by Tessa Bailey
After whispering a sorry to the alumni organizer to her right, Peggy began to skirt her way through the packed house, apologizing as she stepped on people’s toes—grief was making her clumsy. She kept her attention focused on Belmont and Sage, because really, there was no more comforting sight on the planet, and she was almost there…almost there…
“Good evening.”
Elliott’s voice halted Peggy in her tracks. Gooseflesh rose on every inch of her skin, her mouth falling open in shock. But she didn’t turn around. Couldn’t turn to look at him and still keep walking toward the door. It had to be one or the other, didn’t it? How could she see him standing there and walk out? How?
You could hear a pin drop in the auditorium as Elliott adjusted the microphone, creating a squeal of feedback. “Sorry,” he said, his voice gravel-like. “I don’t use these things too often. Usually I just yell.”
“And we listen!” one of his players called from a table. The rippling of laughter in the crowd moved through Peggy’s middle. Amazing that she could be proud of him for opening with a joke when her heart was hanging in limbo.
Peggy couldn’t help but look back over her shoulder as Elliott tweaked his collar and removed a piece of paper from his pocket. The silence grew thick as he stared down at whatever was written in his notes, eventually shoving them back where they came from. “I love a woman,” Elliott leaned forward and said into the microphone. “I…love a woman.”
A tingling started in the top of her head and rioted down, making her nerve endings pulse. If there had been a free chair nearby, she would have fallen into it, but there was nothing but her trembling legs to hold her up. So she just stood there, like a newborn deer, while the crowd whispered, their heads swiveling around to find the unknown woman the Kingmaker referred to.
“These lights are so damn bright, I can’t tell if she’s here. Or if she left me again.” Elliott narrowed his eyes, his frustration that he couldn’t find her in the audience evident, but her hand wouldn’t lift to wave, her vocal cords wouldn’t do their job. Maybe she didn’t want to let him know at all, because he might stop talking and she desperately needed to hear every word.
“I earned this uncertainty, though,” Elliott continued. “So I’m going to live with it and hope she’s somewhere out there hearing me.” Peggy rotated to face the stage fully, not daring to take a breath. “I wrote a speech about seizing the moment and making sure you let your loved ones know how you feel, but all that just makes me sound like a hypocrite. And I won’t be a hypocrite on top of a fool.” He tapped a fist on the podium, appearing deep in thought. “A fool is the kind of man who pushes away someone who makes him laugh. Makes him think. Makes him want to try harder and love harder and live harder. Live at all. That’s what Peggy Clarkson did for me. Twice in my life. Twice more than I earned. And this heart she woke up inside me loves her. It’ll beat for her until it stops altogether.”
An object shoved at the back of her knees. She prayed it was a chair as she fell into it, encountering the familiar, elusive squeeze of Belmont’s hand on her shoulder before it was gone. Emotion gathered in her throat and refused to be swallowed or cleared away. Through the shimmering cloak of tears in her eyes, she absently registered the looks in her direction, coming from several ex-cheerleaders…and Kyler. Kyler was right there, smiling knowingly at a nearby table, but the time it took to notice those things was too long. She needed Elliott.
“I’ve made some mistakes. With my family. With my Peggy.” His possessive way of referring to her earned an ocean of sighs from the women in the room. And an inner one from her, too. “They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. So I’m not going to continue as I have been. I’m not going to ask the woman I need in my life to make changes without giving her anything in return. I need her to know I’m real. That I know what’s important, and I’m going to fight to make her happy. Harder than I’ve ever fought to win a football game. Harder than I fought to push her away.”
Peggy knew Elliott better than anyone in the room, so she saw the next part coming. Felt it quaking in her stomach as she rose to her feet, shaking her head, unable to allow it. But he barreled right through her silent pleas.
