sign you. I’m not going to play for some crap team in the middle of South America. No team worth its shit wants me anymore.”
I turn up the volume on the television and continue to watch Family Guy. This conversation is over.
It’s been two years since the accident and for the most part, I’m fully recovered. But my soccer days are over. I’m strong, but I’ve lost my speed and while my leg has been put back together, one wrong fall, one bad kick to the leg and I’m a goner. Most likely that leg would never work again.
“I did not raise you to be a quitter. I raised you to fight!”
Quickly I stand and face him. “You didn’t raise me at all. Mom gets to take that credit, not you.”
“Oh, now you’re a tough boy, with tough words. I don’t get to claim you as mine because I was busy making you rich? Is that right?”
My dad came back to visit me once every few years when I was little and I loved him fiercely, crying for days every time he’d leave, knowing it would be at least another year before I saw him again. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized I wasn’t important enough for him to stick around. His life has always been soccer and women, in that order. What I want or who I want to be has never mattered to him. “Dad, I will always be your son, but don’t use money as the reason why you were never there. You were too busy with all your various women to want much to do with the mother and son you left in America.”
He snickers, his mouth curling up in a bitter smile, a mocking laugh escaping his throat. “Son, do not claim to be so different from me.”
“We share blood, we once shared a love of soccer, but the similarities end there.”
“I do not think so. Do not be so ignorant to assume I do not know what you were doing with that woman in your car.”
My heart begins to race in panic and sweat beads on my forehead. He cannot know what Megan was doing in my car that night. If my dad wants to think I was having some cheap one-night stand, fine. As long as he never finds out the truth, I don’t give a fuck what he believes. I’ll take that secret to the grave.
Taking a deep breath, I’m not sure how much I want to share with Addison. “Our relationship is complicated. His life is soccer, and he wanted that to be my life as well. After the accident, I accepted my fate. He . . . didn’t.”
“Do you look like him?”
I nod. It’s the one thing I’ve never been able to escape. I can do my best not to follow in his footsteps, but every morning when I look in the mirror I’m reminded I am my father’s son.
“You know, for a big time soccer player, you were a kind of a chubby kid.”
I was a fat kid, no question about it, and I can’t believe she just pointed it out. Not sure what to do with her or that comment. I do the first thing that comes to my mind—tackle her onto the couch, pinning her beneath me and tickling her sides.
“You making fun of me, Green Eyes?” She’s laughing uncontrollably as I hover above her and my hands roam along her sides, pinching as I go. She’s so tiny; my entire form covers her completely. Her head is thrown back as she laughs and her throat is open and exposed. My nose comes down and runs along the line of a vein that is visible under her skin. Her scent invades me, the silkiness of her skin overwhelms me and I want to claim her, press my lips to hers and mark her as mine. I shouldn’t have put us in such an intimate position, but now that we’re here, I don’t know how to back away.
She stills at my gentle caress and her eyes level to mine.
“He probably has a body like yours too,” she mumbles.
I’m in dangerous territory. Hovering above her, those eyes searching mine and silently pleading with me.
Her hands slide up onto either side of my face, and her thumbs run across my bottom lip. My heart thumps in a frantic and erratic pounding inside my chest as her eyes silently beg me to move this further.
“Please,” she whispers.
I am