Rally (Treasure State Wildcats Book 3)

“Hey.” Maverick came into the kitchen with an empty glass.

“Hi.” I took the last of the forks and spoons from the dishwasher’s basket to put away in the silverware drawer.

“Rush told me about your mom. I’m sorry.”

I stacked utensils in their respective slots and murmured, “Thanks.”

My mother had died.

It had been three weeks since Rush and I had gone to visit her at my childhood home. Since, I’d gone another four times, each with Gloria. We’d sat with Mom in her cramped bedroom, listening to her wheeze and cough and attempt conversation. We’d listened to her apologize for the wrongs she’d desperately tried to right in her final days.

I’d planned to see her a fifth time, to go alone. Except Friday, the day I’d planned to visit, I’d received a call from the hospice nurse instead.

Mom had died in her sleep.

She hadn’t wanted a funeral, so two days ago, Gloria, her dad and I had gone to the mountains outside of Mission to scatter Mom’s ashes.

Chuck had said a few words while he’d wept.

Gloria had cried so hard she’d been unable to speak.

And I’d stared at the gray cloud of her remains until it vanished on the wind.

It was Wednesday. She’d been gone for five days, and I had yet to shed a tear.

That wasn’t normal. I was extremely pregnant and my body was swimming in excess hormones. I should be a blubbering, frantic mess. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t cry?

“I, um . . .” Maverick dragged a hand over his face. “I get it. Kind of. If you want to talk.”

No, I didn’t want to talk. “Maybe some other time.”

“Yeah. No worries.”

I finished with the dishes, closing the washer, and slipped past him for the living room, more than ready to disappear upstairs to the shower where I could wash my hair, change into pajamas and go to sleep.

Except before I could leave, Mav called my name. “Faye?”

This guy. Couldn’t he just pretend I didn’t exist? We’d spent weeks mostly avoiding each other. It had been the easiest way to maintain our truce. I only turned because of the truce. Because I didn’t have the energy to fight. “Yeah?”

Mav cleared his throat, hesitating for so long it was like he’d forgotten what he wanted to say. Then he walked to his backpack at the kitchen table, unzipping the top to pull out a plain blue gift bag. The corners were crumpled and the sides wrinkled, like it had been in a fight with his textbooks and lost.

“I got this for you.” He ran a hand over the white, ribbon handle. “I wasn’t sure when I should give it to you after your mom and . . . anyway. Here.”

He crossed the room, holding out the bag until I took it from his grasp.

After shifting a piece of blue tissue paper aside, I pulled out a navy onesie with the Treasure State Wildcats logo on the chest.

It wasn’t the first gift we’d gotten for the baby, but it might be the most precious.

Rush had told me Mav loved kids, and I hadn’t believed him. It was going to be impossible to keep hating Maverick Houston if he loved my son.

“Thank you.” With a smile, I stowed the onesie and started for the stairs again.

“Faye? I’m really sorry. About your mom.” The crack in his voice might as well have been a sledgehammer pounding into my chest.

The emotion swelled so fast it was hard to breathe. Tears flooded as the sting in my nose became unbearable. I’d managed five days without crying. Five whole days. My time must be up. Maybe I wasn’t broken after all.

How was it that Maverick, a huge pain in my ass, was the guy who’d finally made me crack? I’d held my composure when I’d received the call from the nurse. I’d kept my shit together every time Gloria had broken down and cried in my arms. But watching Maverick fight his own tears might be my undoing.

He really loved his mother, didn’t he? Her illness had rocked his world.

I wished, for his sake, I had some advice to give about how to say goodbye. But I’d drifted apart from my mother a long time ago. And I hadn’t said goodbye.

On my last visit, Mom had fallen asleep while Gloria had been telling her about a boy at school. We’d left her to rest, and I’d planned to say what I needed to say on the next visit.

Except there hadn’t been a next visit, and now everything that had been unsaid was clawing at my throat. The words that I’d mentally rehearsed over and over again were shouting in my head, begging to be set free.

Only the person they were meant for was gone.

It was a blessing. I was glad she couldn’t hear them because they hadn’t been entirely kind. Honest, but real. And my reality with Mom had been painful.

My silence had been her mercy.

I think it might have broken her, and in the end, she’d been broken enough.

He stared at a wall as he wiped beneath his eyes. “I mean it. I’m here if you want to talk.”

“All right.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. Then, not wanting to cry in front of Maverick, I trudged upstairs, the weight of my heart as heavy as the weight of my belly.

