The Copper Valley Bro Code Series: Volume 1, page 108
I’d rather be alone.
I don’t know how many flights I’ve gone when I realize Levi’s not behind me anymore.
But when I get to the ground level, I don’t wait for him. I hail a cab.
And I take the chickenshit way out, and I leave.
I can’t do this. I was a fool to think I could.
31
Lila
“He did what?” Parker gasps four hours after Tripp charged in and out of my apartment like an avenging angel who suddenly realized he didn’t want the job after all.
I don’t answer her, because even though my throat isn’t on fire anymore, and even though I’ve read this moment a million times in my favorite books, I can’t talk for the lump just behind my tonsils.
Turns out, doctors really can prescribe good stuff for colds—or bronchitis and pneumonia, whatever—and Levi’s right.
I should’ve gone again when my symptoms got worse.
But I didn’t, because I was sure I could just power my way through it like everything else, and the first doctor told me it was just a normal cold.
And now I’ve triggered Tripp’s worst nightmares.
My eyes sting, and I reach for a tissue to wipe my snuffly nose.
It’s one thing for me to try to take care of him. To protect him. To do what’s best for both of us.
And it’s quite another for him to understand that.
“Oh, Lila,” Parker sighs.
She’s in a face mask, because I refuse to infect her on a normal day, much less today, when I have this suspicion she and Knox are trying to get pregnant, and I’m making her rub her hands down with antibacterial gel every five minutes, even after she pointed out that her immune system is much tougher than mine since she’s gotten more than three full nights’ worth of sleep in the last month, whereas I’ve worn myself down so badly that I should’ve seen this coming, because I did the same thing six years ago when I was investing in a company that had created stickers that turned bright yellow when an avocado was perfectly ripe.
Levi slaps a clean water bottle onto the table next to me. “Drink it.”
He’s in a face mask too, but unlike Parker, he’s grumbling every time I tell him to clean his hands.
“Is he coming back?” Parker asks him.
He squeezes his eyes shut.
Parker’s eyes narrow. “That’s not a yes.”
“This is new territory for him. Just…give him some time, okay?”
Some time.
Yeah. I know how I look. Tripp can have all the time he needs. Honestly? I’d rather he didn’t have to see me like this at all.
It’s not thirty minutes later that my phone dings as I’m drifting back to sleep while Parker and Levi debate which Bro Code song was the greatest of all time. I dive for the phone, see Tripp’s name at the top of the message, and my heart breathes a sigh of relief.
Until I read the text.
I gasp so hard I send myself into a coughing fit.
Parker dives for me. “What is it?”
I don’t answer.
Instead, I burst into tears, which isn’t pleasant anytime, but today feels like an ocean of fire is trying to strangle me from the inside.
Parker takes one look at the screen, drops to the couch next to me, and hugs me hard. “Aw, Lila. Maybe it means he’s coming back.”
“The team means everything to him,” I croak out.
Levi takes my phone, reads the message, and goes still.
“Maybe you mean more to him,” Parker suggests.
But that’s not what his resignation means.
I know it.
Levi knows it.
And Parker, who a week ago was whispering reverently about how many of the Bro Code guys she’d met in the past six weeks, re-reads the message on my phone, and then erupts in a whispered tirade aimed at Levi. “What the hell is wrong with your brother? Look. I get it. He has some issues. We all have issues. But dumping a woman because she got a cold? Oh. My. God. That’s worse than when Randy Pickle divorced me because he thought I was ugly when I was naked.”
Yep.
That’s Parker, and I adore her.
“I’ll go talk to him,” Levi says.
“Why?” I ask. “Why would you do that for—for—” I gesture to myself. I’m a disaster. I haven’t combed my hair in three days. I smell like snot. And his brother just dumped me.
Over text message.
Because I got sick.
This is going to take some time to process, and I’m going to wallow in denial as long as humanly possible, because I read too many romance novels, and I know Tripp. He wouldn’t do this.
Except I’ve just made him face his biggest fear. Again.
Even if this is a knee-jerk reaction to seeing me so sick, I don’t know that he’ll take it back after he has a few days to recover.
The thing is, I’m not actually guaranteed a happily ever after. I feel like I’ve been flattened by a taxi and had my body invaded by flaming goo-making aliens. I want to be in Copper Valley. I miss Tripp. I miss the Fireballs. And nothing about the city is the same if Tripp’s not with the Fireballs.
“Why?” I repeat to Levi.
“Because he likes you, Mr. Wellington.”
Parker looks at him.
Then at me.
I glower at him. Or try to.
“Oh, don’t be mad.” Parker grips my hand again. “We know.”
I suck in another breath, bend over coughing, and my bruised heart erupts in an unsteady rhythm again.
But she doesn’t run away.
She rubs my back until the coughing has passed, and that little gesture is what sends me over the edge.
I don’t deserve her and Knox either, but they’re here.
“How?” I whisper through my tears.
“Don’t ever doubt a librarian.”
“How long?”
