“That’s not why,” I cut her off.
Her face scrunches. “It’s not?”
Dropping the ball onto the mattress beside me, I cross my arms over my chest. “I may have been patient back then, but it didn’t mean I wanted to be. Every time you’d come into my room and didn’t tell me what happened, it drove me fucking nuts. But I knew if I asked you’d probably brush it off like it was nothing and that would have made me angrier. I took your silence, but I never accepted it.”
She blinks at me. “Oh.”
My lips flatten into a grim line at her response. “The reason why I want to know things now is because we’re older, we’re away from the place that made you crawl into my bed crying, and we have a chance to fix it. I’m not saying you can talk it out and forget all the reasons that made you want to leave home. I’ll never understand that because I’ve never been in your shoes. I may have heard your parents fight. Hell, the whole neighborhood did.” She winces at the fact. “But pretending like that part of you doesn’t exist means you can’t move on from it. Holding onto the shame you feel for not swallowing your pride and going home when you knew you couldn’t do it by yourself isn’t going to get you anywhere. Trust me, the only way to stop letting shit take over your life is to face it head on. That’s when you can find more than a scrap of the control you need.”
She squirms on the bed, drawing her legs up to cross under her. “Like your game on Friday? People say it’ll be an interesting one. Are you going to face them head on?”
I scoff. “I’m sure people have said that, especially if you’ve been talking to Caleb again. The Raiders had every right to kick me off their team. It’s just a game.” The last bit is a lie, and she sees through it.
“Doesn’t mean it can’t hurt.” Her refute doesn’t soak in, so she tries a new method that has my chest tightening. “You wouldn’t like it if I said the guys had a right to treat me like shit just because I stepped into their homes.”
“Don’t,” I warn.
“So,” she presses, “you can’t say what happened there doesn’t hurt you. I know they’re a good school. Elena babbles about the pro players that have come from there. You used to talk about Wilson Reed when we were younger. Even if you’re making a future right where you are, it’s okay to admit you care about how you got here. I know how much getting into that school would have meant to you and I’m sorry I couldn’t celebrate when you got the acceptance letter or comfort you when everything happened.”
“I couldn’t care less about them,” I insist, trying to drill it into her stubborn head. “Our situations don’t compare. Don’t you get it by now? If they made an exception for me, if I put up a fight like my parents wanted me to, I wouldn’t have come here. We never would have seen each other again.”
Her eyes go back to her lap. “You don’t know that for sure.”
“At risk of you being pissed off and walking out again—” She doesn’t hide the slight flinch from me. “—I know it’s true. How else would we have seen each other? You wouldn’t go back home on your own, you admitted that already. I tried looking you up online but you said you had a fake name so nobody could find you. Tell me how else we would have met up? Because I’ve got nothing.”
“I…” Her voice fades before she clears it and picks her head up to look at me. “I would have found you. It would be hard not to with your name plastered everywhere as a big hot shot football player.”
Her attempt to lighten the mood only sours mine more. “It would have taken me going pro for you to come out of the woodwork?”
Ivy’s eyes round as they snap up to meet mine. “What? No. I mean, yes, but only because it would have been easier to get in touch. You’ve talked about going to the NFL since you first tried out for youth football. It isn’t like whatever this is between us is based on what your future holds.”
I blow out a frustrated breath. “I’ve had people reach out once they heard my chances at going pro and it never gets any easier to deal with. It’s a big reason why I keep to myself. I can’t get in trouble or risk my shot at what I’ve worked so hard for, and nobody can use me.”
She frowns. “I bet that’s difficult.”
All I do is shake my head.
“If it makes you feel any better, I would have still found a way. Even if you weren’t on billboards or in Dorito commercials wearing some famous team’s jersey.”
A small grin cracks on my face. “You remember.”
She nudges me with her leg, a matching smile teasing her lips. “That we used to make up random commercials for Doritos and pretend you were their newest poster boy? Yeah. I remember that well.”
We both get a laugh over the old memories of us perching ourselves in front of my mother’s video camera and acting out a scene. Ivy always told me to keep it under sixty seconds and would make me do it again if I went over.
Once the nostalgia rubs off, the reality sinks back in. We lose the smiles and watch each other with wariness.
It’s me who says, “I may be a demanding prick these days, but it’s because I want what’s best for you. Is that so bad?”
She bites her bottom lip and slowly shakes her head. “I guess not.”
“Then why do you fight me?”
“A lot of reasons. Do I really deserve you treating me with respect? Sometimes it feels like I should have a worse life than I already do for making the choices I have. It’s fight or flight for me, Aiden. It always has been.”
“You don’t have to do either here.”
I can tell she wants to argue but something in her mind tells her not to. Instead, she says, “The day you had to help me into your room was the first day I’d ever thought about hurting myself. I heard Mom telling somebody on the phone that she thought about packing up and leaving. I don’t know who she was talking to, but she said something about not being sure if she’d take us. When she found out I overheard she tried telling me it was because she’d have to find a job and get her own money before she could support Porter and me. But there was something in her eyes that made me feel like she was lying. I’d felt like a burden before whenever she’d say how much she wished she weren’t stuck at home with us or married or how much she wished she’d gotten an education to have a different life for herself.
“I guess I thought if I hurt myself maybe she would feel differently. Be motherly. Feel bad about all the times she wanted a different life because she was stuck with two kids. It wasn’t like she was cold to me my whole life. She’d take care of me when I was sick, make my favorite food for my birthdays if they had the money, and buy me things whenever she could. But the moments her and Dad were at each other’s throats it was like she was a different person. I remember her telling me once that love changes people and I never understood why she let it. There are so many things that could have made them better. They could have sold the store or split up or something. I mean, no kid wants to see their parents get divorced but it’s better than them constantly being visited by the cops when their fights get too loud, and making their kids feel like part of the problem.”