-28-
JAY
The Buckeye Bar was crowded, loud, and dark. I grinned at Kayla, pleased I’d managed to pull off the surprise. I’d been amped the whole drive down, so excited to see her again. She was still in her cheerleading uniform and her hair was pulled back in a big bow, and my dick radioed to my brain we needed to start planning ways to get under her skirt.
My gaze widened to notice the rest of her family, and my brain delayed the order.
When I looked back at her, she’d stopped talking and the happy expression on her face was frozen. She looked a lot like she had when she’d come into Biff’s.
“What are you doing here?” she asked in a strained voice. Her panic-filled eyes were glued to me.
It wasn’t the reaction I’d expected. Maybe she didn’t like surprises.
“I wanted to see you. This your family?”
The woman seated beside Kayla, obviously her mother, gasped and stared at me like I had emerged from a smoke-filled tunnel at the start of the Super Bowl. “Are you Jason?” She looked excited. “Kayla’s told us . . . well, not a whole lot about you. Grab a chair! Join us.”
Had she just called me Jason?
It was noisy. I must not have heard her right. I glanced around and located an empty chair at a nearby table. The couple there just stared at me when I asked if I could borrow it. I pulled it up to the end of the booth and sat. “Sorry. I drove down to surprise Kayla.”
The guy closest to me, who had to be her brother Cooper, had a shit-eating grin. “She looks surprised, for sure.”
Kayla’s dad was exactly how I expected. He gave off the same vibe my coaches did. Friendly, but evaluating. Twenty bucks said he still reached for a nonexistent whistle hanging around his neck when he saw an OSU play falling apart. His gaze drilled down into me, making me feel like I’d shown up five minutes late to his practice.
“I’m sorry, you drove down?” he asked. “You don’t go here?”
He didn’t know that? I glanced at Kayla, who stared at the tabletop. What the hell was going on? “No.” I cleared my throat, trying to get her attention. She wouldn’t even look at me. “I go to Michigan.”
“—State,” she said abruptly, her focus darting nervously from one parent to the other. “He goes to Michigan State.”
What the fuck? I probably should have expected it, but my jaw nearly hit the table. “You haven’t told them?”
“You go to MSU?” Kayla’s mother straightened sharply, and she turned to her daughter. “Is that why you didn’t tell us about him? It’s not that big of a deal.” Although her tight voice said otherwise. Her attention returned to me, and she looked way less excited now. “Jason, I’m Stephanie, Kayla’s mom.”
So, I hadn’t misheard her. What was I supposed to do? Correct her? Announce to Kayla’s family that she hadn’t even told them my actual name? I went on autopilot, and my tone was flat. “Nice to meet you.”
“Hey, man. I’m Cooper.” The kid held his hand out, and when I took it in a handshake, he used it to pull himself closer to me. His voice went low. “Someone’s going to recognize you. Someone besides me.”
Cooper flashed an easy smile. He wasn’t surprised. At least her brother knew, so that was . . . something? I glanced around, and my heartbeat quickened. Oh shit. Was that Vaughn, Ohio State’s head coach, in the corner? And the entire coaching staff? When Kayla told me about her family tradition, I knew the bar might be hostile, but I hadn’t realized I’d be walking into a lion’s den.
“You catch any of the game?” her dad asked, bringing my attention back to her family. “Kayla said you like football.”
Oh, did she? Once again, she was staring at the table. Irritation dug at me, burrowing deeper with each second she refused to look my direction. “Yeah,” I ground out. “I play, but I had practice earlier.”
There were flat screens all around this sports bar, and the highlights from the Michigan State game were running on the Big Ten Network. I watched skepticism grow on her father’s face as he watched the Spartans score a touchdown at home. “Who do you play for?”
I’d wanted to make a good first impression with her folks, but that had gone out the window as soon as I sat down. And she still wouldn’t fucking look at me. “Why didn’t you tell them, Kayla?” I demanded, filling my voice with sarcasm. “Is it because I’m so awesome, you were afraid they wouldn’t think I’m real?”
A guy was trying to get down the aisle and tripped over the back of my chair, interrupting us. I glared up at him.
“Whoops, sorry, bud—” He stared at me hard, searching the database of his brain. “Do I know you?”
Cooper chose that moment to stand. “Hey, you know where the bathroom is? Is it that way?” He gestured to the back of the restaurant, trying to drag the guy away.
“Haven’t you been coming here since birth?” The guy fired back, not taking his gaze off me. Shit. The lightbulb went on in the man’s head, and his face dropped with surprise. He turned to Kayla’s dad in visible disbelief. “Bob, you realize who this is? What’s he doing here? And at your table?”