“I’ll be taking a leave of absence next season.” Elliott’s expression didn’t change as the room’s energy skyrocketed from merely captivated to total shock…and in some cases horrified panic. Cell phones were yanked out of purses, fingers moving in a blur over their keypads, people shouted questions from their tables, and the dean looked like he was going to get sick right there on the floor. “I have a daughter I don’t know well enough, and someday, she’ll stop caring one way or another. Then there’s the matter of the woman I love.” He made a gruff sound. “I need to build her happiness into my life and keep it there permanently. I’d trade away every game, every championship, to make that happen. So if she’s here—”
“I’m here.”
The words tore through her restraint and burst out of her mouth on a shout, earning her the attention of every eye in the auditorium. Except for Elliott, because he clearly couldn’t find her through the damn spotlight. Although the confirmation that she hadn’t left had him staggering backward, away from the podium, before he lunged forward again. “Baby, I can’t see you,” he rasped into the microphone. “Let me see you.”
Peggy took two steps toward the stage, her heart somewhere up in the clouds, but there was a click in time, audible only to her. A changing from before to after that had her turning around to find Belmont and Sage. But they were no longer standing at the entrance. They were gone. And there was a huge part of her that wanted to run after them, climb into the Suburban, and live in their comfort forever. A much larger portion of her needed Elliott. Beyond words or reason. She’d needed him for so long, and he finally realized he needed her, too. “You’ll be all right,” she whispered to Belmont and Sage, wherever they were. “You have each other.”
And then Peggy turned and weaved her way through the now-standing crowd toward Elliott. A slow clapping started, gaining speed the closer she got to the stage until it sounded like a thunderstorm, bursting in the air around her. Peggy knew the moment she became visible to Elliott because his big chest heaved, the tension in his shoulders falling away. She’d only made it halfway up the stairs when Elliott reached down and hauled her up the remaining way, right into his arms.
“I still loved you when I got here,” Peggy breathed into his neck. “I love you now. Forever.”
His hold tightened, and this time, when he started reciting a prayer, his heart was in the right place. Knocking against hers in double time. “Enough to marry me, Peggy?” He stepped back and searched her face with eyes full of relief, adoration, and the remnants of possible loss. Then he fell to his knees and removed a ring box from his pants pocket, offering it up to her as the audience whistled and applauded, cell phones flashing.
“Is that why you were late?” She half laughed, half sobbed.
His nod was solemn. “I wasn’t showing up here without every single thing you deserve. Marry me, Peggy. Marry…us.”
Alice. He meant Alice, too. She wouldn’t be marrying just the man. She would be joining a family. She’d be a stepmother. Before Cincinnati, the idea of it might have terrified her, but now she wanted the chance so bad, she couldn’t imagine ever having driven away. From either of them. “Does she want me?”
Elliott’s face was carved with gravity. “Yes.”
Peggy’s legs turned to jelly and she went down to the ground, kneeling in front of Elliott…and holding out her finger. “A year off, huh?” she whispered. “What are we going to do?”
He slid the ring onto her finger and crushed her into his embrace, laying a kiss full of promise on her mouth. “We’re going to make up for the last three and plan the next thirty.”
“Sounds good to me, Coach,” she breathed. “That was one amazing speech.”
Elliott lifted her into his ar
ms and carried her off the stage. “Get used to them.”
Epilogue
If Elliott turned around one more time to check for Peggy, his neck was going to get a crick. He’d walked into the middle school auditorium, prepared to find an empty seat without any fanfare, but he’d been ushered to the front row by a student with a cowlick and a blazer. Now the seat beside him was the only empty one in the whole damn house, and Alice’s performance was set to begin any minute. Already the lights were dimming in preparation for the curtain to go up, and there was no sign of Peggy.
A fine time for her to be late when he still couldn’t believe his own fortune. Maybe he’d imagined carrying her off the stage and the two nights she’d spent sleeping in his bed, having breakfast in his kitchen, riding along with him to drop Alice off at school that very morning. An elaborate dream created as a coping mechanism by his brain because in reality she’d never agreed to stay in Cincinnati and become his wife. That had to be it, right? He couldn’t possibly deserve to have the most extraordinary woman on the planet sit beside him in the front row.
