While the sentiment gave me a case of the warm and fuzzies, it also shoved me a little further into that dangerous territory just outside of the friend zone. I had almost convinced myself that being friends with him wouldn’t be as bad as not having him in my life at all, but now I was starting to question my sanity. If Zach planned on blurring the lines between us, I wasn’t sure I could have anything more than a professional relationship for five and a half more weeks. After that, I’d fly back to my shitty apartment in California and lick my wounds. He’d eventually fade back to being my biggest regret, maybe with some happier memories than I’d had for the past few years.
You there?
I sighed heavily, rolling my neck from one side to the other. This man was going to crush me if I let him. Yeah. Why aren’t you having fun with your friends?
Because you’re not here.
Even if it’d ruin everything, I had to put a stop to this. Now. I’d left because I needed to protect my heart and my sanity. Zach, don’t.
Don’t what? I’ve been thinking tonight. About us.
There is no us. I stared at the words before sending my reply.
I wasn’t shocked when the reply came almost instantly. There could be. Let’s talk. We were good, except for me being an asshole to you. I want to fix that.
No, you don’t.
Yes, I do.
How much have you had to drink? There was no other logical explanation for his sudden change of heart. He had to be drunk.
Enough to shut off that part of my brain telling me all the reasons I can’t still love you.
We’re not doing this, Zach. I can’t do this with you. Not now. Maybe later. Maybe after filming wrapped, if he still felt the way his drunken courage made him admit, then we could discuss whether we were good enough together to give our relationship another chance. But not when he needed to focus on training camp. Not when I was trying to prove I deserved to be part of the show – even if I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with the steering I could already see production doing to get good clips for TV. Not when we were both in a daze after reuniting after so long. We weren’t stupid kids anymore, and we had to prove that through our actions.
A door slammed downstairs. Shit. “Where you at, Griffin?”
He sounded pissed. That wasn’t what I expected. I thought about staying silent, but knowing him, he’d go room by room through the house until he found me. And if he was angry that I wasn’t falling at his feet, thanking him for giving me a second chance, I wasn’t sure being out on a balcony was the safest place for me. Not that I thought he’d intentionally do anything to hurt me, but again, I was pretty sure he was drunk off his ass. Accidents happen, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to die.
“Upstairs,” I called back. I gathered my book, empty beer bottles, and phone, taking them inside. I had to get out of my room before he got up— Shit.
Zach threw open the door and stalked across the room until he was standing directly in front of me. He wasn’t tall, but with those broad shoulders and the muscles he’d added onto his frame since college, he was like a brick wall blocking my way to the door. “You’re not calling the shots. Not this time,” he warned me.
I swallowed hard, struggled to draw breath into my lungs. He was definitely drunk, but not so far gone that his words were slurred or I worried he’d black out and not remember this in the morning. He rested his hands on my hips and started walking, forcing me backwards with every step. “Zach, don’t do this,” I pleaded with him. My body still wanted him, or at least parts of it did. Other parts kept reminding me how distraught I’d been when I’d walked away from him, and I wasn’t ready to go through that again. “Please, Zach.”
Zach shoved me onto the mattress, towering over me as he stood at the edge of the bed. “Don’t talk. Not this time. I let you talk before; this time it’s my turn to talk.”
“O-o-okay,” I stammered.
“I want to hate you,” he admitted, scrubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “Life would be so damn easy if I hated you. But I realized tonight that I don’t hate you. I love you. I always have, even though I shouldn’t. I can’t change that. And now, my teammates know about me and said they’ll have my back if anyone gives me shit for it, so there’s no reason for me to not love you. Expect that part about how you wrapped a chain around my heart and dragged it down the road when you left. Maybe Nate’s right. Maybe what we need comes into our life when we need it and it’s up to us to recognize that.”
