At night, she still slept in my arms, but I couldn’t ignore the feeling anymore. Something was off, and if that weren’t obvious on its own, it was in the fact that we’d both been lying still for an hour, but neither one of us was asleep. I knew she was staring out my window into the dark of the sky, and suddenly, I couldn’t take the quiet anymore.
“Talk to me,” I murmured.
She stayed completely still in my arms. But she talked.
“I reached out to Ace Sports in New York,” she said.
I didn’t try swallowing the knot in my throat.
I didn’t try to ask if they’d replied either. If she had interviewed. If they had offered and if she’d accepted. I already knew.
I almost asked why she didn’t go with Thorn Sports. With Iain.
But I didn’t, because I knew.
She didn’t want it to look like her boyfriend’s best friend took her in. She knew she’d have earned a job there on merit alone--that Iain would have hired her in a heartbeat based purely on skill.
But that wouldn’t be how it looked.
Stay, I urged her in my head. Stay or let me come.
I wanted to tell her that I’d go work at Thorn while she worked at Ace. But I knew she didn’t suggest this because it was obvious what would happen if I moved to New York. It was already Iain’s town. If I went to work alongside him at Thorn, we would be kings in Manhattan. The spotlight would shine constantly on us. AJ would work in my shadow. And she already said it herself.
She needed to distinguish her career from mine.
I knew she’d worked hard for it. Busted her ass for it before she ever even met me. I knew she wanted to give herself a chance to stand on her own, and as much as I wanted to ask her not to—to stand beside me instead—I couldn’t do that to her.
I loved her entirely too much for that.
So with that knot in my throat, I kissed her shoulder, and I pretended I didn’t ask what I just did, or hear what she just said. I closed my eyes and as I felt her nestle back against my chest, I pretended that this night was like any other. I treasured it somewhere deep in my heart.
But I didn’t tuck the memory safely away in my head.
This one I wanted to let go of.
37
AJ
Two Months Later
The trip to Rhode Island wasn’t short—a three-hour drive from my apartment in Brooklyn Heights to the stadium in Pawtucket.
But I didn’t mind it at all.
For one, I wasn’t driving, which was something I was still getting used to but definitely enjoying at the moment. Also, the company was paying for the ride and beyond that, I’d never ridden along the East Coast before.
Back when I worked at Engelman, all our East Coast trips involved flying everywhere, so it was kind of fun to just gaze out the window, passing through Connecticut on the way up and driving through all the quaint beach towns with their tall grasses, white fences and cute little houses on stilts. The ocean was a moodier blue on the East Coast too, and that was something I needed lately.
The first two weeks without Adam had been hard. Impossible, even.
I knew we were close. Even before we were together, I knew we had a friendship so close it was hard to define. But I hadn’t even realized the true level of our bond till I was without him.
At least a dozen times a day, I itched to tell him something. Sometimes the most trivial, silly, inconsequential things. I saw the New York J-Mac on the train one morning and couldn’t believe I couldn’t tell Adam. The guy was literally a fratty, thirty-something-year-old Josh MacMillan type carrying a basketball, wearing a backwards cap and a hoody that had The J-Mac emblazoned on the back, which was technically worse actually, because even Josh didn’t use “the” before “J-Mac.”
Stupid things like that made me miss him, as did legit things, like craving advice or conversation. Or a laugh.
He was my person for so many more things than I had ever even realized.