Play the Man Page 12

  While he had been lying there, catching his breath and holding onto his sanity, he had been desperate to know what she was thinking. For him, those moments they had spent together had been everything he had hoped for. No, he hadn’t meant for it happen quite that way. Nick was afraid that Jenna had thought he had been taking advantage of her. He hoped she knew him better than that, but he didn’t get to tell her how he was really feeling. After all, Nick wasn’t an emotional guy. He had feelings, of course, but he didn’t act on them impulsively like that.

  Nick had never planned on telling Jenna at all how he felt, let alone anything like that. Seeing her so upset, though, was the catalyst that goaded him into kissing her. Even though that was no doubt the biggest mistake he’d ever made—sleeping with a teammate’s girlfriend, even worse, a teammate’s fiancée—and probably the biggest mistake he ever would make in his life, he couldn’t help but feel in his core that it wasn’t a mistake at all. Being with Jenna was not a mistake; the fact that she was still with Ryan was the mistake.

  Nick didn’t know any drug addicts, but he assumed that this is what it would be like. Watching someone he cared about repeatedly hurt herself by making the wrong choices and knowing that she could prevent herself so much heartache if she could just quit him. That was Nick’s intervention: giving her a glimpse of a better life and showing her that she didn’t have to endure that heartbreak. He wanted to remind her of her own words: I wish Ryan were more like you. Marrying you would be easy. Why ask Ryan to be more like him, if she could just go ahead and have him?

  He knew it was crazy, and he knew it wasn’t that simple. But Jenna had kissed him back. That’s all Nick needed to know. He didn’t force her or pressure her into anything. She could have pulled back and told him “no,” but she didn’t. She could have stopped him at any point, and he would have immediately stopped as she wished. But she didn’t. That had to count for something; he wasn’t sure what it counted for, only that it was something.

  Like a coward, he ran. When that door opened, he grabbed his clothes and ran without even looking at Jenna. Nick should have stayed and admitted to Ryan what had happened, taken the punishment Ryan wanted to dole out, and taken it like a man. He should have shown Jenna that he was going to be a man about it and accept the consequences for his—their—actions and proved to her that he could be the stand-up man she deserved. But, no, he ran with his tail between his legs. Maybe he was a little scared: scared of Ryan and scared of the avalanche he just started.

  Nick was going to do it. He was going to admit to it and fess up and take responsibility for whatever was going to happen, between him and Ryan, between him and Jenna, between him and the team, and between him and everyone who was going to label him as a guy that stole away another man’s fiancée. So he grabbed some clothes and dressed himself to face the world as a man, instead of continuing to hide in this room like he had for the past half hour. With one deep breath, he grabbed the doorknob and opened the portal into his unknown and uncertain future.

  Jenna was waiting outside his door. Her hair was wet from a recent shower, and her cheeks were wet, too, although from crying. Immediately, he knew she was remorseful. It killed him. Not only had he risked a lot by kissing her and sleeping with her, but also he was about to put it all on the line again by confessing to Ryan and telling Jenna that he was ready to be the man she deserved.

  “Nicky, what did we do?” she whispered, not looking him in the eye. She couldn’t make herself do it. Nick was about to tell her what was on his mind, what he had just decided to do for her, but she kept talking. Jenna was looking for answers. “Why did we just do that?”

  “You were upset, and I... wanted to make you feel better.”

  “You don’t understand. For you, it was just sex. I cheated,” she whispered. “On the man I have loved for the past eight years. I can’t believe I did that to him.”

  Nick pursed his lips and looked down at her, even though she still refused to meet his gaze. It hadn’t been “just sex” to him. It was exponentially more, but Jenna would never understand that because she was hopelessly—and foolishly—still in love with Ryan. Even though he just did his best to prove that she had a better option in front of her. He was about to fess up to Ryan, but now he saw that he couldn’t do that. They couldn’t do that if she still wanted to be with him. “You don’t have to tell him. We don’t have to tell him,” he said. It hurt his heart to say those words.