“Zach, don’t. Please,” I begged again. His words were giving me hope, and I’d been through that before. With him. If he was sober, I’d have thrown myself into his arms and thanked him for cracking open the door to reconciliation. But he’d been drinking. He’d had a stressful night. He’d come out to his teammates. There was far too much going on in his mind for him to be thinking clearly. “If you really mean what you’re saying, you’ll still mean it tomorrow. Let’s talk when you’re not so… excitable.”
“Fuck that,” Zach spat out. “You think I’m saying this because I’m drunk, don’t you?” I did, but I’d be damned if I was going to admit that to him. “You’re right. I am. But that doesn’t mean I’m talking out of my ass. If anything, being drunk is helping, because I can’t hold back what I’ve been wanting to say to you since I saw you in that meeting. This shit has been there the whole time, but now, I’m not trying to convince myself it’s a bad idea. And what do I get in return? You telling me it’s a bad idea. Maybe I should take that as a sign that this really is a stupid fucking idea.”
He turned to storm out of the room and I jumped off the bed. It’d be smart to let him walk away and cool down, see where his head was at in the morning, but fear was stronger than logic. If he walked out of what I’d started to think of as my bedroom, he may very well shut down and we’d never have this chance again. I reached for him and he jerked out of my weak grasp. His shoulders slumped and he leaned against the wall. “I’m not trying to fuck you because I’m drunk.”
“I didn’t realize you were trying to fuck me at all,” I quipped. My cock twitched, reminding me how long it’d been since anyone had given me a good, hard fuck.
“Well, not just that,” Zach admitted with an empty chuckle. “But I can admit I’d thought about the night ending that way.”
I placed my hands on Zach’s shoulders and turned him around to face me. We stood so close our feet were touching. I leaned in slightly, resting my hands on his hips. If this went the way I feared, tonight would be my biggest regret in life, not the night I walked away the first time. “I know you think I’m being an asshole by telling you we can’t do this, but I think you also know I’m right. I’m not saying never; I’m just saying not tonight. Not when you’ve been drinking. At all. If we do this, I want both of us clearheaded. Because if I’m with you again, I’m not walking away. And I won’t let you run, either.”
“That’s what I want, Grif. It’s what I’ve always wanted,” Zach admitted. He lifted his hand to my face and I closed my eyes, reveling in the warmth of his touch. I felt his body shift and I knew what was coming. I swallowed back the emotions overtaking my body. Bit back the pleas for him to ignore everything I’d just said and throw me back on the bed again, consequences be damned. His breath ghosted over my neck as he spoke, the words shooting through my body like an electric shock. “I know you don’t want to hear it right now, but I still love you. It was always you, and no matter how much I tried to hate you for destroying what we had, I knew why you did it. Deep down, I knew you did what you thought was best for both of us. But it wasn’t, because now we’ve both spent three years alone and miserable, because no one since then could compare to what we had.”
Not trusting my voice, I did what any man would do when they’re that close to the other half of their soul. I opened my eyes so I could watch him as I pulled his hips closer to mine. And then, I kissed him. It wasn’t sloppy and desperate; it was a promise to him that we would be talking about this more in the morni
ng. Hopefully, early enough that we’d be able to spend the rest of the day not talking. Zach moaned into my mouth, sliding his hand around to the back of my neck, carding his fingers through my hair, tugging slightly to expose my neck. He broke the kiss and I knew we needed space between us, but I was frozen in place. His mouth moved lower, sucking and biting at the side of my neck. My knees nearly buckled when he found the hollow behind my ear and started teasing me.
“Always you,” he whispered before standing straighter and pushing me back just enough to slide out from between me and the wall. “If you change your mind tonight, you know where to find me.”
As tempting as it was to follow him to his room, I stripped out of my clothes and crawled into my own bed. I turned out the light, punched my pillow, and closed my eyes. I wasn’t sure what frightened me more: Zach not remembering what’d almost happened tonight, or him telling me he’d meant every word he said.
