On The Rebound (Steinbeck U #1) - L.A. Cotton Page 0,76
each step like a knife to my heart. “You had your chance, Zach.”
Goodbye.
Zach
“Fuck,” I snapped, watching as Calli walked away from me.
“What the hell did you say to her?” Maverick appeared, a deep frown crinkling his eyes.
“It’s complicated.”
“Doesn’t look complicated to me. It looks like you had your chance and blew it.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Hey,” he smirked, “just telling it like it is, man.” Maverick moved to a bench outside Abrams and sat down. I joined him, my eyes locked on the dorm building.
“She seems nice.”
“Calli...” Her name was like ash on my tongue. “She’s like no one else I ever met.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“She screwed me over when we were kids.”
“How kids are we talking? Like grade school or—”
“High school. It was my junior year, she was in tenth grade.”
“You guys were together?”
“We were...” Fuck. How did I even begin to put into words what Calli had meant to me back then?
“Yeah, we were together. But it was more than that, you know? She was my best friend.”
The only person I trusted with my secrets.
“You had that high school soul mate thing working for you?” Maverick glanced at me, nothing but sympathy shining on in his eyes.
It made my chest tighten.
“Something like that.” Or at least, I’d thought we had. I didn’t know what it was about this guy, maybe that he did seem to get it, to have been in a similar situation in the past, but I was talking, spilling my secrets to him. “We were both lost, I think. After her dad had an affair, he and Callum left. She didn’t handle it very well. I was struggling with living in my brother’s shadow. Declan was everything I wasn’t: popular, athletic, a real American boy next door. It was a lot to live up to.”
“Sounds rough.”
“I mean, my parents didn’t neglect me or anything, not like Calli’s dad did her, but there was this constant expectation that I would follow in my brother’s footsteps. That one day, I would just snap out of what my old man called my ‘rebellious’ phase and become who I was always supposed to be.”
“You didn’t like basketball?”
“I didn’t hate it,” I shrugged, “I just didn’t want to play. I wanted to carve my own path, follow my own dreams. But my old man always dreamed of having his sons follow in his footsteps. He played for the Scorpions, almost got drafted, but then he met my mom and they fell pregnant with Declan, so he did the right thing by her; graduated, got a job, and settled down.”
“Yeah, Declan told me the story. Never really mentioned much about you though.”
It didn’t surprise me. Mine and Declan’s relationship was strained at best. He’d never understood me as a kid, couldn’t fathom that I didn’t want to pick up a ball and become my old man. Even after he graduated, and I finally gave in to my father’s demands, things didn’t get much better. He was off living his dream at SU and I was still living in his shadow.
“What happened with Calli, Zach?”
Jesus. He wasn’t going to let it drop.
“We danced around each the whole summer before junior year. I wanted her...” I’d wanted her so fucking much. “But I was almost seventeen and she was barely fifteen, and her dad’s affair and the way he and Callum just up and left, did a real number on her.”
“You were scared.”
“Fuck yeah. I was scared.” Sex changed things. Even at the tender age of sixteen, I knew that. And I didn’t want to do anything to mess up our friendship. “I wanted her to be one hundred percent sure,” I said, “so we waited.”
“Until you didn’t?” He gave me a knowing glance.
“Why do I feel like you’re in my head?”
“I have two younger sisters. I know shit. Not to mention the fact, I’ve been where you are. Trying to fight the inevitable. Because that’s the thing about love, Messiah. Once you meet the right girl, boom... there’s no escaping it.”
“We were just kids.”
“Yet here we are. She’s under your skin, man. After all this time, she’s still there. It wasn’t just some high school crush. It was real.”
“She betrayed me.”
“Did she? Or did something happen, and you did what most guys do and run scared? The best defense is a—”
“Good offense,” I muttered.
My old man loved that saying.
Maverick’s words reverberated deep inside me as I let the painful memories flood my mind. He wasn’t right though, he couldn’t be.