“That sounds wonderful. I’m holding you to it.”
“I know you will. I love you, Mom.” The SUV pulled up to the front of the hotel.
“Love you, my superstar.”
I ended the call and stuck the phone back into my bag.
Somewhere between being hustled out of the car and into the elevator, fatigue slammed into me like an overloaded amp. It barreled right into me, nearly knocking me off my feet.
Meetings on top of meetings. Fittings. Interviews. Hours in the studio. This wasn’t the life I’d envisioned for myself. I’d thought I’d be performing in smoky bars, maybe get upgraded to a movie-theater-turned-concert-venue in towns all over the US, loading and unloading my own gear.
This was a life beyond my own imagination and I was living it every day. But I couldn’t get rid of the gnawing feeling in my chest, the one that kept me up late at night, that I tried to fill with the home renovation chatter instead of falling asleep with my own thoughts.
That feeling screamed at me for being even the slightest bit ungrateful for everything I’d been given and all the people who counted on me. But at the end of the day, when I dragged myself into bed, it was the thing I’d always thought I’d have no trouble being—alone.
The loneliness was harder to push back. The quiet moments rang in my ears with the hollowness of the life created around me—the one where everyone knew my name, but no one knew me.
8
Keyton
From the treadmill I stared out over the city soaking up the morning sun. Running wasn’t an escape anymore—it was how every day started. It was a way to get some energy out, while I went through everything on the schedule that Gwen sent over.
Keep things calm, measured and uneventful. If I knew what I had coming up, I could disarm some of the old reflexes that came from not knowing what the hell was going on around me. I couldn’t control it all, but I could make sure my reactions weren’t coming from a place of being absolutely about to lose my shit. And it worked—most of the time.
But this morning I was restless. Bay’s face when I’d left the other day had stuck with me on the elevator ride back to my apartment. The hotel had been swarming with fans. Security was higher than I’d ever seen it before.
Was she safe up there? Her floor had been quiet, but she had to leave at some point. Had she already gone?
I wanted to go back to her. Talk to her even longer. Take her up on her dinner invitation. Taste the lips she’d been nibbling.
Jamming my finger into the stop button, I growled at myself. Stop it.
There was no point in going off on one of these tangents again. Bay had her life, the best life she could’ve ever dreamed of. So why was there a glimmer of sadness in her eyes?
Probably because she’d been sitting across from me, the guy from her past who’d always been nothing but trouble. But the replay of her face had stuck with me since I’d left her hotel room. I couldn’t stop thinking about how good it had felt to run my fingers across her skin, even though it was only her knuckles.
More than a couple times in the past 36 hours, I’d walked to my apartment door before talking myself out of going back there.
After my shower, I pulled out the big guns. Inside my office, I pulled open the drawer in my desk and pulled out my supplies. Sunlight flooded in through the open curtains.
Flicking the lid on the wooden box, I searched for the right pencil.
With it clenched between my teeth, I flipped open the sketch pad.
Drawing helped. I didn’t only draw Bay like I had in college. I drew things around me. Scenes that stuck in my head. Scenes from my past. Scenes from my present. The scrape of the pencil or charcoal against a pad of paper helped me process a lot of the shit flying ninety-miles-per-hour in my brain.
Today I drew her. I lost myself in the memories of seeing her up close for the first time in six years. Not when she’d been Bay ready to walk out on stage, but when she’d sat across from me with the hot-chocolate-stained lips.
The drawing took long enough that the side of my finger ached from gripping the pencil. By the time I set it down, the morning sun wasn’t peeking out from above the horizon—it was searing in the sky.
I jerked forward in my seat to check the time. The stampeding heartbeat slowed. There were still three hours until I needed to be at the stadium.
Dragging my finger along the space where her hair cast a shadow over her forehead, I smudged the lines of her face and held up the paper.
She stared back at me. The glimmer hadn’t been imagined. It had been there. And there was nothing I could do about it—nothing I should do about it.
We’d both made our choices. It was only fair we lived with them, no matter how much we hoped we could take it all back. There was no erasing the past.
After a shower, I made my breakfast and headed into work to sit on my ass and do nothing and hope whatever the hell had worked so far continued to work. Sometimes I felt paralyzed, like anything I changed in my game day routine might break the spell cast over my stadium presence. I’d given up on it because the rituals had gotten too obsessive. I couldn’t control this. Everyone else thought I did, but it didn’t mean I didn’t want them to win. I just wished I could do something that actually mattered out there.
The first game of a brand-new season. Nervous energy led to seated leg bouncing, which led to pacing. All the calm from drawing had evaporated in a matter of hours. I left my apartment when the waiting became unbearable.
Inside the locker room, I suited up early.
Support and coaching staff strode through the room with purpose. It was less of a room and more a hive. The physio rooms were off the main locker room, which weren’t so much lockers as oversized cubbies. The conditioning and rehab rooms had all the latest recovery tech.
There were ice baths that felt like you were being stabbed all over your body with sub-zero icicles. Not that I’d needed them with my level of game play. I’d jumped into one once before a game in LA and ended up doing it before every game in order to not lose the mojo. When I’d moved on to Phoenix, I was sure to leave that out of my pre-game ritual.
Long gone were the days of needing to wash and take care of my own gear. It was all set out on the wide padded bench seat in front of the placard with my name.
Honeycombs of activity all connected together. Learning new stadiums, new coaching staff, and new teams every season or two always created a settling-in period, but this was my second season with Philly and the initial transition had been less scary than the others.
The locker room door opened, and the crew of guys who were the closest thing I had to family outside of Knox and his parents burst through the doorframe.
“Keyton,” they shouted as one, like we hadn’t seen each other a few days ago at the first pre-season game.
I ducked my head and braced myself for the dog pile.
They barreled into me, squeezing me and whooping about kicking some serious ass this season. Everyone had done the same thing during training camp and the pre-season games.
“You guys need to work on your hellos. No damaging the merchandise or maybe you won’t get another ring.” I shrugged them off with a laugh, smoothing down the hair they’d ruffled. Confidence always played a part in my role. If I swore it would happen, people around me fell in line.