Total pages in book: 191
Estimated words: 182070 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 910(@200wpm)___ 728(@250wpm)___ 607(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 182070 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 910(@200wpm)___ 728(@250wpm)___ 607(@300wpm)
Parking on the street after pulling a U-turn, I headed up the pathway and shot off a text to Zac letting him know I was there. I wasn’t nervous. My stomach didn’t hurt in any way either. I’d had hours to come to terms with the fact that I was going to hang out with him—as in physically drive to his house and spend some time with him one-on-one. Because he’d asked me to.
And I was planning on apologizing for how I’d acted.
Okay, maybe I was a little nervous, but just a little.
And really, my nerves came from me not wanting to talk about certain things. But that was it.
At the door, I rang the doorbell and waited, glancing down to see if he’d replied; he hadn’t. But not even thirty seconds later, someone approached the glass and iron door. Someone that couldn’t be Zac from how much shorter and beefier he seemed to be built.
I remembered during his days in Dallas, he had lived with some big-name player for a couple years. Toward the end of that living situation was when he’d been released from that team, the Three Hundreds. Boogie had told me he’d struggled during that time a lot; that had been when he had been working in London long-term. It had been before Zac had been picked up to play in Oklahoma.
The door swung open, and the guy who had called Zac’s phone, the one with the bleached, platinum blond dreadlocks, stood there, dark eyebrows already up and aimed at me.
I lifted my hand and offered him a smile, a real one. “Hi again.” I held my hand out. “I’m Bianca.”
The muscular guy looked down at my hand. He looked at it for so long I was more than halfway expecting him to just keep on looking at it, but he finally took it, giving it the slowest shake as he said, in the deepest voice I’d probably ever heard other than on those insurance commercials, “CJ.”
CJ, right. “Is Zac here?”
“He’s upstairs.”
My phone pinged at that exact moment, and I looked down to see it was a message.
512-555-0199: Gimme 5. Sorry.
I showed him the screen—regretting for a second that I hadn’t saved his phone number and more than likely wasn’t going to—when I glanced back up at him and found him still looking at me funny. “He said he’ll be done in five minutes. Can I wait for him inside? Mosquitoes really like me.”
CJ nodded, his expression still careful and almost wary, but he stepped aside.
I went in, taking in how clean the place was, and waited for who I was pretty sure was a football player too to head back into the main part of the house before I followed after him, taking everything in now that I wasn’t looking through a mass of people for Zac to give him bad news.
Sure enough, the house was just as bare as I remembered.
There was only the most basic of furniture. Nothing on the walls. It was all so… vanilla. And so unlike Zac and his hoarder ways from what I could remember. His car had been a mess. Then again, this was probably just a rental he was sharing during the off-season, so why would it have personal touches in it?
Maybe one day I’d ask Boogie about the situation.
I was going to do this right. I was a—mostly—grown woman, and I could handle this… friendship. I knew what I was getting myself into. He had asked me questions. He had been happy to see me. I was ready and willing to be the kind of friend to him that I was to everyone else, for however long he was around.
Well, to an extent.
The past had happened, and it was where it belonged: back in the day. You live and you learn, and all that jazz. Once I was done here, I was going to go home and live my best life.
Like I had been.
One fortifying breath later, I clutched the bag in my hand when we got to the very white kitchen. I didn’t hesitate before asking the man I’d briefly met weeks ago, “CJ, would you like a scone?”
The man paused in the process of settling onto a stool that had already been pulled out around the kitchen island, and I didn’t miss the way his eyes flicked down to the canvas bag in my hand.
I held it up a little higher. “I promise they aren’t drugged, and they have blueberries in them. Coconut oil too. They’re mini-sized.” This wasn’t my first rodeo with skepticism. My nephew had acted like I’d been trying to feed him arsenic the one time I offered him scones with rosemary in them… and he’d ended up eating four once he gave them a chance and stopped gagging before he’d put anything into his mouth. He never doubted me again after that.