“You scare me, Levi, for so many reasons.”
“So you’re stopping yourself from getting close to me. Same reason you’ll let me fuck you in the ass but won’t even kiss me outside of the bedroom…”
I winced.
“Shit.” He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I’m just frustrated. This is not the time nor place for this conversation.” He turned away.
When I followed and put my hand on his arm, he whipped around. “What is this really about, Presley? Is it just about Tanner, or do you really not trust me?”
I stayed silent, not wanting to admit that I did worry about his ability to be a one-woman man, even if he’d done nothing specific to warrant my insecurity. I knew old habits died hard, and I couldn’t accept that he’d changed.
He took my silence as an affirmative. “Well, then, I’m fighting a losing battle. If you can’t trust me, that’s worse than worrying about how Tanner would react. Without trust, we have nothing left to say to each other.” He dumped the rest of his coffee on the grass and crushed the cup in his hand. “And by the way, I’m just as fucking scared as you about all this. But I’m not gonna pretend what we have is nothing to try to neutralize it.”
He stopped talking suddenly when we saw Alex running toward us.
“Uncle Levi! I didn’t know you were coming today,” Alex said when he got close.
“Hey, buddy. Figured I’d try to make the end.”
“Why were you yelling at Mom?”
Levi blinked. “Did it look like I was yelling?”
“Yeah. It seemed like you guys were arguing about something.”
“No. I was just complaining about my day.” He lifted the crushed cup. “And this coffee stunk. Put me in a bad mood. Tasted like mud.”
“Oh. I thought you guys were fighting again, like you used to when you first moved in.”
“No, Alex,” I said.
“It’s all good, buddy. No one is fighting.” Levi ruffled my son’s hair.
“You missed a lot,” Alex said.
“I’m sorry. I’ll be sure to be here for the entire thing next time, okay?”
Alex looked toward his teammates. “I gotta go back!” he said, already running away.
I watched Alex disappear into the distance. “You see how affected he is by everything—just the mere thought of us arguing. If we take things too far and it goes wrong between us, it will devastate him.”
“I’m not discounting that.” Levi bit his lip and looked down. His ears turned red.
I could feel the emotions emanating from his body.
He suddenly looked up at me. “You’re right.”
“About what specifically?”
“About us. I think we should stop. For real this time. I’m not gonna push for something that’s not attainable if you don’t believe in me.”
He was giving me what I thought was right, but hearing him say that devastated me. We stood staring at each other. I didn’t know what to say. I’d essentially asked for this, right? Why did I feel so gutted that he’d agreed?
As he started to walk away, I called after him. “Levi?”
He didn’t turn around this time. Instead, he walked to the bleachers on the opposite side of the field. He watched Alex there for the remainder of practice while I stayed in my corner under the tree.
CHAPTER 17
* * *
Levi
In an effort to follow through on staying away from Presley tonight, I went over to my mother’s house for dinner instead of heading back to The Palm Inn.
In fact, I considered spending the night at Mom’s if it would put space between Presley and me. I knew nothing good could come of going back there tonight. We needed time to cool off after what happened at practice today.
My mother made corn on the cob and fried catfish. We ate our dinner outside, overlooking the small marsh by her house.
As the last of the evening sun set, she looked over at me.
“Talk to me. What’s going on with you?”
“You could tell, huh?”
“When you were younger and you were upset about something, you never used to finish your food. Tonight’s the same. That’s so unlike you normally. I know something is bothering you.”
“I don’t think you want to hear it.”
“Let’s put it this way,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I already know what this is about. Or should I say who. And my imagination is already running wild, so you’ve got nothing to lose in telling me the truth.” She took a long gulp of her wine. “Now tell me what’s happening between you and Presley.”
“After today, maybe nothing. I ended it. Well, it was more that I finally agreed to let her end it.”
“I suspected you wouldn’t heed my warnings about getting involved with her. How far did you take things?”
I lifted my brow. “You really want me to spell it out?”
“Jesus. How are you even able to get away with that, considering Alex is in the house?”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
My mother took another sip of her wine. “Okay, so…you ended things. That’s good, right? I’ll pray your brother never finds out.” She sighed. “I assume she wanted more than you could give her?”
“Actually, it was the opposite. She seems to think I’m just playing house and as soon as I go back to Colorado, I’ll be back to my old player ways. She doesn’t trust how serious my feelings have grown for her.”
My mother looked out toward the marsh and shook her head. “I guess I just don’t understand how you could let this happen, Levi. Not only how you could do this to your brother, but why you would want to be with someone who left him the way she did. This is not making any sense to me whatsoever.”
I’d always felt it wasn’t my place to tell my mother what really happened between Tanner and Presley, but I felt compelled to defend Presley, and I couldn’t do that without relaying the truth.
“Things didn’t go down the way you think,” I said. “All those years, we thought she left him because he was injured and down on life when that was far from the case.” I gritted my teeth. “Tanner cheated on her. More than once. She never did him wrong. Presley didn’t say anything for so long because she wanted to keep the peace for Alex.”
My mother narrowed her eyes. “That wasn’t the story he gave us.”
“Of course, it wasn’t. But unfortunately, that’s the truth. And it’s why I’ve had a real hard time feeling sorry for him. Not to mention the way he’s treated both her and Alex, being virtually absent besides a few phone calls here and there. Yes, I do still feel guilty. But he makes it hard sometimes.”
My mother grimaced. “Well, this is the first I’ve heard of all this.”
“I know. I only found out in the course of getting to know her. We certainly weren’t gonna learn the truth from Tanner.”
“Well, now I feel badly about giving her attitude all this time. I could never help myself, thinking she’d left my son when he needed her most, secretly blaming her in part for his gambling addiction.”