“Yeah? That’s great, Dean. I’m glad you spoke to him about it.” She sighed. “I did say I’d reward you with swimming.”
“I’m sorry I overreacted about finishing the list,” I whispered, staring between her eyes to make sure she heard me. “I love that you spent time researching this and invited me. Let’s do it. Let’s go camping. Let’s knock off the rest of this list together.”
“I’m so glad you wanted to do this with me,” she said, her voice even softer than mine. There was a finality to it, like she was saying goodbye somehow. It caused the ache to worsen, but I’d deal with that later. We still had two weeks left. Plenty of time to stress out.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Mack
We drove in Dean’s car with the windows down, music blasting, and our hands intertwined on the center console. He had this half-smile on his face the whole ride, his dimple teasing me every so often. Seeing him like that had the question on the tip of my tongue:could we not end this?
He mentioned the final two weeks so often that it seemed foolish to even suggest going longer. My tongue swelled, and sweat pooled in unsavory places when I even thought about asking him. It wouldn’t help us, and it would only cause the final two weeks to be harder. I knew this. It was what we agreed on.
This would be the best summer of a lifetime, where I fell hard for Dean Romano while living life without regret. I had a summer love and went on adventures. When I went through those thoughts, everything seemedfine,even though I wanted to break down and cry thinking about not seeing Dean every day or talking to him or kissing him.
Or thinking about him getting with other girls.
“You look thoughtful over there. What’s on your mind?” he asked, his voice kind and unhurried.
“You. This summer.” I squeezed his hand as he pulled into the campsite. A guard checked our licenses as we gave them our names, but that was it. We had no phones. We agreed to leave them at my apartment to fulfill the twenty-four hours. We told everyone, and they knew where we were. If there was an emergency, they would come here.
The guide handed Dean a map, and he chewed his lip, staring at it.
“We need to go there.” I leaned over and showed him the section. “I reserved this one. If you head down the path and go right, it’ll lead us to our spot.”
He glanced at me with the same happy smile. “Right, yeah.”
“Romano is bad at maps. Cute.”
“Shut it, you.” He flicked my nose playfully as he made the right turn. “Some people are directionally challenged. Like me.”
“It’s a good thing you’re good at real plays then.”
He sighed and took my hand again, palm to palm. “You ever think about what you’d do without soccer?”
“No.” I laughed. “I want to plan my life around it. Always have. My parents want me to have a fallback plan if I get injured, which I get, but even then, my career would still revolve around the sport. Even if I was a newscaster or announcer or something that supported it. There’s just no world where I’m not shouting about women’s soccer. It’s part of me.”
Or maybe even coach and help cultivate healthy athletes, basically be the opposite of Emily.
“I get that. It’s how I feel about football. This summer just had me thinking about a different kind of life, even just as adaydream.” His voice sounded gruff, thick. “I love the mentoring aspect of the game.”
“You could always coach when you get too old.”
“True. I just… with what Coach is having me do with Jayden, I think I’m gonna like it. It’s weird moving from the headspace of only I matter to the whole team matters.”
“Sports are strange, especially when you’re a key position player. Our goalie is like that. Games can be won or lost from her actions. So, she worries about her stats more than the team. It doesn’t matter if she has thirty or five saves if we only make one goal, you know? She can’t worry about our forwards when she has her own shit to deal with.”
“This shit with Jessica—well, the girl I told you about, really had me thinking about life beyond the sport. I loved the famous aspect of everything, but this lowkey summer taught me that this makes me happier. The small things.”
I’m a small thing?Sadness weighed me down.
“Wait.” He shook his head. “That came out weird. I mean… camping and the lake house. Reading an article and drinking coffee with you. Watching you do your social media posts. I’ve…they meant a lot to me.”
“Yeah, me too.” I smiled, hiding my mouth from him. I enjoyed all those things too. “Okay, if you could never play football again and couldn’t coach, what would you do then?”
“My degree is in economics because I chose it like a dumbass freshman, but any sort of job that requires teaching or mentoring. Not a teacher; that seems hard as fuck. This is hard. You gotta do this question too.”