  “Not tell him? I can’t not tell him. How am I supposed to let him touch me? How am I supposed to just go on and pretend like nothing happened? How can I let him go on completely unaware, not knowing what happened? That’s not fair to Ryan.”

  He shrugged. He didn’t have an answer. Nick wanted Ryan to find out, because he wanted to clear the air. How was he supposed to go on like nothing happened? How was he supposed to go on and forget about their passionate time together? It wasn’t fair to him, either.

  Ryan walked down the hallway and saw the two of them standing there. Jenna’s arms were crossed over her chest and her shoulders were slumped, and Nick wore a pained expression. “What’s up, Marty?” Ryan asked as she joined their somber gathering in the hallway.

  “Uh, I have a headache. Tired from being out all evening. I’m going to lie down,” he lied. He closed the door and left Jenna and Ryan in the hallway.

  Neither spoke for a moment. “I came up here for a reason,” Ryan said finally. He held out the paper in his hand, the sheet that Jenna didn’t notice he was holding.

  “What’s this?” she asked, with a voice raspy and raw. She took it from him and examined the page of names.

  “My guest list. Um, there’s two hundred on that list. Including my family and everything. So that puts us, in total, under three hundred.”

  Jenna’s eyes scanned the list. Now? He decided to do this now?! She couldn’t believe that Ryan chose this moment to fulfill her wishes and compile the list she wanted to so badly, at this moment when her attitude toward marrying him was less than enthusiastic. If only he knew, Jenna thought, he would never want to marry her. She couldn’t find the proper adjective to describe her current situation. Ironic, twisted, a sick joke. Ryan was finally taking the initiative to marry her at the very moment he should he pushing her out the door. And now, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to marry him either; not with the weight of her actions hanging over her head and the confusion swirling in her head about whether or not she should still tell him.

  Chapter 13

  That wasn’t the reaction Ryan was expecting to get from Jenna. She had been no help to him in telling him what to do in order to help their situation, so he went back to the source of the schism: the wedding. That’s where this whole thing started, after all. He wouldn’t have been bitching to Alex if it hadn’t been about the wedding. If it hadn’t been for that damned guest list for the wedding, he wouldn’t have had a reason to bitch. So he tackled the project and spent half an hour writing down names, crossing some out, adding more names, then crossing more out.... Until finally, he had a list he could be happy with. And he even listed less people than Jenna allowed him. Surely he’d get bonus points for that?

  He worked on and finished the guest list because he thought that was what she wanted. Maybe that wasn’t the problem, because she wasn’t happy about it, it seemed. And she certainly still wasn’t happy with him. Maybe the guest list was just a cover for something else. If that were the case, how was he supposed to know what to do? He was screwed. “I thought you wanted me to do this?” he asked, feeling hopeless and frustrated.

  “Yes, um, I did. Did you... did you just do this? Just now?”

  Ryan was sure that if he told her that he just wrote the list in the past thirty minutes since he’d arrived home, then she would be mad that he put it off since she brought it up weeks ago. So instead, he avoided her question completely and tried to choose his words carefully; however, he stumbled over them. “Listen, I know you’re mad at me. I’m not good about this wedding
stuff, Jenna. I want to marry you, but this kind of stuff, I just.... Whatever you want, it’s yours. Just talk to me about it, don’t shut me out. These past few days have been hell, and I want to go back to the way things used to be. So can we just, like, forget this ever happened? However we got here, let’s just, you know, erase it and go back to the way we were this summer. I hate fighting. I hate you being mad.”

  Jenna let out a deep breath and pinched the bridge of her nose. That sounded like a good idea to her: going back to the way things had been over the summer, before the fighting and before her huge mistake. She, too, wanted their relationship to be the same as it was during the blissful summer. There was only one way they could go back to that, and that’s if she kept her tryst a secret from Ryan. She wanted to tell him and come clean, but she knew that if she spilled her guts, Ryan would never forgive her and they would never get back what they had. She nodded and shed a few tears. “Yeah. I just want to forget about it all.”

