When I get to my room Piper’s still asleep. I take a shower and realize I feel … empty. Just completely, utterly empty.
I try to sleep for a while but I can’t stop thinking of him. His face and the way he smiles. How sincere he is. How beautiful. How amazingly good he feels when he’s inside me, groaning my name as he comes in hot, seedy bursts. I think about his rule, now broken. His parents, gone, just like mine. I get up and try to do some sketching but I only end up drawing his face, which I can’t even begin to do justice. So I draw a football helmet. And the number 11.
Maybe I should have tried to explain to him more clearly how broken I am. Maybe I shouldn’t have just left like that. But I knew what he would say. Stay. Don’t go.
I’m scared. Scared of needing him as much as I already do. Scared that he’ll hurt me and leave me, like everyone always does.
Piper comes back into the room after a shower. She’s a sundress and has a towel wrapped around her wet hair. “Have you seen all this stuff on social media? There’s a football game that starts in less than an hour and Blake Travis is nowhere to be found. Everyone’s looking for him. Some guy saw him running through a dorm this morning but he hasn’t been seen since. He’s not at his house and he’s not answering his phone. Isn’t that crazy? I wonder where he is.”
I stand next to her and look at her phone as she scrolls. It’s all people are talking about. The starting quarterback is missing.
“Did he ever find you, Skye?” Piper starts brushing her long, gold-red hair.
“Yeah. He did.”
She stops and stares at me. “He did? What happened?”
“He invited me to have breakfast with him, at his house. So I did.”
“You went to Blake Travis’s house? What happened?”
“We talked. We … hung out. Then I left.”
“Do you know where he could be, Skye? Did he say anything?”
“No. I mean, I left his house and he was still there when I left.”
“What time was that?”
“It was … ” I hesitate, but what the hell. “Around five o’clock this morning.”
“You slept there?”
“We drank some champagne. It was his birthday. We slept on this lounge chair by his pool.”
Piper’s studying my face, but she’s not going to push me. I realize how lucky I am to have her as a friend. She’s more interested in how I feel about what’s just happened to me than the gossip. “Are you okay, Skye?”
I brush a tear away. “I’m fine. I’m just … I wonder where he is. I hope he’s okay. I left kind of abruptly.”
She gives me a hug, and it’s just what I need. “The football team is freaking out,” she says. “There are NFL scouts coming to this game. They need their quarterback.”
And then it occurs to me. When I looked up and you were gone, I couldn’t handle it. So I ran up into those stands and I asked your friend about you and when she told me, I’ve been counting down the seconds until I could see you again. Because I knew where I might find you. Right here.
I grip her hands. “I think I know where he is. We have to go find him.”
We scramble around to finish dressing, then we run all the way to the art building.
Blake is sitting there, leaning against the wall with his knees bent and his head resting on his arms, in the exact spot where we sat together when he first came looking for me.
“Oh my God,” says Piper. “There he is.”
He stands as I run over to him. He’s as gorgeous as always … and angry. But as I step closer to him, his anger fades away, to pure relief.
He runs a hand through his disheveled hair. As he does, his shirt rides up and I can see the rippled muscles of his six pack. The same six pack my fingers were touching just hours ago as I rubbed my naked body against his and we came together.
“My girl has come back to me.”
“Blake, I’m so sorry. For leaving so suddenly.” I can see in his eyes that he’s already forgiven me.
All I really want to do is give him everything he wants. If only it was that easy.
Maybe it is that easy.
“I want to know why,” he says. “Why did you leave so suddenly? Tell me the reasons so I can fix them.” He takes my hands.
“I just … I got scared. I’m not good at … anything. I’m not good at figuring out how to do things the right way when it comes to other people.” Damn it, I’m crying again. Now that I’ve started, I just can’t seem to stop.
Blake takes me in his arms and he kisses me. It’s a gentle kiss, worshipful and searingly devoted. “I’m not ‘other people’, Skye. I’m yours. And you’re mine. I told you.”
“But you can’t know that already, Blake! We’ve only –”
“OH YES I CAN! I CAN AND I DO! I DO KNOW THAT!” He’s holding my face and he has tears in his eyes. He stops shouting but his voice is husked with the intensity of his words. “I do know. Okay? I know. You’re the one. I don’t care that you’re shy and you don’t know what to do or how to do it. Neither do I. But we’re going to start now and we’re going to learn. We’re friends, you said. Friends don’t walk out on each other. Okay?”
Friends also don’t romp nakedly by the hot tub and make love all night and give each other multiple simultaneous orgasms that are so mind-blowingly good and beautiful, it just about changes your outlook on everything, I want to point out. But he already knows that. I can see it right there in his ocean-blue eyes that he knows that. “Okay.”
Blake kisses me again and I kiss him back. I can’t help it. I want to believe everything he says and pretend that everything’s going to be just as he says it is.
I whisper. I don’t want him to worry. “I’m on the pill, by the way.”
He doesn’t bother whispering. “I didn’t care if you were or weren’t. I’m all in, Skye. All of it. Everything. That’s also part of my rule.” He narrows his eyes at me. “By the way.”
