I’d always said I was too immature to be this old, but tonight had made me feel young again in both the best and worst possible ways.
FOUR
CADEN
“You want to run some laps?” I teased Sabrina as I motioned toward the track while we strolled through the park. “It’s been a while, but maybe I can give you a few pointers from my track days so you can be in good shape for the soccer field.”
She glared at me, rolling her eyes before she looked away.
“I’m an assistant coach for a kids rec league, Caden. I pass out juice boxes, bags of snacks, and try to keep the kids from killing one another in between kicks. I don’t need any kind of athletic stamina for the job, but thanks for the offer.”
We’d been doing this ever since the night of the reunion. This, meaning hanging out whenever we had a free moment. We’d seemed to pick up right where we left off, but we had this whole other level of common ground now as jilted spouses of brutal divorces.
The heat was there too, but we hadn’t done anything with it yet. We had moments of staring a little too long or a goodbye hug that lasted a beat longer than just a friendly one, but we’d back away without it complicating things.
It was just like old times, other than falling into each other’s bed—or, as it was then, any back seat or corner we could find. We were friends without the extra, and it seemed to be holding.
Sabrina would always be more than a friend to me, but I had a twenty-year track record of keeping that to myself, and I had managed okay so far.
To keep her in my life, I could hold myself in check. It sucked, but I could do it.
“Well, you may need some stamina to help Emily keep the single mothers away from Jesse,” I said.
Sabrina let go of a laugh when I lifted a brow.
“Poor Emily isn’t going to have any back teeth at the end of the season from grinding them so hard.” She snickered, shaking her head. “You need to come to a game. I told you, the actual soccer game doesn’t hold a candle to the battle between those two.”
Jesse had settled things with Emily after the reunion, but he hadn’t planned to take it further than that. He’d wanted to keep all his attention on his niece, but as fate would have it, as it laughed its ass off at both Jesse and Emily, when Jesse had signed Maddie up for soccer, Emily had become her coach.
Now, they were “friends” who danced around each other during every game and practice—or, at least, from what Sabrina had told me and what Jesse would allude to when I pushed.
When I’d asked Sabrina if she wanted to meet up at the bar last week, she’d blown me off with a no-thanks text, which was not like her. We were both pretty damn wordy, except she eventually got the hint when it was time to close her mouth.
It was hard to read emotions via text, but it had been short enough to feel like a brush-off.
“Everything okay lately?” I asked her as we settled onto a bench.
“Fine,” she said, securing a lock of hair behind her ear that blew across her face in the brisk fall breeze. I pressed my palm against my thigh, an effort to rub away the impulse to trace my finger along her jaw.
Sabrina was always beautiful, but sometimes when the sunlight hit her eyes in just the right way, her hazel irises would turn gold, almost translucent. A shiver would roll down my spine, as if she were looking right through me, and I couldn’t hide a damn thing.
But if I was going to keep her in my life, I had to keep that part of myself with all those pesky feelings I’d never known what to do withtomyself.
“Why do you ask?” She leaned back on the bench and squinted at me.
“Well, because you’ve been a little distant. Did I do something wrong?”
A moment of panic laced through me that maybe Iwasn’tdoing such a great job of hiding my feelings. I did a quick replay over what I could have said, and I tried to recall a time I’d stared at her for too long without realizing it.
She blew out a long breath, her shoulders drooping as she shook her head.
“No, you didn’t. I can see how you’d get that impression, and I’m sorry. I did something stupid.”
“And…you were embarrassed about it? Have you met me? I’m the king of doing stupid things.”
She dropped her gaze to the ground and bumped her shoulder into mine.
“It was stupid since I’ve done it before, and no good ever came from it. I logged on to Facebook and looked up my ex-husband. I do that when I’m feeling low, hoping that karma finally did its job and made him miserable and ugly.”
