I’m quiet for a beat. “But the thing is, it’s none of his business who I date. Yes, Cal treated me badly, but do you know many women who haven’t been treated badly by someone over the years? Maybe not people who marry their high school sweetheart, but I have to believe that’s the exception, not the norm.”
“Oh, I agree. We’ve all been in shitty relationships. I think most people have had a broken heart or two.”
Do I admit I never have? Not really. High school doesn’t count, in my opinion.
“I dated a nerdy biology major senior year for about four months and he broke my heart too. And he’s the furthest thing from an athlete.”
“I haven’t had a broken heart since high school,” I admit, opting to be honest. “But I’ve seen it with my friends.”
“So…are you a player?” she asks. “The kind of guy who sleeps around and never gets emotionally attached?”
“That’s been my mantra,” I admit, “but I’m trying to be better. Like I told you in our chats, I’ve been in therapy all summer.”
“Because of your sister.”
“Yeah.” This is tough to talk about but she needs to know who I really am if we have any chance of being together.
“Her name is Billie and she’s twenty-three?”
“Actually, she turned twenty-four a couple of weeks ago.”
“And her boyfriend? The one you don’t like?”
I snort. “It’s not that I don’t like him. I didn’t like himfor her. Thirty-five to her twenty-three. I felt like he was taking advantage of her.”
“But he’s not?”
“No. At least, not that I can tell. She’s the happiest she’s been since our parents died and doing really well. The two of them are going to buy a restaurant franchise that she’s going to run, but that’s another story. As far as what I did, he was one of my teammates. Rome Castellano. He?—”
“Wait, what? His name is RomeCastellano?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Oh, my God. Lourdes’s last name when she met my dad was Castellano.”
“Oh, yeah, we haven’t had a chance to talk about this.” I hesitate, but there’s no point in trying to hide anything so I tell her about the conversation I had with my friends at the cookout.
“The plot thickens,” she says, chuckling. “That’s crazy.”
“Honestly, it makes me feel better to know that one of his divorces wasn’t his fault.”
“He has more than one?” she asks.
“Yeah. That was another thing I didn’t like—twice divorced and broke as fuck. Also basically at the end of his career, so how the hell is he going to take care of my sister, you know?”
“We’ll go back to the Lourdes thing in a minute but tell me the rest of the story.”
“It was ugly. I was a complete ass. When I found out about them, I went after him in the locker room, something I’m not proud of.”
“You mean… a fist fight?”
I cringe but I need her to know the good, the bad, and the ugly. “Yeah. But I’ve been working on my overprotectiveness. I know it was wrong. And honestly, he played well for a guy at this stage of his career. So much so that when the team owner called us in to talk to us about the altercation, she basically said if she had to choose between us, it would be him because I hadn’t had a good year.”
“Ouch.” She squeezes my hand. “I’m so sorry that happened.”
At least she’s not asking me to drop her off immediately.
“Rome loves her,” I say quietly. “I know that now. It was a whole big clusterfuck of my own making. Luckily, I realized the error of my ways, and she forgave me, as long as I promised to get therapy to deal with my overprotectiveness.”
