The Jock and the Dreamer
Page 17
I was selfish. I dreamed for me. I dreamed she’d always be mine. Always be brave and open. That she’d never stop biting her lip. Never stop being patient.
It had taken a lot to get here.
I felt like an idiot sometimes when I thought back to that broken, lonely girl spilling her heart out to me. All I had to do was listen and trust.
That one day we would both be dreamers.
Epilogue
Esmaie
“Enough already!” Sabby bellowed, covering her ears.
Wade chuckled, lacing up his cleats.
The sun shone overhead, bright and beautiful. Bees flew happily through the wildflowers on the edge of the soccer field. Groups of kids gathered around, their little hands lacing their little cleats. Sabby was already dressed and ready to go at five this morning. I smiled at our daughter, my heart and soul filled with so much joy I wasn’t sure how it stayed contained.
“You asked,” I reminded her.
“Yeah, I asked where my name came from. Not how you and Dad met.” She rolled her eyes, as blue and clear as her dad’s. “You guys always get all smiley and gross when you talk about college.”
Wade’s eyes glittered when they caught mine, glowing in the sun. “You all smiley and gross right now?”
I winked. “You always make me smiley and gross.”
A hint of fire blazed in his eyes right where his loneliness used to be. It was harder to spend the nights and days entangled together now that we were parents and I was pregnant with our second child, but we did our best.
Sabby sighed heavily. “See what I mean? I’m going to go start practicing with my friends.” She paused, giving her dad a worried smile. “Is that okay, Coach?”
Wade put on his “coach face,” the one he used to coach the kid’s soccer team. He had been a hot commodity when he enlisted himself in the roster when he retired from playing the game himself. He never made it to the Olympics like his sister, but he had made a name for himself in the industry. Enough of one that when he got the job to coach the Winchester Dragons, he’d gotten three times the admissions.
“Go on,” Wade allowed.
We’d never left England. I fell in love with the quaint house we lived in, and my teaching job at the local primary education center was a dream come true. Filling their little heads with knowledge gave me such a rush. I never thought that one day I’d get to live my dreams. They weren’t big dreams, I supposed. I didn’t want to go to outer space or skydive from Mount Everest. But they were all I needed. Love and happiness, something I hadn’t grown up with. Something my parents hadn’t tried to give me. We rarely spoke, my parents and I, and when we did it was five seconds of banal words. The happier I got, the less and less we spoke.
Maybe my father always knew I was better off leaving the nest. Maybe he knew that he would never give me what I needed, and my mother couldn’t. It didn’t mean I didn’t love them, it meant I had to love myself more. Not all problems are solved; some problems just become easier to live with.
“Why do you think she asks that so often?” Wade asked, sinking down on the grass beside me. I was seated on a blanket his mother had sent over in her “care packages,” aka humongous boxes of comfort items that made me ohh and aww, and made Wade roll his eyes because he knew he had to figure out where to put all of it in our small flat.
“Because she loves hearing the story. And you love telling it.” I peered up at him.
Sabrina would always be a part of his life. We’d named our daughter after her because she had just as much a part of him and I coming together as fate. I wanted Wade to have a piece of her everywhere he went. So we named our daughter Sabby, to keep his first love from fading away. My heart filled with warmth, and all I wanted to do was tackle him in the grass and ride him.
He leaned close and pressed a long, sensual kiss to my lips. Whenever Wade kissed me, the stars aligned, the stability I clung to evaporated—I was so deliciously lost, and there was such beauty in trusting that every single time that missing piece I sought so deeply would bring me back down to him. It would find me.
“I love you,” he clarified, his hand settling on my ring finger and his kiss skimming over my jaw and on their way to my ear. He toyed with the diamond ring. “You were right, you know. All along.”
“About what?” I breathed, my thighs pressing together.
“You were going to be Mrs. Wright one day.” His eyes twinkled when he pulled away.
“You were right, too.”
“About what?” he asked.
“I was crazy all those years ago.” I kissed his biteable lips, sucking gently on his bottom one. “And it wasn’t about you. It wasn’t even about my dreams. It was about hope. Hope that one day I could smile and mean it. Hope that one day I could love my kids the way I had never been loved. Hope that I could love that hard and be loved back just as much. I love you, Wade, and I always will.”
He blinked the emotion from his eyes. “My little dreamer.”
And we dreamed.
Together.
Forever.
THE
END
Thank you so much for reading Wade and Esmaie’s story in The Jock and the Dreamer. I’m an author who doesn’t have a choice sometimes when it comes to the stories I write. Some stories interrupt your writing process and beg to be written. Some stories are worth stopping everything for. This story was one of them.
Thank you,
—Shana Vanterpool
xoxo
More Titles by Shana Vanterpool
Wrecked
Crash into Us
Under the Peaches
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