Page 11 of Catch
“I’m going to Calvin. My parents said they won’t help me at all if I go to ACU.”
“Wait, what?”
“It’s not fair to you to ask you to wait for me. Michigan and Texas are thousands of miles apart.”
“So, you just want to give up? You’re eighteen. You can pack your stuff and move in with me and Dad. Then we can go to A&M together. You don’t need their money.”
She shook her head and grabbed my hands. “They’re my parents, Sutton. I’m all they have. I can’t just leave them.” I watched the tears trickle down her face and knew I was losing her. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. “I love you and that’s why I’m doing this. Trying to date long-distance is impossible. This is hard enough and we’re only a hundred miles apart.”
Everything she said made sense, but my heart wouldn’t concede. I was too invested. I put my head on my steering wheel and cried. I felt her arms wrap around my body as she cried with me.
“I will always love you, Sutton.”
I looked at her through the tears that wouldn’t stop falling. “How can you do this to me?”
“I’m doing this for both of us. You’ll always have my heart.” She opened the door and slowly slipped out.
“You’re making the biggest mistake,” I said. When I realized that this wasn’t a joke, I got angry. “Go ahead and forget about me. Forget my face, forget everything that happened, and lose my number!” I watched as she walked to her car and drove away without so much as a backward glance. I sat in the parking lot wondering how my heart slipped out of my grasp so effortlessly when just a few short minutes ago it was something I held onto for dear life.
Chapter Six—First Meeting, Again
Present
I was dreading tonight. Like on a scale of one to ten, I was at an eleven. Lexi felt my tension even though I tried to hide it.
“Come on. It’ll be fun. I promise to be on my best behavior,” Lexi said.
I smiled because she was charming and I knew she would look good on my arm. “I know you will.” I kissed her softly. “You make me look good.”
She posed and slowly spun so that I could see her amazing dress and heels and how perfect her hair and makeup were. Her auburn hair, when curled and styled, touched her shoulders. Her hazel eyes shifted from blue when she was happy to green when she cried. She was hot, no doubt about it, but I was also getting bored again. I didn’t have time for a girlfriend, but I didn’t know how to tell her that either. Our fights were becoming more frequent.
Tonight, she was being nice. We were going to a black-tie event in downtown Bridgemont where coaches and starters were introducing their charities to the public. It was a big event and tickets were by special invitation only. If you weren’t on the list, you didn’t get in.
“Now, hurry up and get ready. I don’t want to be late,” Lexi said.
I dropped my towel and slipped into the cream-colored double strap one-shoulder fit evening gown that Lexi wanted me to wear. I didn’t have a lot of time to mess with my hair so I blew it straight, applied makeup, and slipped on strappy heels. I stood in front of Lexi when I was ready.
“Well, how do I look?”
She ran her hands down my sides and rested them on my hips. “You look incredible. I’m going to have to fight everyone off tonight.”
“I’ll be the wallflower standing by the bar,” I said.
“You’ll be the one surrounded by all the football players who want to talk shop with you.” She rolled her eyes and smirked. It seemed odd that she wanted to start a fight tonight.
“Well, it is about football. All of this,” I said.
“I’ll just hang back with the girlfriends and wives and we’ll talk about how we never get to see our partners during the season.”
She was in for a rude awakening when she found out the players were home by six or seven. The coaches hung back to talk about the day’s practices and how to improve plays. If we could, we’d stay there all night. A new team was exhausting, but we were all so excited to make this happen. Lexi would never understand.
It also didn’t help that tonight I was most certainly going to run into Parker. It was inevitable. I had managed to avoid all gatherings with her until tonight. As I drove into town, I thought about how I was going to handle seeing and talking to Parker after all these years.
“Is there anybody I should avoid? Or be mean to? Are you on anybody’s shit list? Because I won’t stand for that,” Lexi said. She put her hand on my thigh and gave me a small squeeze.
“Nope. It’s all good.” I hoped that was true. The closer we got to the event, the more I sweated. I turned up the air.
“Oh, babe. You’ll ruin your makeup.” She touched my brow and adjusted the vents to blow on me. “Are you that nervous about tonight? I mean, you’re going to be around your people. If anyone should be sweating, it’s me. I’m going to meet your boss and the owner of the Cheetahs.”