It would’ve been easy to climb into Zach’s bed. Curling into his side, using his chest as a pillow had always been the perfect cure for restless nights in the past. And if he was still the way he was in college, he’d be so sound asleep that he’d barely even move as I settled against his side. I could have one night next to him, just in case he did change his mind in the morning. But I didn’t, because when I was next to him, I wanted him to know I was there. I love you, too, Zach, I whispered into the darkness and rolled over, trying one last time to get some sleep. It never came.
Ten
(Zach)
I only had two days left before I had to report to training camp. At the beginning of last week, I’d wished for time to fly by because I didn’t want Griffin invading my new home any longer than necessary. Now, I didn’t want to think about going back to the real world, where we wouldn’t be alone together. He’d informed me over breakfast that he had ordered a few things for my house. That was bittersweet, because as grateful as I was for his artistic flair (his words, not mine), I knew how much it’d hurt to see the pieces he’d chosen after he went back to California, knowing I’d totally blown my shot to convince him I was serious about giving us another chance.
I’d told deShawn everything last night once most of the guys had taken off to get back to their families. I’d admitted to him that Griffin and I knew one another, intimately. At first, he’d scolded me for getting involved with one of the crew members. It’d never happened before, for obvious reasons, but he worried that Griffin would lose his job and I could get in trouble with the league. It was a bitter pill to swallow when he pointed out that we still had no clue how the rest of the league was going to take the news about me being gay, but I knew he was saying it because he worried for me. That’s when the dam broke and I told him everything. He was the one who convinced me I was hurting both of us by being so hung up on the past that I wouldn’t give him another shot. So, I had. I’d ignored the bit of advice about waiting until I sobered up, because I was so damn certain Griffin would be happy about my change of heart and we’d have epic make-up sex, not fallen asleep in one another’s arms until sometime after the sun started peeking over the horizon.
But that wasn’t what happened at all. And then, Griffin got a call from the production company while we were cleaning up the kitchen and Liam picked him up for some important meeting. Until then, I’d almost forgotten about why he was here.
When Griffin returned, he looked like someone had kicked his puppy. “Hey, you okay?”
“Other than being bitched out in front of my coworkers because I have nothing usable for promos, yeah, I’m great.” I followed him through the house and out to the deck. That’s where we wound up most days when we weren’t trying to avoid one another, and it was where we did most of our talking.
“I did warn you I was a boring person,” I reminded him.
“It’s not your fault.” Oh, but it was. I’d watched Out of the Pocket every year and I knew what they wanted for the first episode of the season. They expected the players to give fans a glimpse of their private lives. Fans wanted to watch the players going through prep for the season, working out logistics with their spouses, stupid shit that had nothing to do with the game. The problem was, I’d done exactly that and it hadn’t turned out well for Griffin. I needed to give him something that’d get the bosses off his back without turning the show into a soap opera.
“Hey, we still have a couple of days before I have to report. Let me make a few calls and we’ll hit the road.” There was a chance this was going to backfire spectacularly, but it was the best I could offer. Hopefully, my half-cocked plan wouldn’t blow up in my face. Because if I pulled this off, Griffin would become the hero of the entire show.
I considered telling Griffin to pack his shit because we weren’t coming back to the house, but that was just dumb. Because if this went well, I fully intended to bring him back here and fuck him, the way he’d suggested and refused last night. It was killing him to not know where we were headed, but this had to be a surprise for him. If he knew what I was about to do, he’d object.
I was right. As soon as we took the exit toward my parents’ house, he started trying to get me to tell him what I was up to. “You’ll find out soon enough,” was all I’d give him.
“Why do I have a feeling you’re going to do something incredibly stupid?”