“Sorry, excuse me, sorry.”
Elliott shot to his feet as Peggy scooted past the other parents in the row, using the sleeve of his dress shirt to dry the sweat on his upper lip. “You’re here,” Elliott said gruffly, glancing down at the giant bouquet of flowers Peggy was cradling in her arms, but unable to keep his attention off her face for too long. “Lord, you don’t stop getting prettier, do you?”
When a scattering of sighs went off around them, Elliott realized he’d spoken out loud. But it was worth the slip when Peggy eyes softened and she did a little twirl, fanning out the edges of her bright green dress. “I knew you’d like this dress because it’s the color of a football field. You’re too easy, Coach.”
“I didn’t even notice.” A smile twitched his lips as he reached out, sliding a hand around her waist and tugging her close for a kiss. “But now that you mention it…”
She laughed against his mouth. “You’re crushing the flowers.”
“If buying flowers is why you were late, they better have magical powers.” He allowed his nerves to show, because there was no more hiding between them. “I was about to send out a search party.”
Sympathy flitted across her expression. “Let’s say they do have magical powers. What would you wish for?”
“A thousand years of you,” Elliott murmured, rubbing his forehead side to side against Peggy’s. “I wouldn’t even have to think about it.”
“Wish granted,” she whispered, sounding a little breathless. “Except for the whole thousand years part.”
Elliott dropped into his seat and pulled Peggy down onto his lap, already knowing they wouldn’t be needing the second seat because he wasn’t letting go of her for a single damn second. And he didn’t give a damn who was watching. When you were granted the love of a woman you, by all rights, should have lost, you didn’t pause to worry about any other perception of yourself save hers. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said into her hair. “If I can get lucky enough to put a ring on your finger, I have to believe anything is possible. Even a thousand years together.”
She looked up at him, contentment making her eyes shine. “There’s nothing to stop us from trying. Maybe if you want something hard enough, it comes true.”
His heartbeat went wilder than any crowd he’d ever heard at his back. “Then consider it done.”
A moment later, the curtain went up and Alice took the stage with her cast mates. After delivering the opening line, her voice only shaking a little, she found Peggy and Elliott in the audience and smiled.
* * *
In all forms, change was the enemy. When things changed, there was a domino effect. Belmont could hear the clacking of the tiles now as they tumbled on their newfound course and the earth took a new shape, a new perspective. So he did what he’d grown far too accustomed to doing when a new situation presented itself and gave him no choice but to get on board or lose…something, because there was always something or someone to be lost, wasn’t there?
He focused on Sage.
And the clacking ceased and his blood stopped raging to get out of his veins and her scent kicked him in the back of the throat and coasted down, down, down, until it coated his heart and made his bones feel less brittle. He couldn’t allow them to be brittle around her because she might have need of them. To lift or carry or fight on her behalf.
Belmont opened his eyes—when did he close them?—and realized he was holding Sage two feet off the ground, her slip of a body wedged between him and the Suburban. His mouth was open on her shoulder, the way it had been doing too often lately, trying to steal a small taste. Anything of her or from her. But even when the catastrophe of change showed up on his doorstep, his mouth didn’t dare take that sample. No, even when his brain grew fevered and the dominoes began to fall in their twisting paths, he remembered to keep his goddamn tongue inside his mouth and off the glowing perfection of her skin.
Perfection. What was he doing holding her so close? He could snap her like a twig if he didn’t get a grip on himself. Problem was, he couldn’t seem to accomplish calm unless they went through this ritual. This ritual of trying to meld their bodies together without crossing the line he’d drawn in the sand for himself. Hold. Cherish. Benefit just enough from her grace to retain normalcy, but not enough to use her or take advantage. God forbid. God forbid anything ever happened to her.
