The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas (novels for students .TXT) 📕

that moment, as I stood there, watching the crowd and my teammates celebrate a victory I couldn’t bring myself to care about, I decided I’d pull out from the draft. And I did.”

“That must have hurt so much,” I told him, my thumb caressing the warm skin on the back of his hand. “All of it, losing your mom and letting go of something you had worked all your life toward.”

“It did, yeah.” His head dipped, and I watched him look at our intertwined hands. “My dad couldn’t understand it. He wouldn’t even try.” A bitter chuckle left him. “My football career had turned into the perfect escape, following Mom’s diagnosis. Instead of that consolidating our father-and-son relationship, it turned us into coach and player instead. Nothing more than that.”

More loss. My heart broke for Aaron. I squeezed his hand and then very slowly leaned my head on his arm.

He continued, “He said I was throwing away my life. My future. That I would fail. That if I did drop an opportunity that would change my life, he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. So, I graduated and left Seattle.”

Aaron still held my hand in his lap; his fingers had tightened around mine as he talked. I kept the side of my head on him as I felt my other hand fly to his forearm. It was the only way I could express how sorry I was for what he had gone through without engulfing him in a tight hug I wasn’t sure I’d be able to let go of. At least, not for the rest of the night.

“It must have been so hard, growing up, limited by someone else’s idea of what you should and should not be.”

He absently played with my fingers, the soft caresses of his skin against mine causing tingles to crawl up my arm. “I realize that now, in hindsight. I never noticed while it happened; it was just how things were. I was given a set of goals, and I simply went with it,” he explained, his thumb trailing up my wrist. “I was never unhappy—at least, not until I realized that perhaps I wasn’t completely happy either.”

“And now? Are you completely happy now, Aaron?”

Those soft brushes of his fingers against mine came to a stop, and he didn’t hesitate when he answered, “Completely? Not yet. But I’m working my fucking hardest on getting there.”

Chapter Nineteen

For anyone witnessing my foolish attempts at reaching the bedroom, it would have been pretty obvious that I was about to face-plant on the floor. And they wouldn’t be wrong. It was a wonder I was able to move at all, considering my feet barely lifted off the ground with all the dragging they had been carrying out.

Ironically, and contrary to the story my body told, I didn’t think I had ever felt more awake than I did as I crossed the threshold of that door.

My head was working at full speed. Processing everything Aaron had told me about his past. I kept spinning and turning even the tiniest pieces of information until I was completely sure I had them pinned down securely so they wouldn’t flee my memory.

Never mind that my legs wobbled with every step I took and exhaustion throbbed through my body. Aaron’s confession—because it had felt like he was unveiling something he had kept guarded and locked away from sight—had created a little riot in my head.

And my chest. Definitely my chest too. The organ that resided there had constricted and squeezed, and I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t supposed to feel that way. Or to act on it. A part of me missed being drunk or tipsy enough not to care, but after all the water Aaron had insisted on me gulping down and the fact that I hadn’t touched a drink after we went back inside the infamous bar, I didn’t have the luxury of that excuse anymore. It was past five in the morning, and the effect of the alcohol had faded to a very low buzz that indicated tomorrow wasn’t going to be much fun.

I didn’t realize I had been standing in the middle of the bedroom, staring into empty space, until Aaron closed the door behind him. When I turned, my gaze immediately fell on the glass of water in his hand.

I watched him walk to the nightstand, where I had placed a few of my things, and set the glass there.

“That for me?” I knew the answer, but the small gesture turned something inside of me to mush. Just like every time he had watched after me tonight. It just … didn’t feel all that small anymore. “If you keep taking care of me this fiercely, it’s going to be really hard to go back to real life.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that, shouldn’t have phrased it that way, but after everything that had happened tonight, the careful grip I tried to maintain around Aaron seemed to be loosening.

Aaron nodded, his expression turning somewhat more serious. But he didn’t comment on what I had said. Instead, he unbuttoned the top of his shirt and then changed his mind and started fumbling with the wristband of his watch.

Feeling my legs wobble—for all the wrong reasons—I walked to the edge of the bed and sat on top of the simple and silky comforter. Stopping my body from melting into it right away, I exhaled tiredly, releasing some of the tension in my shoulders. But before I could completely relax, my spine stiffened with a realization.

The bed.

We would be sharing this very same bed tonight.

That fact had somehow fled my mind until now. And its return did strange things to my belly. Things that were not strange in a funny way, but in a rather exciting way. Things that heated my skin.

Well, if I was feeling this way and we hadn’t even gotten into bed yet, I couldn’t even