“He’s a friend of my daughter’s.” Her father looked confused.
The guy’s face flushed red, like he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. “She’s got some shitty taste in friends!”
I clenched my hands into fists and controlled my breathing. I had walked in here knowing it could be bad, but I didn’t like her being dragged into it.
Bob’s expression darkened. “What? Watch it, pal.”
“Mom, you have to let me out.” Finally, Kayla set her gaze on me, but it was hard and serious. “Time to go.”
The angry fan looming over my chair wasn’t done, though. “She at least getting some good intel out of him?”
That was enough out of this a-hole. I pushed back my chair and stood, giving the guy a good look at my game face. It helped that I was nearly a foot taller, too. My voice was dark. “Get lost.”
“Me?” He wasn’t very smart, because he wasn’t intimidated. “Go back to your truck-driving school in Michigan!”
He’d said it so loud, it caught the attention of the people nearby. Forks froze mid-bite.
“Calm down,” Bob ordered, but when did telling an angry person to calm down ever work?
“This is Jay Harris. You’ve got Michi-scum’s tight end sitting at your table!”
Heads swiveled toward me. Someone dropped a glass in the bar area, and it shattered on the tile floor. The only sound was the ESPN commentary piped through the sound system. No one said a goddamn thing, and I felt the weight of a million pairs of eyes on me. I could handle it when I had a football tucked under an arm, but this was different.
“I think I just blacked out,” Stephanie whispered. “What’d he say?”
A horrified, male voice came from two tables down. “Michigan?”
Cooper reached up and clapped a hand on my shoulder, leaning in. “Just wanted to say this, man, since you might not get out of Ohio alive tonight, but I think you’re an amazing athlete.”
“Thanks?” I was reeling.
When I turned back to her, I discovered Kayla was gone. She’d given up on trying to get out of the booth on her mom’s side and had crawled beneath the table. Was she going to hide under there, rather than face me? I was so pissed, I couldn’t even focus on the bullshit going on around me.
A fan from somewhere yelled out, “Get outta here, douchebag! Go Bucks!”
Kayla emerged from beneath the table and stared up at me with anxiety, maybe even fear. I sighed. “You’ve got some explaining to do.”
“No shit,” her mother said.
“Great,” the angry fan barked. “Take it outside, and don’t come back.”
Fuck this noise. I curled a hand around Kayla’s wrist and stormed away from the table, dragging her with me. Some people hurled profanities, while others clapped as I shoved open the door for her and followed her out.
It was cold outside, but fire burned inside my veins, flaring hotter when I saw my car. Someone had tossed what looked like a milkshake on my windshield. Ice cream was slung all over the front of it, and the Styrofoam cup was caught on a windshield wiper. I’d forgotten about my Michigan license plate holder. Why did Ohio State fans have to be so goddamn obnoxious?
“Oh,” Kayla said, pulling to a stop beside me and staring at my car.
I sighed. “You really do get thrown out of every place you go.”
She looked up and gave me a small, sad smile. “Only when I’m with you.”
“I don’t have a hard time with women.” I leaned over and set my fists on the hood of the car, avoiding the milkshake. “I could find some girl at Michigan to be with me, easy. Maybe even a dozen. These girls hang around outside practice, waiting. Shit, they practically line up.”
Kayla looked sick to her stomach. “You’ve mentioned it before, so why are you telling me again?”
“All those girls care about is the helmet, not the guy underneath it. I don’t want ‘some girl,’ I want you.” I pushed off the car and faced her directly. “You aren’t with me because you like who I play for, you’re with me because you like who I am.” I dropped my voice to a hush. “At least, I thought so.”
She looked pained. “I do!”
“Yeah? Then, why does your mom think my name’s Jason?”
“Because ‘Jason’ doesn’t go to Michigan, and he definitely isn’t their starting tight end. Jay Harris is. My parents are probably in there right now, examining where they went so horribly wrong with me.”
“Be serious.” My frustration was reaching a critical level. She’d met my parents. Spent the whole day with them. Yet hers hardly knew anything about me, and what they did, seemed to be lies. “I’m exhausted from practice, and all I want to do is crash. But instead I drove three hours to see you. Now I’m wondering what the hell I’m doing here.”
“Don’t be like that.” She drew back as if my words had physically hurt her. “I was going to tell them tonight, I swear. I wanted to do it the right way. You have to understand, my family’s going to have a hard time dealing with this.”
Dealing with this? Was our relationship some sort of terrible situation?
The door to the bar opened and her parents came out. When Stephanie’s gaze found me beside her daughter, she stared daggers.
“C’mon,” I said dryly, “let’s find out how your folks are coping with the bad news.”