Page 123 of Hard to Hold

“Is it good to be home?”

I miss you.

“There’s nothing like your own bed.” He chuckles.

Your arms holding me tight.

“I know. All I wanted to do was lie in it for hours the first day I got home.”

Your raspy voice when you first wake up in the morning.

“Things are good with your sisters and Dad?”

Knowing I could reach out and touch you to know you’re real.

“If you’re asking if we’re bickering, the answer is of course we are.”

Do you miss me?

And so yet another conversation where we talk about nothing, because we’re too afraid to address the elephant in the room, and that elephant is us.

CHAPTER SIXTY

RUSH

Lennox: I saw you called. Sorry I missed you. I’m about to catch a flight to Florida to corral a wild-child athlete. You’ll be asleep by the time I land. Have a great team workout today.

I stare at the text and hate this feeling—wanting to talk and knowing I can’t.

Wanting to be with her, but she’s thousands of miles away.

Needing this ache in my chest to go away instead of steadily getting worse.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

LENNOX

“DID YOU WATCH?”

I look up at where Brexton is standing in the doorway of my office. “Watch what?”

“Jesus, are we back to you pretending like you’re not sitting around this office moping all goddamn day?” she asks with a healthy dose of an eye roll.

“I’m not moping.”

“Then you watched.”

“Of course, I did,” I say, as I think of the twenty times I replayed Rush’s big contract signing with Liverpool on YouTube. How I devoured everything about it and him as if I were a stalker desperate for a fix of the person she was obsessed with. “Why would I miss it?”

“Because it was at four in the morning so I thought you might be, you know, sleeping.”

“Don’t be a bitch.”

“I’m not.” She shrugs and moves into my office to take a seat. Exactly what I don’t want—to be put under the microscope by my sister. “I’m just curious what’s going on.”

“I’m trying to get a contract reviewed for Johnson, and I have a meeting in two hours with Berringer. That’s what’s up,” I say with a sarcastic smile to reinforce my brattiness.

“When are you going to see him again?” The playfulness is gone from her voice this time, and the compassion in her tone has me looking up from the contract to meet her eyes.