Yet.
“I mean, I guess I could be. I’ve never really been sure.”
“You definitely are. Who just calls someone without giving them a warning first?”
I snort out a laugh, leaning back against the headboard and getting comfortable. “You sound like Riley. Every time I call her, she takes it as a personal insult. She’s all,Why didn’t you just text me?Since when is texting the default form of communication?”
Maddy rolls her eyes, leaning back against what looks like ten thousand pillows in various shades of blue and purple. “Since always, Grandpa. When you text, the person you’re texting can decide when or whether to text you back at their leisure. A phone call forces an instantaneous decision that no one wants to make.”
“And yet you made the decision to answer my phone call just now.”
Maddy grins and it makes my chest feel light as air. “Riddle me that, Cameron. Riddle me that.”
I grin right back at her, loving the way she calls me by my full name. It feels deliciously forbidden to be talking to her like this, but also like the only thing I want to be doing right now. “I think you like me. I think you really, really like me.”
She shrugs. “I think we’re past the point of me pretending I don’t, don’t you?”
My heart thuds like she just stripped naked and confessed her undying love for me. I open my suddenly dry mouth to respond then close it, her admission having stripped my brain of anything resembling words. Suddenly, I’m a teenage boy with no idea how to talk to the prettiest girl at the dance.
She bursts out laughing, and it’s the best sound in the world. “Did I break you?”
I blow out a breath, trying to get my shit together. “I guess I just wasn’t expecting you to admit it so easily.”
Maddy gives me a lazy smile. “That’s me. When you think I’ll zig, I zag. And when you’re sure I’ll zag, I actually do zag again. I’m unpredictable and occasionally impulsive. Or maybe it’s just the late-night phone call. There’s something kind of cozy about it, don’t you think?”
She reaches out of view of the camera, and I get a quick glimpse of the Renegades logo on her gray hoodie. Her wearing my team logo makes my chest feel funny, and I get a brief mental image of the way she might look in my jersey, my name and number on her back, and I like it so much.
Too much, probably.
But before I can think too hard about it, Maddy’s end of the phone goes dark, and a second later, a soft light that must come from a bedside lamp clicks on. Settling back against her pillows, she rolls to her side and props the phone up so only her face is in view, bathed in the dim glow of the lamp. “It makes me want to tell you all my secrets.”
Pushing up and off the bed, I shut off the overhead light in the room, then click on my own lamp before getting back into bed and lying against the pillows. When I look back at the phone, my heart squeezes at the view of Maddy cuddled up in her bed, blanket pulled up to her chin. I slide down, rolling to my side and holding the phone up in front of me in a mirror of her pose. It’s almost like we’re sharing a bed, instead of being separated by seven miles and a highway, and I really, really like the thought of that. “It’s been a long time since I’ve shared secrets with a girl in a late-night phone call.”
“Lainey?” she asks. And something about the way she says Lainey’s name in that casual, curious tone has me opening up in a way I rarely ever think to do. I want her to know me, dented parts and all. Somehow, I already know she’ll hold those pieces of me gently, just like she did when I opened up to her that night on the roof of our hotel in Tampa.
I nod. “Yeah. Between college football and then my first years in the NFL, I was away a lot, so we spent many a late night on the phone, just like this.”
“Was it hard? Being away so much, I mean.”
I rub a hand over my jaw, letting my mind travel back to those early days. “It wasn’t at first. Lainey was dedicated to her career, and she had a lot of friends, so she always had a support system around her when I was traveling. And since Drew and I were drafted to the Renegades together, I had my best friend on the road with me. Lainey would come to away games when she could make it work, and she never missed a home game.”
I laugh a little, because so much has happened between then and now that thinking about those early days is almost like thinking about someone else’s life. Maybe, in some ways, it is. “It felt like a wild adventure. Like, it was such an insane thing to get to have a career playing the game I love, and to do it with the woman I loved by my side. All our dreams were coming true, and we were having the time of our lives. It was so fucking fun. It only got hard once Riley was born. Every time I had an away game after that, I felt like I was leaving half my heart behind, counting down the minutes until I was home again. It’s still like that.”
Maddy gives me a soft smile, leaning into the phone like she’s trying to get closer to me, making me lean in too, drawn to her in a mysterious, inexplicable way. “I like the way your voice sounds when you talk about Lainey. It’s the same way you sound when you talk about your kids.”
“How do I sound?” I ask, curious about what she hears.
“Like you love them.”
I nod, my chest tightening at the simplicity of her words. “Sometimes I think maybe I love them too much.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think that’s even possible.”
I consider my next words, wondering again, just like the night on the roof in Tampa, whether it’s weird to be talking to Maddy about my dead wife. But it doesn’t feel weird. It just feelsright. Like my time with Lainey was a chapter in my life, and tonight is another step in what could be my next one. And maybe a second chance starts with the truth of the end of my first. “Losing Lainey the way I did left me with some…scars. You saw one of them in Tampa. With the storms.”
Maddy’s eyes go serious. “Loss like you experienced is impossible. Of course it left you with scars. It would be crazy if it didn’t.”
“I might be crazy,” I mumble, looking away from the phone as I think of panic attacks when it storms. Forcing my kids to send me pictures before every game.I love youtimes a million.
