Nixon (Raleigh Raptors 1)

His eyebrows raised. “Getting big,” he said, then cringed. “I mean the baby. Not you. You look incredible as always. A little tired, but incredible.” He cut off his ramble, shaking his head. “Are you sleeping enough?”

I found the floor very interesting.

“Lib,” he chided.

“It’s hard,” I said. Not being with you. Not talking with you before we go to sleep. No midnight kisses that burned me from the inside out. “I can’t get comfortable or settle my mind.”

Nixon nodded. “I understand that, but sleep is really important for the baby’s development.”

“I know that.” I didn’t mean for the bite to slip into my tone, but my emotions waged a war inside me. All I wanted to do was reach through the screen and touch him, talk to him with nothing between us. Heal him.

He remained silent for longer than was comfortable.

“You’ve been doing great on the field,” I said, and his eyes met mine.

“You get the games out there?”

“I wish,” I said. “But I look up the live scores every game.”

A hint of a smile played at his lips but was gone in a blink. “Well,” he said. “It’s all I have to focus on. To distract me from…”

My absence.

The baby’s absence.

God, had I become that woman? The one who kept the man’s baby from him out of what? Spite?

No, that wasn’t it.

It was career vs. career, and it wasn’t fucking fair.

“How are the boys?” I asked, desperate for any detail of his life. “Hendrix still up to no good?”

“Yeah, we went out last night,” he said, and my stomach dropped. I smoothed my hand over the large bump instinctively.

“You went out with Hendrix?”

“Yep,” Nixon’s lips popped on the word, and I swallowed a mouthful of acid. Going out with Hendrix usually equated to extravagant clubs, and plenty of women willingly draping themselves all over him…and his companions.

“Did you have a good time?” I asked, unable to keep the hollowness from my voice.

“Are you serious?” There was a growl to his tone I couldn’t help but miss. Nixon’s rough edges were one of the first things that had me falling head over heels for him.

I shrugged. “I’m just curious.”

He raked his palms over his face, shaking his head. “No, I didn’t have a good time. Because you’re not here. Because the mother of my child is half a world away and she can’t sleep, and I have no idea if she’s eating well or if there are poisonous insects close to her living quarters. Or if the water is clean enough for her to drink. I have no control over the situation, no way of protecting you or my baby. So, no, going out for a few drinks and listening to some music was not as fun as it should’ve been.”

Tears welled in my eyes, that hole in my chest cracking another degree. “Nixon, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t ever want to put you through this.”

He blew out a breath. “I shouldn’t have said all that.”

“You should,” I said, imploring. “I want you to talk to me. To be honest with me. I don’t want you to push me away.”

He groaned. “And I didn't want you to run away from me. Remember that?” he asked, his eyes heavy. “You said you wouldn’t run.”

“You promised you wouldn’t, either.” I could barely get the words out, my heart aching at the pain in his eyes.

“And look where we are.”

The silence settled between us, neither one of us having a solution. A month hadn’t helped us figure this out, and I wasn’t sure if there would ever be a way out of the mess we’d tangled ourselves in.

But, there was one thing I knew with absolute clarity.

“I love you, Nixon,” I said, having nothing else to give him but that single truth.

A heavy sigh rushed past his lips as he moved and reached for the keyboard. “You have no idea how much I wish it was enough.” He clicked, and the screen went black.

I shut my laptop with shaking fingers, the sobs wracking my body in waves.

This was my dream life?

This pain, this aching hurt, this half-awake living?

I’d told countless friends and prospective clients to chase their own happiness, and the rest of their lives would fall into place around that singular goal.

Was I happy here? Sure, to some degree. But not in the way that likely benefited anyone in the way it would if I was complete, whole, healthy—both mentally and physically.

Nixon had been a mirror image on that screen—empty and aching and raw.

I’d put that ocean between us, shattering us.

And I wasn’t sure how the hell I was going to cross it to put our broken pieces back together again.

19

Nixon

I rubbed the back of my aching neck as I climbed up the stairs toward our—my—bedroom. Was I really so whipped that I still thought of it as ours even though she’d been gone over a month? Yes, yes I was.