Page 4 of Falling Back to You

ME:

at least my sister loves me

MYLES:

She loves me more.

ME:

im not having this convo with you this early in the morning

MYLES:

So dramatic.

Pick you up at 7:30.

The pancakes started to bubble around the edges, and I sprinkled a handful of chocolate chips on a few, adding blueberries to the rest before flipping them. Breakfast of champions. I scrambled a few eggs on the side then started on my protein shake.

Khia’s singing wafted down the stairs, and I smiled to myself. She’d inherited my easygoing temperament but had inherently better singing skills. I wasn’t a bad singer per se, but the words “sounds like a dying moose” had definitely been lobbed my way in the past.

Unlike Troy Bolton, I couldn’t be both musically gifted and an athlete.

Hockey had been my life up to this point. I’d been drafted to Seattle’s NHL team just after I turned nineteen but came down to the minor league four and a half years ago. Partly to play closer to home while navigating life as a single dad with a newborn, but also because I was a young hothead with an attitude problem and a habit of picking fights. All the pressure and publicity around Izzy’s death had messed with my head, and I’d paid for it. Even if I didn’t realize it was the best thing that could have happened to me at the time.

Now my contract was up for renegotiation. The team had been generous in letting me play in Caldwell this long, thanks to waiver exemptions, but now I had to choose between giving it up or signing into the major league again and face getting traded.

This would be so much easier with a wife. It wasn’t the first time I’d indulged that fantasy. Having someone else to partner with, do life with, come home to. For years, I’d witnessed my parents’ forty-one year marriage stand strong and watched all five of my siblings find love.

Also not for the first time, I envied them. Particularly Greyson and Juliet, who both got second chances with the loves of their lives. Why couldn’t I?

Because you never moved on from Noelle. Not really.

But if I did get a second chance with Noelle, would I really take it? She’d broken me in ways I’d never fully healed from, even thirteen years and an abundance of therapy sessions later. She was the only woman who’d seen the real me. The one beneath the goofy-younger-brother facade. She believed in me. She was my person.

So why did she run?

Maybe it was the never knowing why that ate at me. The women I got involved with had a tendency to leave me behind. Noelle had. And Izzy, too, in her own way.

You’re no fun anymore, Cal. If I wanted a bore, you aren’t what I’d have chosen.

Izzy’s complaints about my mellowing out from “life of the party” to “responsible girl dad” still stung. Unlike Noelle who ran without telling me, Izzy spared no time in sharing exactly what I did wrong in our relationship. Although relationship might be stretching it. Our marriage hadn’t been a happy one. I’d only proposed because it felt like the right thing to do once I found out Khia was on the way, and Izzy had jumped at the chance to be a “hotshot athlete’s wife”—her words, not mine.

I flipped the pancakes onto a plate.

Lord, I’m open to dating again. But you’re gonna have to make it super clear. And . . . I know we’ve had this conversation before. A lot, actually. But well, about Noelle, I don’t know where she is but . . . bless her. That feels weird to ask for, but . . . yeah. And anytime You want to take these feelings for her away is okay with me. Oh, and about the contract . . . I need help with that, too.

I needed a lot of help these days.

“Breakfast!” I hollered to Khia.

Elephant footsteps clattered down the stairs accompanied by the jingle of Mrs. Pickles’s collar. Yup, she was definitely my daughter.

No more what-ifs and jaunts down memory lane. For now, I had to focus on what was in front of me.

A little girl and her cat and playing the best I could in the second game of the season tonight. Beyond that, the future was out of my hands.

“Thanks for the ride,” I grunted, slipping into the back seat of Myles’s truck after dropping my gear in the box.