Southern Playboy (North Carolina Highlands 4)

Add a championship to that? Makes me feel all puffed up in the chest.

Makes me feel like shoving this inconvenient desire for fun and family to the side, at least for the next couple years. Two years for literally generations of security and purpose seems like a solid trade to me.

Like Coach said, my scans still look good. Maybe a couple extra years won’t come with such enormous risk.

Think of all the good I could do with that money. For everyone.

I’m trying to let this go, the idea that happiness lies on the other side of a pile of money and a Super Bowl ring. But even though I know, rationally, it’s a bullshit idea, I keep coming back to it. I keep pressuring myself to nab that ring already.

Old habits die hard.

The plane dips, and so does my stomach.

Amelia stirs, tucking her head into the crook of my neck, and now it’s my heart that’s dipping. She’s right here. She’s not an idea or a ghost or a hang-up. She’s the one who promised to put my son and me first. But now I’m hesitating to promise her the same, and it makes me feel like the world’s biggest piece of shit.

Then again, that’s the scaffolding holding up my whole life, isn’t it? The idea that I’m only worth something if I win.

Because here’s the thing: now that I can take in the ten-thousand-foot view, I realize I wanted Kevin and Miguel to convince me to sign the contract. I wanted to escape my new life for a taste of the old. I was ripe for the picking the second I saw them standing in my living room.

Getting on this plane was an asshole thing to do, and I did it anyway. I was reckless.

The same way I was reckless one night three years ago with a woman I’d never see again.

God fucking dammit, what is wrong with me?

“Christ,” I breathe, running a hand over my face.

“You all right?” Miguel asks softly. We’re the only ones awake; Coach is snoring softly in the seat across from mine.

“Tired.” I yawn. “Just really tired. Can’t party like I used to.”

“Rhett, I’m forty. You’re too young to be saying shit like that.”

The words slip out before I can stop them. “I’m too young for a lot of things, but I’m stuck with them now. I’ve become the lame old guy.”

“Adulting sucks sometimes, doesn’t it?”

I look out the window. “Yeah. Yeah, it really does.”

I know something’s wrong when Amelia’s quiet on the ride home from the airport.

I know something’s really wrong when she grabs her bag off the bedroom floor and starts throwing her shit inside it. Luckily Liam and Mom are still asleep upstairs, so I can handle Amelia before I deal with them.

“Hey.” Standing beside her, I put my hand on her wrist. “What are you doing?”

She pauses. Looks at me.

The tip of her nose is pink.

“I’m leaving.”

For a heartbeat, I just stare at her, my brain drowning in the thirty-two drinks I had last night. “But—”

“I thought you were past the whole getting-old-is-such-a-drag bit. Having a family sucks that much, huh?”

My stomach bottoms out. I try to grab Amelia’s elbow, but she yanks it out of my grasp.

“That’s not what I meant.”

She finally looks up from her bag. “What did you mean, then? What about your life sucks? Your million-dollar house? Your beautiful son?” She swallows. “Me? Am I what’s holding you back, Rhett?”

More staring like a mute idiot. Somewhere in the back of my head, I know I need to quit drinking for good—booze is not the friend I thought it was—but I’m too panicked to give it much time.

This.

Here.

Now.

I have to stop what is happening right here, right now. Because the thought of going to bed without Amelia—

It’s the fucking worst.

“I was talking about being hungover.”

“No, you weren’t.” She lets out a breath, closing her eyes, and her shoulders fall, deflated. “You can’t do this, can you? You can’t pass up another shot to make ‘your dreams’”—I wince at the air quotes she uses—“come true. We moved way too fast.”

You know what’s also the fucking worst? Lying to the people you love.

The anger I felt talking to Beau the other night on the porch flares to life inside my gut. Anger at myself, at her, at the world—I don’t know where it comes from, but I do know where I’m aiming it.

“Maybe I can’t,” I spit. “But that’s something you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh?” She opens her eyes. “And why is that?”

“Look how easily you gave up on your dreams. You just let them go, didn’t you? That teaching job you wanted so badly, you messed up, and you quit fighting the second it got hard.”

Her eyes go wide, mouth falling open. She looks like I punched her.

I feel like I punched her. It gives me this horrible, hollow feeling, and at that moment, I wish for nothing more than to be the one who took the blow.