brought him out of the serious moment by telling him he wasn’t going to make it to the pros. It had worked.He’d smiled and tackled me, but we’d both known the truth. He would make it, and his fear was a legitimate one. There were a million and one people out there who would love to have a piece of his pie. Who would stop at nothing to have a piece of it.
Now, I was here, basically saying I was supposed to have sex with him to get him back. To get him to go back to my dad and UTK.
“That isn’t what I meant, and you know it,” I told him instead of apologizing. We both did it a lot, deflecting instead of saying I’m sorry. Assuming the other person knew what we really meant.
He just stared, his emotions having been shuttered behind his game face. The look he had when fighting the enemy. That look wormed its way beneath the barricade I’d tried to put up because I knew the truth about Ty. I knew, behind the bravado and the snarky attitude and the ego, there was a little boy who had always been compared to an uncle he hadn’t known. To someone he couldn’t possibly have ever lived up to because that man had died.
I took a step toward him.
“I just meant Dad needs you, and I wanted you to know that before you made a decision you couldn’t take back.”
“So, you’re only here for him.”
Was that the case? Was I truly only there for my father? God. Probably not. I missed Ty. I missed his crappy attitude and his ego. I missed his hands and his lips. I missed the passion I felt when I was with him. I missed how much he understood me. How he didn’t look at me and see a girl pretending to know football, but, instead, saw a woman who breathed football.
I took a shaky breath and took a leap I didn’t even know I’d come to make until I was there, looking at him. The knowledge winged its way from my brain to my heart to my toes and back. I loved him. More than I should have. More than I thought I was capable of loving someone.
“I came for him,” I said quietly. “But I’d like to stay for us.”
“What?”
We stared at each other, and I finally said, “Don’t make me say it again. You know it’s too painful.”
He smiled that goddamn lazy smile. The smile a million other people, along with me, thought was sexy. He closed the distance he’d put between us, wrapping his arms around my waist so I was tight up against his body. His body with too few clothes. The body that always caused mine to burst into flames.
Then, he was kissing me with the ferocity he’d always used and matched my own. We weren’t tender, because we weren’t tender people. We were passion and heat and savagery. We were tearing-clothes, shoving-against-doorways, biting kind of people. Until I’d met Ty…until I’d had sex with Ty…I’d been afraid to let all of that out of me. I thought the guys I was with would have said I was a slut, or a whore, or that my passion would simply be misconstrued. But Ty had let me show every ounce of my strength and desire and met it with his own.
He tossed me onto his bed, and I was yanking at his sweats as he pulled my sweater until it tore from my body. When our clothes were flung away from us, and we were at the point where we normally would have licked and devoured each other, he suddenly stopped. My body was pounding out an incessant beat that was demanding he meet it, and yet, he didn’t. He looked into my eyes and pulled my hand to his chest where I could feel his own furious beat.
“Do you feel that?”
I nodded.
“It’s yours.”
We stared at each other, my gold eyes bouncing against his that were so many different colors it was like a box of puzzle pieces had been spread across them.
“I love you,” he said so low and so deep it was almost as if the words were pulsing through my blood instead of the air around us. “But I can’t make this decision about my career because of your dad. If that isn’t going to be okay with you, then I need us to stop right now. I need you to put your