“HI, LAYLA!” RUBY, the little old lady that works in Linton’s miniscule library waves at me from the top step. “How have you been?”
“Good, thank you. How about you?”
She rambles on about her arthritis and the turnout for the preschool arts and crafts program and how it’s been low and she wants to turn it around. She goes on and on. I try to nod as best I can and seem interested and not like I’m listening to Branch standing behind me whispering that she looks like the old lady from some cartoon he used to watch as a child.
“I’m glad to hear it,” I say when I can find a moment to cut in. “We need to get going, Ruby. Take care.”
“You too. Good to see ya.” And with a wave, she disappears inside the library.
Branch and I turn the corner and start up Main Street. On each corner is a big pot fashioned to look like a basket filled with flowers. There’s a little plaque on the front of each one with the name of the citizen that volunteers their time maintaining that particular arrangement.
American flags hang off the streetlights, fluttering in the warm afternoon sun over the street. Mix in the smells of Carlson’s Bakery and the sounds of the children two streets over at the town pool and it’s the perfect summer day.
“What’s that smell?” Branch asks, wrinkling his nose. “It smells like heaven.”
“That’s the coffee cake at Carlson’s. They use butterscotch pudding in the cake and it’s seriously divine.”
“Want to get some?”
“I just had a hot ham and cheese sandwich, a pickle spear, and a side of home fries. Do you think I need coffee cake?”
He considers this as we walk along. “Will it make you happy?”
“Yeah, but I don’t need it.”
“My job isn’t to decide what you need. It’s to make you happy.”
Blushing, I kick a pebble and watch it roll into the gutter. “I think I said it’s for you to be nice.”
“Doesn’t me being nice make you happy?” he asks.
“Yes. Mostly. But it also makes it harder,” I admit, looking at him out of the corner of my eye. “Could you be likeable yet irritating? Can you find that balance?”
He laughs, leading me to Beecher Street. It’s a little side street that houses a few businesses and lots of little homes built in the early nineteen hundreds. The houses have hanging ferns dangling from porches and yapping dogs in the yards. It’s adorable.
Beecher Street rises as we reach the middle and sitting on top of the crest is a railroad track. On the other side is the only doctor’s office in town, the post office, and Crave.
As we near the bar, Branch shoves his hands in his pockets. “I want to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“I guess it’s half tell you, half ask you.”
“Okay,” I laugh.
“When you left the cabin that weekend,” he starts slowly, “you saw something online about me, didn’t you?”
The image of him with that girl on his lap, one I’d mostly forgotten since the appointment with Bai, pops in my brain. My stomach churns.
“I thought so,” he mumbles.
“It doesn’t matter,” I point out. “You and I were nothing then. We’re nothing now,” I add for good measure.
“Then why did you leave?”
“Let me ask you a question.”
He doesn’t answer, but gives me a look like he’s not sure he wants to go this route. I go on anyway.
“What if the night you and Finn went to Crave, Poppy and I had gone out and I had slept with someone? And then you and I still hooked up the next day like we did. How would you feel about that the next morning?”
“Well,” he draws out. “I’ve actually been in that position more times than I care to admit.”
Curling my lip, I try not to show my total disgust.
“I’ll be honest, it didn’t generally bother me because I didn’t expect to see that girl again anyway,” he admits.
“Well, all right then.”
“What do you think happens on road trips, Layla? Hell, there are guys on my team that have little set-ups for each city in our league. There’s a girl in every zip code we routinely go to just waiting for that direct message.”
“That. Is. Disgusting.”
He laughs. “That. Is. Life. On. The. Road. Sure, there are guys out there who avoid it. There are a few—very few—that have something at home strong enough to keep their dick dry. The rest just do what they can to not give their wife enough ammo to void the pre-nup.”
I shiver before I realize it, imagining living a life like that. Constantly worried. Constantly second-guessing. Constantly having your self-esteem whittled away. Just thinking about a life marred with insecurity and self-doubt makes me anxious.
“Callum didn’t make it out to be that bad,” I admit. “Lord, now I only imagine how dry his dick was not while we were together.”
Branch laughs. “I’m sure it wasn’t. But now you know why the league divorce rate is over eighty percent.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Afraid not. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? To anyone. It’s fucked up on so many levels.”
We stop in front of a little bench at the end of a dead end street that faces the water’s edge. Branch sits and I follow suit.