Piper clears her throat. She’s giving us as much privacy as she can but she has other things on her mind. She tries to give Blake a stern reprimand. “Now that we have that all sorted out, Mr. Quarterback, there’s somewhere you need to be, and pronto. A Cowboys scout has his eye on you, apparently, and he is not going to be impressed by a QB1 who shows up late.”
Blake looks at his watch. “Shit.”
“Kick-off’s in fifteen minutes,” Piper says.
Blake holds my hand and won’t let me move. “I’m not playing football unless you’re there to watch me, Skye,” he says. “Will you come?”
“Of course she’ll come,” says Piper. “She’ll be right there next to me in the front row cheering you on.”
Blake’s still looking into my eyes. “And you’ll wait for me after the game? There are some things we need to talk about. A lot of things.”
Sometimes in life – although I’ve never done this until I met Blake Travis – you just have to go with it. You can’t let fear hold you back anymore and you have to be willing to get hurt to get to the good stuff. The real stuff. I decide he’s worth the risk. “Yes.”
He takes me in his arms. He’s looking at me like he did that very first time he saw me. With such sureness it hurts my heart. You.
Blake kisses my face. My cheeks. My lips. “Please don’t ever do that to me again.” His voice is low and husked with emotion. “Please don’t leave me. I love you, Skye. And I know what you’re thinking: you can’t love me, you don’t even know me. But I do. I know enough. And I’ll learn. Please let me try. Because the second I saw you, I knew you were for me. I’ve been looking and hoping for you for such a long time and then there you were. All golden and perfect and dazzling me with all that you are. And then when I heard your voice and you let me walk with you and be near you, I fell even harder if that’s possible. And then when you kissed me, everything made sense. Everything felt right. And real. Because you’re nirvana, baby. And now I’m ruined. Addicted. Obsessed. Call it whatever you want. I’m going to spend the rest of my life loving you and trying my hardest to make you love me back. Because I love you. That’s it: I love you. Please don’t leave me again, Skye, without at least giving me a chance to change your mind.”
My Blake is such a romantic. “Shh,” I say, kissing him. “I’m not going to leave you. I’m right here. I’m yours. And you’re mine.” How can it be any other way? He is mine. Letting him go just doesn’t make sense. Being apart from him is far more painful than trusting him. I want to try. I want to try with all my heart.
“Ahem.” Piper breaks our little bubble. We both look over at her. She’s got her hands on her hips but she’s smiling. Her eyes are shiny, like she’s crying too. “I hate to break this up, Travis, but you need to get to the stadium now and throw a bunch of touchdown-scoring passes.”
“She’s bossy as hell,” Blake mutters to me.
“She has three older brothers. And they’re all football players.”
“Well, that explains a lot,” Blake says.
“Kick-off’s in less than ten minutes, QB.” Piper’s clearly used to oversized male egos. She has one eyebrow raised. “Time to go.”
Blake drives us to the stadium, holding my hand the whole time. He insists we go with him through the players’ door and he orders some guy to get us two seats right behind the bench.
Blake plays a perfect game and the Longhorns win 21-6.
After the game, once the mobs of people have swarmed around their hero, and the scouts have secured their meetings with him, Blake comes to find me. Piper and I have been talking to some other girls. Piper met one of them at a party last night. Her name is Mia. She seems nice and is also a fine arts student, like me. It even turns out we have some classes together. We arrange to meet for coffee before our Tuesday class to talk about the projects we’re working on. And just like that, I have three friends.
One of those friends is walking towards me. He changed out of his football gear. He’s dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt that hugs the sculpted muscles of his shoulders, and he’s staring right at me like he’s on some kind of a mission. Of course I’m captivated by his rugged perfection, as always. But I notice, too, that his eyes are bloodshot. He had a late night, after all, and didn’t get much sleep. We were too busy proving his rule. But more than anything else, as he gets closer to me, he looks happy. He smiles at me and it’s so sweet and heartfelt I almost feel myself starting to cry again. When he leans in to kiss me, even with all these people watching, I let him. I kiss him back. “Skye. Will you do something for me?”
“Depends on what it is.”
He smiles. “Come home with me. I didn’t get to tell you the things I wanted to tell you this morning, before you bolted.”
“I already said I was sorry about that.” I blush, embarrassed now by my crazy behavior. Not the other crazy behaviour that involved getting down and dirty with the star quarterback. That, I don’t regret in the slightest and in fact can’t wait to do it again.
As if he’s reading my thoughts, he says, “See, I had some other plans I didn’t quite get to. Quite a few of them, actually.” He leans closer, whispering in my ear. “I’m suffering from withdrawal. I need you.”
I blush even more. “You just played three hours of football, Blake. Maybe you should rest.”
“Are you kidding me? I don’t want to rest. I want to get down on my knees and beg you to be with me. I want to kiss you and taste you and make sweet love to you, every second of every day for the rest of time.” Then he says, “I don’t want to be alone. I want you, Skye. I love you.”
His words sort of funnel themselves into the broken fissures of my heart. You know that saying about how cracks let the light in? Well, those cracks in my soul are flooding with light. His light.
So I say the most honest words I ever have. “I want you too, Blake Travis.”
Blake lifts me up like we’re crossing some kind of threshold and maybe we are.
Then he carefully places me in the passenger seat of his black Mustang and he takes me home.