  “Oh, thank God,” he said, a tiny smile playing on his lips. He was relieved, but Jenna still seemed a little upset. Ryan was clueless, completely unaware of what was really running through her head. Not knowing any better, he put his arms around her.

  Instead of flinching or moving away from him, she melted in his arms, conforming her shape to fit into his. They fitted together again, just like they always did. Like they both hoped they always would. Jenna took a deep breath and tried to exhale all her demons with her sigh. She knew it wasn’t going to be easy to keep this secret, but she needed to for the sake of her relationship with her fiancé. “I love you, Ryan. No matter what. Always have, always will.”

  Before she knew what happened next, she suddenly found herself back in her bedroom with Ryan, his mouth on hers. It felt wrong to be doing this with Ryan so soon after doing it with Nick, but she was afraid to stop him. Ryan would just know something was up if they didn’t have sex. His hands meandered around her body. “Ryan,” she mumbled as best she could, considering her lips were still smashed against his.

  “Mmm, Jenna,” he replied, calling her name the same way she did his. In his mind, she was saying it as an encouragement. After all, it had been days since they’d had such an intimate moment.

  That wasn’t at all how she meant it; she said his name in order to get his attention to halt his actions. She didn’t need any other reasons to feel disgusted with herself. Jenna repeated his name, and that only spurred him on even more. That made her give up and cede to him. Besides, Jenna had promised him that they were forgetting about the past few months—and that promise included everything she had done that day. No matter how it made her feel.

  As Ryan grabbed her waist and brought her down onto the freshly made bed with him, that saying came to her mind. You’ve made your bed, now lie in it. Well, wasn’t that entirely appropriate for her at this moment, both figuratively and literally. Jenna brought this problem on herself by sleeping with Nick in the bed she shared with Ryan; the very same bed she stripped and remade with clean sheets. Yes, she made the poor judgment call and the bad decision, and now she had to live with the consequences.

  Jenna thought that she could justify their act by making it mean something. If it were more than just make-up sex, it wouldn’t make her feel so dirty. Ryan, on the other hand, was hastily stripping himself of his clothes. He was desperate to be with her. This was just their routine: fight, make up, and then have sex. Ryan was following the script, but Jenna was looking for a little deviation from the norm.

  She grabbed his ears and pulled his face to hers, giving him a long, passionate, lingering kiss. However, that didn’t stop his relentless hands from moving around her body. Ryan quickly discarded her unsexy, unflattering flannel pajamas that she was wearing on purpose. She was dressed in layers to cover and hide herself. Her reservations, however, could be cured with a little TLC. Jenna stopped kissing him and begged, “Ryan, make love to me tonight.”

  “What do you think I’m doing?” he asked back, pulling her camisole over her head. “Why are you wearing so many clothes tonight?”

  Jenna ignored his latter question. “I don’t just want to have sex with you. I want you to make love to me. I want us to make love.”

  Ryan nodded, thinking he understood. He pushed the crotch of her panties aside and lowered his pelvis toward hers. “I love you, Jenna.”

  “Then show me,” she said, pushing herself up on her elbows so they could kiss again. She wanted soft, meaningful kisses and whispered sweet nothings and gentle caresses and promises of a long, happy future together. Instead, Ryan pushed himself inside of her with little ceremony. That wasn’t what she was hoping for. She groaned, “Ryan. This isn’t love.”

  He stopped his movement and looked down into her eyes. “I have to leave soon. Away game tomorrow. I promise, we’ll take more time when I get back. When Marty’s gone.” She grimaced and looked away at the mention of his name. That was the last thing she wanted to hear, especially while in mid-coitus with Ryan. “I just want to be with you now.”

  She nodded and let him continue, letting him bring her to the edge of the cliff and push her off like always but not finding any pleasure in it this time around. Her body liked everything he was doing, but her mind was elsewhere.