“Just a few months, since you really ramped up retiring him and we started talking about what you’d do to keep busy when it was done. Well, retiring you.” She passes me a tissue. “You’re such a fucking badass. I love that.”
“I’m a mess.”
“Lila, everybody’s a mess.” Levi squats in front of me and yanks his face mask down. It’s hard to look at him, because he’s in those damn white jeans again, and another paisley shirt, and for all their differences, the Wilson boys have identical blue eyes, and their lips are weirdly similar too. “He’ll come around.”
“He quit the Fireballs.”
He drops his gaze, and it’s like another punch in the gut, because if anyone could tell me that Tripp’s just being irrational, that he’ll come around, that he’ll realize he’s overreacting, that he’ll take it back in a few days, it’s Levi.
But Levi’s not telling me that Tripp’s overreacting.
He’s telegraphing instead that Tripp’s made up his mind.
He’s not one to change his mind. And if he does, it’s because he feels responsible for me, and not because I’m what he wants.
Tears blur my vision again. “It’s not his fault,” I whisper.
“Fuck that,” Parker says.
I’d love to.
I’d love to blame Tripp. To say he’s being a dick, to rail against him.
But I can’t.
I lied to him. I pushed him with too many changes for the team. And I got to pretend, for a little while, that I could belong somewhere.
But the truth is, it’s probably better to part ways now.
To cut our losses and run.
Much better now than when I decide I need a new challenge.
Especially since I can’t promise him nothing will ever happen to me.
I can’t. No one can.
32
Tripp
After quarantining myself for forty-eight hours at a hotel outside the city, I’ve realized what an ass I made of myself, and I don’t want to go home.
So I head to the one place I can count on for some peace and perspective.
Beck’s place in the mountains.
Waylon and my mom bring my kids out. Beck and Sarah show up. Levi cancels his studio time in New York and claims he’d always planned on coming in early for the holidays. Davis drives up to add to the torture.
And none of it helps.
I’m a fucking chickenshit.
I’m a fucking chickenshit with kids who are being entertained by everyone else, surrounded by bright, happy holiday decorations, and all I want to do is sleep.
And mourn.
I keep telling myself that if I’d gone straight to New York, if I’d been there sooner, at the first sign of trouble, I could’ve kept Lila from getting that sick. That I could’ve handled it better if I hadn’t let my imagination run away with me when she didn’t come home and when she didn’t start getting worse and when she didn’t insist on texting me instead of calling me.
But the truth is, I freaked out, and I can’t fucking handle it.
And if I can’t handle the woman I love getting sick without having a complete breakdown, then I have no business being in a relationship.
I didn’t miss being in relationships.
But I miss Lila.
I miss knowing that I’m the guy she’d confide in. I miss arguing with her. I miss laughing with her. I miss watching her hug Emma and her million unicorns, and I miss listening to her debate trucks with James. Fuck, I miss the Fireballs. But I miss her more.
It’s a physical ache that’s put a pallor over the whole world.
The lights on Beck’s Christmas tree are dull and lifeless. The cinnamon rolls heating in the oven smell like sawdust. James’s shrieks are giving me a headache, and Emma’s whining is making me want to pull my hair out.
And this house is too crowded.
I came here to get away.
This isn’t away.
But then, I can’t get away from myself, can I?
“You could just call her,” Levi says two days before Christmas when he catches me staring at my phone without doing anything about it.
“I don’t deserve her,” I reply.
And that’s the crux of the issue.
I didn’t just leave her.
I left her when she was down. Sick. Not at full strength.
And I left her.
I left her to fix herself.
Me. The guy who’s always taken care of everyone else. I couldn’t take care of her, because I couldn’t take care of myself. And the truth is, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to find my own oxygen mask when it comes to the people in my life being sick.
“You deserve to be happy,” my mom tells me.
She has to say that. She’s my mom.
I head out for a hike in the woods by myself, because no one’s going to try to placate me out in nature.
Not that anyone’s letting me go anywhere by myself. This time, Davis tags along.
He doesn’t talk.
The Man Bun knows when to shut up. Except when we get back to the house, and I hear my kids laughing hysterically inside, and I see Sarah giving Emma raspberries on her belly while Beck makes James fly, I get this ache in the pit of my gut.
That’s family. And I can’t give that to both of them by myself at my house.
“Ask you something?” Davis says.
“No.”
“Why her?”
I scowl at him. “I said no.”
“You want to walk away, walk away. You do fine on your own, man. If you don’t need her, you still want her, and the question is, why? Because that’s what you need to know to decide if it’s worth it to go back and grovel, or if it’s better that you go through this and come out alone on the other side.”
He leaves me wondering—again—how the youngest of all of us got to be the smartest.
Why Lila?
Because she’s the only person I know more afraid of getting close than I am. Because she took the risk anyway. Because she sent chicken noodle soup when my kids were sick. Because she gets this light in her eyes when she talks about romance novels, and I know she’s not talking about the books, but talking about how she feels when she falls in love.
