16. Nathan

Instead of eating our meals at the dining room table, we sat on my living room floor, eating at the coffee table as we watched ESPN for hours.

Avery hadn’t brought up the wedding over the past nine hours that swept past. Instead, she talked about everything else under the sun. We talked about our team’s stats and how we’d tackle next week’s games. She went over our practices and how we should switch things up. She even talked about how to make the best chicken wings. Anything and everything but the wedding.

It was going on so long that I finally burst while we were eating Chinese food for dinner. “What the hell happened yesterday, Avery?”

She turned to me and hesitated before placing her fork down. “What do you mean?”

“With the wedding. What happened?”

“Oh. That. Well, I’m cursed.”

“Cursed?”

“Yup. When I was a kid, Betty Stevens read my tarot card on the playground. She told me all men would choose their careers over loving me. I figured when you ditched me for baseball, it was just a coincidence, but then having Wesley leave for the same reason made it clear as day. I’m cursed to be second-string in men’s lives.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Maybe, but true. If it wasn’t, I would’ve been married today. Instead, he showed up to my dressing room to tell me he got a new job and no longer wanted to get married.”

“What a dick.”

“I loved him. Or love him. I don’t know. I don’t even know what love is. All I know is I’m two strikes down.”

“Two strikes down?”

“Well, Wesley was leaving me for a job opportunity. You did the same thing. One more strike and I’m out.”

The amount of guilt that hit the pit of my stomach was enough for me to want to crawl into a hole. I wanted to explain to her why I’d left all those years before. I wanted her to understand that leaving her was the hardest and worst decision of my life. But that didn’t matter in that very second. She didn’t need my excuses. She needed comfort.

“Men are idiots,” I murmured.

“You don’t have to tell me twice.” She huffed. “But still, it would be nice to be someone who people stayed for.”

“I hate that he did that to you.”

“Did you hate that you did that, too?”

That felt like a stab to my chest. “Avery?—”

“Sorry.” She shook her head. “I didn’t mean to say that. I want to leave us, whatever we were, in the past. What happened with Wesley just triggered something in me.”

“We can talk about it if you want. I have no issues talking about us.”

“But it won’t change anything. It is what it is.” She combed her hair behind her ears and looked at me. “Can we talk about anything else but this? But us? Remember our rules?”

I wanted to say fuck the rules, but I knew she was too sensitive that evening for me to push it. So instead, we spent the rest of the night talking about sports.