“Because you know me,” I teased. I’d given my parents a heads-up that we were coming to see them and that they had to pretend Griffin wasn’t there. If I hadn’t, my mother would’ve fawned all over him and my dad would’ve threatened to kick his ass. Dad accepted my relationship with Griffin as well as could be expected, but when it’d fallen apart, he’d constantly reminded me that distractions would keep me from getting where I wanted to go. When the letter came that I was on academic probation because I’d taken up drinking as my new pastime after Griffin left, Dad proclaimed him enemy number one. I hoped Dad would eventually forgive him and understand that both of us shouldered part of the blame for the past. “Seriously, it’ll be fine. You need something more exciting than me sorting through boxes at the house, so I’m going to give you that.”
“Zach,” he hissed, drawing out my name by a few syllables. “Whatever you’re thinking of doing, you need to remember I can’t delete anything I record. And I can’t ask production to not use it.”
“Yeah, you’ve made that pretty clear,” I responded. “And that’s why I called Mom ahead of time to make sure they know they can’t acknowledge you while you’re filming. It’ll be fine. Promise.”
“Never thought I’d say this, but I really wish I had your optimism,” he grumbled. “Please, don’t do anything you’re going to regret for my sake.”
I was really getting sick of him projecting his own fears onto me. Just because he’d done something he regretted because he thought it was best for me didn’t mean I was doing the same. Sadly, I was too self-absorbed for that shit. If I wasn’t, I’d have realized how much of a dick I was to Griffin when we were together. But I didn’t, because I did what I wanted, everyone else be damned. If Nate heard me talking that way about myself, he’d tell me I was full of shit, because if my career wasn’t part of the equation, that wasn’t who I was at all.
I was trying to get better about being such a conceited asshole when it came to my own dreams, but it was a slow process so far. That’s why I’d insisted Nate take time to sort out shit with his new boyfriend rather than being the one to follow me around, making sure my life was in order.
Dad met us in the driveway, arms crossed tightly over his chest, glaring as Griffin stepped out of the car. Maybe it was too much to hope Dad wouldn’t speak his mind regardless of how I pleaded with him to bite his tongue. “He’s going to kill me, isn’t he?”
“Nah, he’s mellowed in his old age,” I assured Griffin as I waited for him to get his camera out of the back of my car. “It might be a bit much to hope he’ll give you a big hug and tell you he’s missed you, though.”
“Great.” Griffin’s shoulders sagged. “So
you’re saying he hates me and isn’t happy I’m here.”
“I didn’t say that,” I pointed out, slamming the trunk deck closed. “You’re more welcome than religious zealots and political activists.”
“Well, that’s reassuring.” I patted Griffin on the back before leading him to the front of my childhood home. “Mr. Kendricks, it’s good to see you again.”
Dad let out a noncommittal grunt. Baby steps. It was better than him telling Griffin to get his sorry ass off Dad’s property. “Let’s get this over with. Got shit to do today. No one told me I needed to pencil in whatever this is.”
“Dad, don’t be an ass,” I scolded him. Since I no longer had to live under his roof, I wasn’t anxious about calling him out for being an asshole. “I promise, this won’t take long.”
The house smelled like lemon cleaner and Windex. It seemed Mom hadn’t listened when I told her there was no need to clean before we came over. She took her job as a housewife very seriously and the house was always clean. But she’d kicked it up a notch, knowing there would be a camera in the house. I grimaced as I stepped into the living room. Everything I loved, everything that made our house a home, was missing. The ratty afghan that’d been a wedding gift to my parents wasn’t draped over the end of the couch. The pillows Nate had sewn during Home Ec were gone, probably because she kept them mostly to remind us that it was okay to be whatever we wanted to be, even if that briefly meant thinking sewing was a better elective than shop class.
Griffin quickly got to work testing the lighting, which was atrocious. “Maybe we should do this outside,” I suggested.
“Nah, this will work,” he responded, although I wasn’t sure he believed it. The thought crossed my mind that he was humoring me and hopeful that the footage would be crap so they wouldn’t be able to use it. “Mrs. Kendricks, would it be okay with you if we open the blinds to get a bit of light in here?”
Down By Contact (Wilmington Breakers Book 1) Page 8