“That’s why I won’t get married. Not at least until I retire.” He looks at me out of the corner of his eye, gauging my response. “I don’t want that on my conscience, and I don’t feel like it’s a good thing to do to someone, especially if you think you like them enough to consider such a thing.”
He strokes his chin. “There’s this guy on the team. He was married, had the cutest little boy, right? They used to have me over for barbecues and whatever. He had a great set-up. Then he got swept away in all the press when we won the championship. Next thing I know, he’s got his side piece an apartment close to mine and she’s picked up dick because he’s not paying attention to home. They’re both ruined. It’s awful.”
“I don’t even know what to say to that.”
“It seems ridiculous with my reputation, I know, but it is responsible to not be responsible. I make no promises, no commitments, and no one gets seriously hurt because it’s not serious.”
I don’t give him a lot to go on. I just watch him blankly, processing everything he’s told me and well aware that he didn’t answer my original question. Like he reads my mind, he grins.
“Your original proposed situation had you and Poppy going out and you fucking around with someone, not a random girl doing it,” he says softly. “When I think about it in that light . . . I’d have been pissed.”
“Why?”
He considers this. “A competition thing, I guess. It would’ve bothered me to think someone else had you and you were comparing us or maybe you were thinking of him and not me.”
“Exactly,” I say, giving him a shy smile. “But I wouldn’t say I was pissed.”
“What were you then?”
“I was embarrassed, I think.”
“By what?” he blurts, a laugh in his voice. “What could you possibly have been embarrassed about?”
“That I was a number,” I say, slipping a laugh in my voice too. “Same reason as you, I guess, I’m just a little less confident about it.”
“For what it’s worth and it may be worth nothing, but I didn’t fuck that girl that night.”
I don’t want to be relieved, but there’s no denying the sigh that escapes my lips. “So you didn’t do anything with her?”
“I didn’t say that, but I didn’t sleep with her. I’m not going to lie to you, even if it’s not what you want to hear. I also didn’t sleep with Selma Puress. Just throwing that out there in case you saw a picture online.”
Looking straight ahead, I just nod.
“I know what that sounds like, but I didn’t realize I’d be explaining myself later.”
“Why are you?” I look at him, my brows pulled together. “Why are you telling me this, Branch?”
He shrugs and looks at the water. “I don’t know. Maybe it felt like it mattered.”
“Do you think I want to hear that? I mean, I can’t get mad at you and you certainly weren’t wrong, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear some girl had her lips around your cock hours before you stuck it in me.”
“Gee, just put it out there bluntly, why don’t you?” he grins.
“Why mince words?”
He looks at the sky, a softness on his rugged features. “Maybe,” he breathes, “maybe it bothered me to consider you thought I just wrote you off like another girl.”
“But didn’t you?”
“Depends how you look at it. Did I think I’d be back here? Hell, no. But I knew from the moment you got out of that car and shook my hand that I was going to have a hard time putting you in a box, you know?”
“I hate boxes, if you’ll remember,” I say, referring back to our unpacking conversation.
He laughs. “This is what I mean. The more time I spent with you, the more I wanted to spend even more. Even that first night, the night we went to Crave, if I could’ve gotten Finn to let me stay behind with you, I would’ve.”
His words are sweet and maybe even what I want to hear. Still, it’s just another one of those things that will make it even more painful when I’m home with the baby and he’s sleeping with half of Detroit or wherever they are.
“This conversation seems a little too deep for late morning,” I say, getting up and starting down the sidewalk. He follows a step behind, giving me the space he can tell I need.
His words at any other point in my life would’ve left a huge grin on my face and maybe even had me riding his cock if the timing was right. But with it following up the words that he’ll never be serious, never settle down, until he’s out of the league? That makes it a little less sweet being that I’m pregnant with his child.
Whatever I had vaguely hoped in the back of my mind is now erased and the stark reality of the world I live in is blindingly bright. All I can hope for is for Branch to love his child and for us to co-parent to some extent.
We reach his car and he opens my door. “Want to get some coffee cake?” he asks.
“Is this your plan? Feed me to keep me happy?”
I sink into the plush leather seats that he helped adjust until it was at the perfect position for me before we left.
“I’ve noticed that you’re more manageable with a plate of food in front of you,” he winks.
“Branch?”
“Yeah, Sunshine?”
I take in the way the sun reflects on his hair and the way his eyes look even bluer than normal when he’s wearing a white shirt.
“I’m going to need two slices—one for now and one for the middle of the night.”
His laughter trickles through the car as he shuts the door.