Page 151 of Just One More Thing

She sits and pulls one knee up and rests her chin on it, the sweatshirt covering half her hands. “This is my favorite time of day here,” she says. “Right when everything settles.”

I look out at the water because looking directly at her suddenly feels like more than I can handle.

Then she says very quietly, “Jake, you make it really hard not to stay.”

Everything in me goes still.

CHAPTER 36

JAKE

My phone rings, playing theGilligan’s Islandtheme song.

I keep looking at her.

The phone keeps ringing.

“You can answer it,” she says around a bite of ice cream.

I glance down. The number on the screen is from Tampa. I stand, and before I go inside, I look at her one more time.

I go into the kitchen and answer the call. “Wheeler.”

The voice on the other end belongs to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers general manager. Hearing his voice again feels strange. Like somebody reached straight into the ground and pulled up old memories by the roots.

He gets right to it. Injury. Need. Seasonal contract to start. Team wants me to come down this week if I’m interested. Needs an answer soon.

I brace one hand against the kitchen counter and stare through the open door while he talks.

At Mo.

Still sitting there eating ice cream, completely unaware she’s currently wrecking my ability to think straight just by existing in an oversized Bucs sweatshirt, ironically.

Hank’s asleep at her feet, snoring hard enough his jowls flap out every few breaths.

A whole life right here in front of me.

For a minute, the past and the present stand side by side in my head.

Stadium lights. Crowd noise shaking the ground under my cleats. Cannons firing. That old electric feeling right before a snap, when sixty-five thousand people are waiting to see if I’m about to become a hero or the reason they all get quiet.

There was a time I would’ve said yes before he finished asking. For a long time, I didn’t know how not to go when football called. It was the only thing I trusted not to leave me.

But now I’m standing barefoot in my kitchen, looking at Mo on my porch, in my sweatshirt with my bulldog asleep at her feet.

And somehow that looks bigger than any stadium ever did.

“Jake?” the GM says.

“Yeah,” I say quietly. “I’m here.”

“You interested?”

My eyes stay on the porch.

On her.

On the life I tried hard not to build with her and somehow built anyway in pieces small enough I didn’t see it happening.