Because she challenges me.
She makes me move outside of myself.
I’ve been all over the damn world. I thought my eyes were open to just about anything. But they’ve never been open to a woman who’s overcome losing everything, only to turn around and take over the whole fucking world.
She’s not humble, and she shouldn’t be. She should be fucking proud of everything she’s done.
But she’s not hoarding her wealth either. She’s using it to fix a team she shouldn’t feel responsible for, but does anyway.
I caught her filing her mail that had been forwarded from New York just after Thanksgiving. Letter after letter thanking Dalton Wellington for his generous contributions to charities for orphans. To children’s hospitals. To boarding schools. To scholarship funds. To literacy. To pet shelters. To women’s shelters.
It was a fucking box. And she got flustered when I started looking closer, and insisted she still wasn’t doing enough, and that she didn’t want to talk about it.
She might say she’s hiding from the world, but she’s making a difference, quietly, in her own way.
She’s the only person I know more responsible than me.
And despite all the secrets we started with, I trust her every bit as much as I trust every single person I’ve ever consciously chosen to call family.
Fuck, I miss her. I want to call her and ask what I should do about running away from the only woman in the world who’s managed to make me want to risk my heart again, except I doubt she has any desire to see me ever again.
For all I know, she’s hopped a plane to an obscure island somewhere, and I’ll never see her again.
The thought makes my heart crumble to dust, and I have to suck in a hard breath to keep myself from completely losing my mind.
Mom sits down next to me at the dining room table and squeezes my hands, and I realize I’ve completely tuned out of everything going on around me.
Again.
Beck flies James to the door, cracks it open, takes something from one of his security guys, and calls my name.
“Daddy got mail!” James says.
I grimace when Beck hands me the envelope with the official Fireballs logo. At least, the logo for now.
It’s probably my severance package.
I don’t care about the team. I can’t, because no feeling that I have about the team will ever touch the dull, constant ache that I feel when I think about being unable to be the man Lila needed.
I toss the letter aside.
Mom makes a disgusted noise, grabs it, and rips it open.
“Hey!”
“Tripp Robert Wilson, stop hiding and deal with it.” A letter and an old-fashioned receipt tumble out of the envelope. She grabs both and shakes them at me. “The only thing permanent in life is death. She’s not dead. You miss her. If she deserves you, she’s going to understand. Get over yourself and do something about this.”
Leave it to my mother to put the onus of deserving on Lila’s shoulders when Lila didn’t do anything wrong.
Mom gives me the eyebrow of I am your mother and I know what’s best for you while she offers me the two slips of paper. And when I don’t take them quickly enough, she heaves an exasperated sigh worthy of an Oscar—swear to god, Jessie said so once upon a time—and thinking of Jessie makes me realize just how disappointed she’d be in me too.
Levi was right.
She’d want me to live.
She’d grab me by the shoulders, tell me one bad flu bug doesn’t mean germs are going to kill everyone you love. It sucks. It sucks so hard that I died. But that’s no excuse for you hiding from the rest of your damn life, and then she’d order me to move on, fucking relax, find my happiness, and live.
And this? This isn’t living. This is hiding.
Mom gasps, and I jerk my head around, looking to see if she could hear that same voice I just did.
But of course she didn’t. That message?
That was for me.
Mom’s staring at the papers from Fireballs headquarters.
“What? What?” I snatch it, my stomach dropping at just how round her eyes have gone, and I quickly scan the note, then the receipt, then repeat.
Three or four times.
On the fifth read, it finally sinks in that I’m starting at a receipt for the sale of the Fireballs organization, to me, for one dollar. Paid in cash.
The note is brief. And handwritten.
Mr. Wilson,
I know you’ll take good care of them. Mr. Pakorski approves.
All my love,
Lila
Why Lila?
Because she does insane shit like this.
She just gave me a fucking baseball team.
And suddenly, the only thing I care about is finding her before she truly does disappear, and I lose my chance forever.
33
Lila
I missed Christmas in the Caribbean, but spending it upstate feels right this year. No, make that necessary.
For the first time in my adult life, I don’t want to be alone over the holidays. Staying in New York means I’m close enough that Parker and Knox can come visit me in the small manor house I’ve rented through the New Year once they’re done with their own family obligations.
They’re not my first choice, and I’m pretty sure they know it, but seeing as my peace offering to Tripp has been met with complete and total silence, I have to face reality.
And the reality is that he was my transition relationship.
The man who taught me that it’s okay to trust people. It’s okay to leap.
I don’t blame him for leaving me.
But I wish he’d trust me as much as I trust him. That’s what hurts.
And hurts might be an understatement.
Aches like someone shot a thousand rusty nails into my heart and then swirled it in boiling lava might be a little closer.
My friends arrive late Christmas evening, not long before a snowstorm is due to trap us all here for a couple days. They distract me with stories about Knox’s nieces and Parker’s brothers, they give me utterly ridiculous gifts like a screaming goat and a blanket with Knox’s nana’s face on it.