That was just it, though. He’d happened to her. His family had tried to downplay the fact that they’d sent for Sage back in New Mexico when he’d started to get a little too restless, making them nervous. And now it was just the two of them. Just him and the woman he alternated between wanting to carry around on a plush pillow and…wanting to use one hand to tear her dress down the center, while the opposite one climbed up her thighs. What did she look and smell and feel like between her legs? Would she smile if he kissed her there? Or be angry?
Stop. Stop. Never happening. Look at him. He was a fucking disaster. Couldn’t handle the slightest change to his schedule or the prospect of new, untraveled roads ahead for him and Sage. All the unknowns that could touch her while she was in his keeping. So he rocked her side to side on the Suburban and listened to her summer wind of a voice counting one to ten, one to ten, until he joined her. Their heartbeats began to slow down, like the wing beats of bees that had flown straight into a jar of honey. He’d done heroin a few times trying to cope with the anxiety, and this was what the come down had felt like. Lethargic and awful and beautiful and fleeting and forever. But there had never been Sage on the other side of heroin, the slow motion butterfly of her, dancing on the breeze and beckoning him toward sanity. Sage, Sage, Sage.
“We’re okay now,” she whispered against his neck, almost collapsing him with the soothing nature of her voice. “We’re okay, Belmont.”
“Not we,” he slurred. “Me. There’s nothing not okay about you.”
He was grateful for the evening wind hiding his slow, rasping inhales of her scent. “There’s a lot of things not okay with me,” she murmured, hazel eyes trapping him in their depths. “You just don’t want to see them.”
“I can’t see what isn’t there,” he insisted.
Her gaze took on a sheen that had premonition prickling the back of his neck. “I have to tell you something you won’t like, Belmont. I need you to try and understand.”
A circular saw started spinning in the back of his skull, sharpening his denial. She was going to cut him off and he would prolong that forever. Forever. “The way I am might be…wrong in a lot of ways. But the part of me that’s right? It would demolish whatever is making you not okay, Sage. That part of me knows exactly what it’s doing. It’s just waiting for you to ask. Or signal. Or just…” Dammit, he looked at her mouth, that double-arched upper lip that got chapped faster that her lower one. That one she was always licking when she concentrated. “Tell me what I can give you.”
His world suspended itself when
she squeezed her eyes shut. There was something. Something was coming. His heart slowed under the anticipation. When the hazel was focused back on him, he almost begged her to put him out of his misery, but his cell phone rang. His cell phone? Couldn’t be. He’d recorded an outgoing message letting anyone with salvage business know that he’d be gone until further notice and turned the damn thing off back in California.
No, wait. He’d turned it back on to search local hospitals when he’d thought Sage was sick. “Answer it,” Sage said now. “I’ll be here when you’re done.”
“No. Talk to me now.”
Sage shook her head. “It could be important. It could be Peggy asking us to wait, or…” She trailed off, both of them knowing his sister was staying put in Cincinnati for good. They’d both seen it in her backbone when she started walking away. “It could be about your father.”
Not as important as you. Nothing is important as you. But when Sage tapped his shoulders and wiggled, he had no choice but to set her down or embarrass himself. Sage…wiggling. He distracted himself from the memory of the feeling by taking out his phone. Aaron? His brother? “I’ll just…” He answered the phone with a curt “Hold on,” before unlocking the Suburban for Sage and locking her inside. Keeping her within sight, he backed up a few paces and pressed the phone to his ear. “Yeah.”
“I miss you, too,” came Aaron’s dry response.
This was when Belmont would usually make an excuse to get out of the conversation as fast as possible. He kept too many secrets from his siblings, withheld so much that when he was around them for any extended period of time, the pressure of those lies by omission pushed at his insides. But there’d been rare moments of ease between him and Aaron back in Iowa, and he wasn’t ready to let go of it just yet. He sensed Aaron…needed that ease. And there was a need inside Belmont to provide for his siblings. It just was. “How is everything going?”