Asher pulls back, pats his uniform pants pockets like he’s forgotten something. “I don’t have a ring.”
I offer my hand where I’m still wearing the large yellow diamond Brayden gave me months ago. “That’s okay.”
Next to us, Brayden holds up his own hand, where he’s wearing the black silicone wedding band he normally plays in. “Who says you’d be the one to give us a ring, Asher?” He reaches into his pocket, takes out another silicone band: this one with a subtle geometric pattern all over it.
Asher takes the ring, examines it, looks between us as if wonderstruck, before he slides it on his left hand. Stares at it for a moment like he can’t believe this is happening. “This wasn’t part of the plan, B,” he says.
“Plans change.” Brayden knocks their shoulders together. “Ask me how I know.”
A burst of light appears above the stadium—post-game fireworks—shimmers of bright pink and green and white. Who knows what will happen tomorrow: if they’ll be cut from the team, if there’ll be the media firestorm we spent so long avoiding.
For now, I weave my fingers through Brayden’s and Asher’s, and we watch bursts of color streak across the sky like stars.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Savannah
When we get home—Braydenand me in Brayden’s truck and Asher in his hybrid—Brad and Barb’s car is sitting out front. Brayden told me he bought it for them when he got his signing bonus, the same way Blake had bought them a different luxury vehicle. The car looks enormous next to Asher’s compact little hybrid—the one he manages to fit all six-foot-something of himself in on a regular basis. Still, all I’ve heard Brad say about the car his son bought for him is that it doesn’t have enough legroom.
We get down from Brayden’s truck, intercept Asher where he’s about to go up our front path. “My parents are here,” Brayden says.
“Oh.” Asher nods, goes back in his car like he might drive away. Except he pops the trunk and withdraws something from the back. A bat. The one he left on our kitchen counter when he’d come over thinking I was in danger.
“It won’t be like that,” I tell him. At least, I hope it won’t be like that, even if Brayden’s face has gone pale under the glow of the streetlight.
“If you say so.” Asher puts the bat back. “What’s the plan?”
“I’ll talk to them,” Brayden says. “Might as well get this over with.”
“Hey”—I lean up to kiss him—“this can’t be much worse than the first time I met them.”
He nods tightly. “Things can always get worse.” But he goes up the path to our house first like he’s trying to protect Asher and me from the inevitable fallout.
Barb and Brad have let themselves in, of course. They’re standing in our living room, a garish tennis bracelet on Barb’s wrist, a drink already in Brad’s hand.
“Brayden, I see you’ve brought your…” Barb makes a face like she just sucked a lemon. “People.”
“The word you’re looking for iswife,” I say to her. “The other word isfiancé.”
Asher is standing next to me, eying them both. He’s in his normal street clothes after a game—jeans with a rip in the knee, a T-shirt cropped at the arms and hem, like he was designed in a lab to piss off Brad. He extends a hand. “I’m Asher.”
Brad looks at his hand, declines to shake it. Turns to Brayden, his full back to Asher as if determined not to acknowledge his presence, so he doesn’t see the slow smirk that crosses Asher’s face like Brad was just tested and failed.
“Brayden,” Brad says, “we should talk in private, without these…eavesdroppers.”
More like witnesses.I’m about to tell Brad he can go back to his ownprivatehome anytime, when Brayden says, “Sav and Asher are family. Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of them.”
I don’t have time to savor that—that however fake our marriage was to begin with, it’s real now—when Barb moves forward and takes her son’s hands in her own pale claws. “You’re being led down a dark path, Brayden, one you don’t fullyunderstand. These people"—Barb spits the word as if she can’t bear to say our names—“do not have your best interests at heart. If you continue on like this, there’s no telling what depravity you’ll be drawn into.”
“Depravitywas actually what we were planning to do before you showed up.” Asher smiles at them, hard. “Maybe some of it on that couch where you were sitting.”
Barb goes white, her lips practically disappearing into the pale powdered surface of her face. She steps back as if Asher slapped her.
“Are you going to let them speak to your mother that way?” Brad barks.
“This is my house—” Brayden gestures to the room around us, then points to Brad and Barb. “Our house. And you will not come into it and disrespect the people living here. The people Ilove.”
Barb recovers enough to scoff. “What do you know about love?”