When I reached the last step, I looked at the open bathroom door. The idea of a shower suddenly seemed like too much work, so I shuffled into Rush’s room, sinking to the edge of his bed.

I waited, my breath lodged in my throat, for the tears to come. For the body-wracking sobs of a daughter grieving her mother. Except that brief swell of emotion from downstairs had died somewhere between the first floor and second.

Now there was only fog in my brain and numbness in my chest.

I wasn’t sure how long I sat there, staring into the nothingness, waiting to feel anything. But my lower back was aching by the time Rush’s rugged voice cut through the haze.

“Hey.” He leaned against the door, dressed in the jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt he’d pulled on this morning.

“Hi.”

He came into the room, closing the door at his back, then he knelt in front of me, untying my shoes. He’d tied them for me today before he’d left for campus because I couldn’t reach my feet.

“My mother didn’t teach me to tie my shoes,” I said. “Did I ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“It was my fourth-grade teacher. She noticed one day that I poked my laces into my shoes rather than tie them and so she taught me how during recesses. I taught Gloria when she was eight.”

He massaged my calves, his large hands kneading my tense muscles and swollen ankles. Rush never said much whenever I talked about my mother, probably because there wasn’t much to say. He wasn’t her biggest fan.

Neither was Dusty.

Was that why I was struggling to cry? Because I’d already used up my tears where Brynn Gannon was concerned? I’d used them all up in the last twenty-one years?

“Why can’t I cry?” My throat felt like it was being scraped with sandpaper. My eyes were watery, but three blinks and they were dry again. “I’m almost nine months pregnant and exhausted and enormous, and I should be crying over my dead mother, but I can’t. What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing.” He rose up, his forehead to mine as he took my face in his hands. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

I sniffled, not even trying to pull the emotions off the surface. They just slunk down deep, crawling into their hole where they’d eventually vanish. “I think I’m going to take a shower.”

“Don’t.” Rush’s thumb traced a line across my cheek. “Stay with me.”

I searched his eyes, that gorgeous, unguarded face. Rush was a fairly approachable man, but when it was just the two of us, he dropped all pretenses. He was utterly vulnerable. It was the kind of openness you gave the person who held your heart in their hands.

“I used to feel alone. Every day.” I put my hand on his cheek. “I don’t feel alone anymore.”

“You’re not.”

“It scares me.” Being alone, there wasn’t much to lose. Now? “If this is too good to be true, if this falls apart, I’ll never recover.”

“Then I guess we can’t let it fall apart.”

I stared into his eyes. “Promise me.”

“I promise you.” He leaned forward, pressing his lips to mine in a soft, sweet kiss. Then when I collapsed forward, his arms were waiting, hauling me close until my face was burrowed in his throat and I breathed in the scent of his skin.

“I don’t know if anything would be different if I had called her months ago when Gloria told me to call her. I think if we had had more time, we would have hashed out too much. We would have relived all the hurt. I don’t know what to think. I forgive her. I can’t carry it around forever.”

“Good,” he murmured.

“I don’t miss her. At the same time, I do.”

There was a lot of heartache for me to process. It was something we weren’t going to solve tonight, not entirely. But Rush would be here, no matter how long it took, ready to listen when I was ready to talk.

“Did I ever tell you that she hated sauce too?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“She’s the only person I’ve ever known like me. Or maybe I was like her.”

And there it was. The biggest fear of them all. The one I knew soul-deep but hadn’t had the courage to voice.

I leaned away, searching Rush’s eyes. “What if I’m like her? What if I mess him up? What if I die and he can’t cry because he hates me?”

Not that I hated my mother. Not really. I just wasn’t sure how to grieve her yet. And I suspected this grief wouldn’t be the kind with a river of tears. It would be a quiet sadness in my heart that I’d likely carry for decades.

“He won’t hate you,” Rush said.

“He might.”

Rush shook his head. “He will love you the way I love you. With everything I have.”

He loved me. It wasn’t a surprise, not really. “You love me?”

“I love you.” His thumb brushed across my cheek. It came away wet with a tear. My tear.

The relief was staggering, and I fell into his arms, letting him hold me as the first sob escaped. “I love you too.”

I loved him so much it hurt.

He pulled me away, taking my face in his hands, and he kissed me as tears dripped down my face.

My hands fisted his shirt, keeping him close until we were both breathless. When we finally broke apart, my face was wet and a half sob, half laugh escaped my throat. “Say it again.”

“I love you.”

Rush Ramsey, quarterback extraordinaire, Wildcat football hero, honors student and fixer of flat tires, loved me.

Maybe I was lucky after all.