  Nick heard the apology from his stance right behind the closed door. He hadn’t lied when he said he had a headache; that headache, however, was of the human variety. His headache was Ryan. Nick stayed right by the door and listened as his teammate asked his fiancée if they could just go back to how it used to be. No way; there was no possible way that they could just pretend it never happened. Nick had told Jenna that they didn’t have to tell Ryan, but that’s not what he really wanted. He really wanted to tell Ryan everything and to tell Jenna that he loved her, and that she should drop Ryan like dead weight.

  After all, the three of them would forever be changed because of their actions this Sunday evening. They had to be. Ryan may be unaware for now about what happened, but that would have to change. Nick was so sure of it until he heard Jenna’s answer through the crack in the door. “Yeah. I just want to forget about it all.” Her words stung him. It wasn’t like a blade cutting through his heart. His affections weren’t that deep yet. But it did hurt him, especially as she added, “I love you, Ryan. No matter what. Always have, always will.”

  As he reflected on those words, Nick wondered what he expected. Was Jenna supposed to abandon Ryan immediately and fall for himself instead? Move out of his house and move into his place? Was she supposed to pick up with Nick right where she left off in her relationship with Ryan? Honestly, Nick hadn’t thought about the details like that. He only wanted to be with her, to experience it, to know what it was like. And now that he had a taste, he wanted to have it all.

  However, he didn’t think he was going to get the whole enchilada. Not if she was still professing her love for Ryan. He was so stupid! He should have made it clear from the get-go that he cared about her and that it wasn’t just sex for him. That he wasn’t just taking advantage of the situation or trying to find a way to comfort her. That he was showing her how he felt rather than simply say it. When Nick heard them kiss and shuffle off in the direction of their bedroom, he thought he was going to be sick. Jenna was choosing Ryan. After their amazing moments spent together, she was choosing Ryan over him.

  He could hear them from the guest bedroom across the hall, and he had to leave. The sounds were reverberating in the hallway as he trotted down the stairs. There was no reprieve in the living room, since their bedroom was now right above him, so he continued into the kitchen and sat down at the breakfast nook. Nick wasn’t a drinker normally, but he really wanted a beer at that moment. Or a shot of hard liquor. Or ten. Anything to numb him. Those sounds were tormenting him.

  Nick lost all sense of time as he sat alone in the kitchen. He couldn’t drive, so he couldn’t leave; and he knew that they guys were leaving for their game tonight so he couldn’t even call Brian or Mike or someone to come get
him for a few hours so he could get out of this house in which he didn’t belong. Off in his own little world, he didn’t even notice when the noises stopped and Ryan walked into the kitchen.

  “I thought you were lying down, man. Thought you had a headache?”

  Nick picked up the bottle of Advil that was conveniently resting on the table in front of him from the last dose he had taken. “Just needed to take something.” He didn’t mention that he could hear them, hear every creak of the mattress and every grunt and hiss and sigh and moan. Nick was sure that even if Ryan had known that Nick could hear them, Ryan would never think that it might bother Nick. In fact, he’d probably want to brag about how he was banging his fiancée.

  Nick laughed to himself at the idea of an unsuspecting Ryan. Nick often was teased and razzed for being so serious and sometimes naïve; today, however, Ryan was the naïve one. He had no idea what his teammate and fiancée had just done under the roof of his house. That Nick had had sex with her shortly before he had. At least Nick wasn’t a braggart, and he wasn’t one to boast about how he’d “tapped that” or whatever else the guys would say. That was, of course, besides the fact that he’d told Jenna that they didn’t have to tell. Nick would never risk it anyway. Not anymore.

  “Well, if you need anything, just let Jenna know. She’ll take care of ya. We’ll see you when we get back from the Wild game.”

  “Have a good game,” Nick said as he nodded and looked away. The game he wasn’t playing in, or even going to. The doctors and trainers thought it best if he just stayed in Chicago and rested instead of traveling. Once again, he was stuck in Jenna and Ryan’s house—this time, alone with Jenna. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

  “Take care of yourself and rest up,” Ryan said, clapping him on the back as he grabbed his bag and headed for the door.