“Confession,” he began. “I was lying when I said people don’t usually cook for me just for coloring rainbows. Haddie, people don’t…cook for me.”
Haddie’s brows furrowed, and she lowered the fork that had only made it halfway to her mouth. “No one has ever cooked for you?” she inquired with a laugh. “I find that hard to believe.”
“I mean, not in my grown-ass-man-living-on-his-own years, which have been a lot of years.” He scratched the back of his neck and chewed on his top lip. Was he…nervous?
Her expression softened. “You can say whatever it is,” she assured him. “No judgment here. Just a meal between roommates.”
He laughed. “Right. Which is why I feel like a total asshole for what I’m about to admit.” He blew out a breath. “I have always lived alone.” He motioned between them. “And this type of thing usually happens in a…you know…relationship. But I–I mean, I traveled a lot for my job, and when I was on campus for any lengthof time—even in the offseason—I was knee-deep in preseason or postseason training, in strategizing, in…” He hesitated, but Haddie nodded eagerly, not wanting him to lose his momentum, especially if she was about to get a glimpse of vulnerable Levi again. “In focusing on the one thing I was good at, which was football.” He clasped his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling before meeting her gaze again. “I never let relationships get to the point where someone might want to make me dinner.”
Haddie nodded while absently swirling the wine in her glass.
“See?” Levi added after a long beat of silence. “You think I’m a dick.”
But she shook her head, finally focusing her eyes on his again. “If you’re a dick, then I guess that makes me one too because aside from a recent lapse in judgment that will never happen again, I, sir, wrote the book on casual.”
How was it that three weeks ago she’d had every intention of making this man a nameless one night stand, and now she was telling him things about herself she’d never actually voiced out loud?
“Do you want to talk about that recent lapse in—”
“No!” she blurted out, and Levi nodded once.
“Fair enough,” he told her, a muscle ticking in his jaw.
“Are you…mad?” she asked, brows furrowed.
“Nope.”
Except hisnopesounded a lot like a misspelledyep.
“It’s just that it’s in the past, and it’s not something I want to dwell on or really even think about ever again, so maybe just forgetI said anything. Okay?”
His dark-brown eyes softened, and he nodded. “Yeah, okay. Just, if you ever change your mind…”
“I won’t,” Haddie told him and then painted her smile back on and raised her glass. “What should we drink to?” she asked, hoping they could find their way back to normal. Again. Because they really were having the hardest time staying on the path they’d both agreed to travel.
“Um…” Levi began, scratching his chin. “To being afraid of commitment?” He shrugged and raised his brows.
“Now that is something worthy of a raised glass, don’t you think?” she asked with enough forced enthusiasm that she almost believed she was excited that Levi was just as much of a mess as she was.
The bottle of wine was empty, and their wineglasses were well on their way. Haddie was so not going to be productive tonight with lesson planning, but she didn’t care. The food was good (if she didn’t say so herself). The wine was good. And the company? Well, once they got past the bump in the road, it was the best she’d had in a long time, possibly bordering on favorite.
Maybe she and Levi didn’t see eye to eye on the way Principal Crawford was dealing with the school budget, or on whether or not they were the type of roommates that talked about anything other than today, tomorrow, and—when they got there—the next day. But they seemed to get each other in a way Haddie hadn’t felt gotten before.
“To being a dick!” Haddie declared, raising her glass.
Levi barked out a laugh and lifted his glass as well. “To being a dick, I guess,” he agreed, tapping his glass against hers before they both finished what was left of the wine.
Chapter 16
Levi tossed in his bed, unable to find the right position. Thecombination of the wine at dinner and the soothing sound of the light drizzle outside his cracked window should have lulled him to sleep, but tonight he couldn’t put his jumble of thoughts to rest.
He and Haddie had eaten dinner together on more than one occasion, but it usually consisted of him tossing a pizza in the oven while Haddie concocted one of her many “girl dinners,” which was what she called it when she tossed a hodgepodge of whatever was in the fridge onto a plate. Sometimes it was half of a sliced cucumber, a couple of torn-up pitas and a tub of hummus. Sometimes it was a handful of chips, a couple of hard-boiled eggs, and whatever fruit she could find.
“That’s just Lunchables for grown-ups,” he often teased her, to which she’d counter that adding extra cheese to his store-bought pizza and baking it on a stone did not, in fact, make it artisan.
But tonight she’dcookedfor him, which took preparation and care, and Levi wasn’t used to someone taking care of him, at leastnot since he was a teen before his mom got sick.
Levi wasn’t oblivious to the carefully constructed walls he’d put in place since then. Here was the paradox of Levi Rourke. The game was everything to him as a kid, a teen, and a young adult. It came before everything and everyone, and because of that, he wasn’t at his mother’s side when she took her last breath. He chose to believe her when she called him at school from the hospital bed that had taken up residence in their living room. “Go win this one for me. I’ll see you when you come home next weekend,” she’d told him. But those were the last words she ever said to him.
