to cut out on those thoughts early rather than really living in the pain and heartbreak she must have endured—that she’s still enduring.

She didn’t just lose the baby. She also lost me, and none of it was what she wanted.

And then when she found herself pregnant again, Cameron Foster told her to take care of it.

Jesus Christ.

It’s an epiphany a little too long in the making.

I can’t change what we’ve done, but I can go forward with a more understanding heart. It’s what we both deserve.

I don’t have a lot of time to waste, but I do need to take care of a few things here before I head back to get my girl.

The first of which is my ex-wife.