Page 133 of Love, Literature, and the Linebacker

“But every time something good happened—signing the contract, meeting the team, all of it—I kept wishing you were there.” He gives a quiet laugh, almost embarrassed. “Turns out dreams feel a lot smaller when the person you want to share them with isn’t standing beside you. I told myself the Larks were the only dream that mattered. But…” He exhales, gaze steady on mine. “That dream feels empty without you in it.”

My heart dips. Part of me wants to reach across the table, to confess how hollow these months have felt. But the cautious part of me—the one that learned the cost of loving someone with wings—holds back.

“Dylan,” I start, then stop. I glance down, collecting myself. “You deserve to chase that dream without anything holding you back.”

His hand shifts across the table, stopping just short of mine.

I close the distance myself.

“You were never holding me back,” he says. “You were the reason I wanted more than just football. The reason any of this mattered.” His thumb brushes over my knuckles. “I realized what I really wanted wasn’t just to go. It was to have something worth coming back to.”

Emotion swells, swift and terrifying. I look away. “And when you’re thousands of miles away?” I ask softly. “I can’t be the one standing on the sidelines, hoping someday it’ll be different.”

He tightens his grip on my hand, grounding me.

“Then I realized that wasn’t fair either. You’re not supposed to stay in one place so I always have somewhere to return to. You have a life to build, too.”

My heart pounds against my ribs as I look at him. Everything inside me wants to tell him I’ve missed him every single day. That I still love him. That I never stopped.

But love has never been the thing I was afraid of.

It was everything that came after.

Dylan waits, his hand still wrapped around mine. He doesn’t rush me. He doesn’t fill the silence. He just lets me think.

Somehow that makes me love him even more.

I release an uneven breath. “Can we go for a walk?”

He blinks once before smiling.

“Yeah,” he says softly. “I’d like that.”

Together, we step out of the café and into the cool morning air, neither of us pretending to know exactly what comes next.

And that doesn’t scare me nearly as much as it used to.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Dylan

The first thing I notice is that I’m not thinking about football.

Not the contract I signed.

Not rookie minicamp.

Not the playbook waiting in my hotel room before I fly back tomorrow.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, none of it is loud enough to drown out everything else.

Lucy walks beside me with her hands tucked into the pockets of her sweater, matching my pace without either of us saying much. The sidewalks of Willow Creek look exactly the way I remember them.

We walk side by side and everything feels calm. Familiar.

Neither of us rushes to fill the silence. We just walk, our shoulders brushing every so often, our footsteps finding the same rhythm.

I realize so much of my life has been motion.