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I shouldn’t have walked out, but what the fuck else was there to do?

All I could think about were the ways we could try to make this work, but my stupid, logical brain kept showing me all the different reasons why it can never work.

I can’t play for a manager I’m lying to, and he’d never be okay with me dating his daughter.

It’s his daughter .

He’s a good friend of mine. One of the very few friends I feel like I can count on right now, at least in this town since he offered me a place to live along with the incredible opportunity to get back in the game.

I owe him a lot, and that has to start with my respect.

The man knows how I used to live my life before I got serious with Stacy, and for fuck’s sake, I know how he lives his, too.

It’s too messy, too complicated. Too ugly.

But the love I feel for her is the opposite of all that. It’s beautiful and simple and easy.

It’s the greatest thing I have in my life, maybe the greatest thing I’ve ever had in my life, and I’m making the decision to let it go.

I knew if I stayed in that restaurant one second longer, I’d break down in front of her, in front of the waitress, in front of every other patron in that place, and then you can bet your ass I’d end up as a fucking headline in the media with her sitting across from me. And you can bet your ass my boss would see it, and then we’d be in an even bigger mess than we are now.

We’re lucky that shit hasn’t happened already. We’re lucky we’re in Vegas where the people sitting beside us are too drunk or high or wrapped up in their vacations to realize Cooper Fucking Noah is in the house.

I want to be angry she never told me who her dad was, but it’s hard to be angry when I left a pretty big puzzle piece out of the conversation myself.

I guess I just want someone to blame, but other than myself…I keep coming up empty.

And so I allow myself to break down once I’m in the privacy of my truck. It feels like a death as the loss of what could have been starts to wash over me. I think I’m still in that state of shock.

When I took the hit that took me out of the game, I didn’t cry. The pain was too intense and I went into shock.

This pain feels worse.

At least with the injury, I knew what I was dealing with. I could take painkillers if I needed to, and they would help ease the pain.

I’m not sure anything could ease what I’m feeling right now.

I pull myself together, and then I take a drive. I can’t go back to Troy’s house like this, especially not given the fact that I’m living with Gabby now, so I drive up some hills and into the mountains. I find myself driving and driving, and a little under an hour later I wind up at Hoover Dam.

I pull off the road and get out of the car, staring at the magnificence of the dam, wishing she was here tucked into my side as I press a kiss to her temple and we take in the view together.

I don’t know how to deal with this.

I don’t know how to get through this.

I don’t know how to come out on the other side and live my life without her in it.

I stare out over one of the places I always wanted to visit. While it is fascinating, it’s not the magic I was expecting. How can it be after I walked out on Gabby?

I read a sign letting me know how the dam does something with the water from the Colorado River, but I can’t concentrate on the details when it feels like my chest cavity is being shredded in two.

How could I not have pieced this together?

I felt like we knew each other so well, so intimately, and now it feels like we never knew each other at all.

How did I not know she was leaving something out of the story just as I was? How could she have not wondered whether her father and I knew each other given our career history? We ran in the same circles, and she had to have puzzled that out.

I guess it’s easy to blame her naivety or her inexperience. From everything she’s told me about her mom, she wasn’t allowed to show any interest in anything that her father might’ve been interested in, so I guess it makes sense she wouldn’t know much about baseball, particularly baseball that took place three years ago before she moved in with him, back when I was still in the game.

It would be the easier choice to give into what I want, but that would mean either disrespecting my boss in lying to him or it would mean telling him the truth…that I’ve been disrespecting him for weeks by wrecking his daughter.

But my brain keeps returning to the entire reason I’m here.

Troy Bodine wants to build a team that I lead.

While I believe in what Gabby and I shared in the few weeks we’ve known each other, there are hard and fast rules in both the game and in friendships. You don’t fuck a friend’s mom. You don’t fuck a friend’s ex. And you certainly don’t fuck your friend’s daughter.

Another sign tells me how the dam provides water to millions of people. What the hell am I doing here?

I shouldn’t have run away from her, but I couldn’t see any other option. My choice was to sit at that table and bleed out in the booth across from her, baiting somebody to get a picture of us…or fucking bolt. And so I fucking bolted.

The media paints me as the unemotional third baseman whose feathers are never ruffled. The guy who’s never bothered. I’m painted that way because that’s what I allow others to see, so that’s what I allow others to believe.

Gabby might’ve been the first person I ever really let in apart from my mother—and even dear sweet Mommy doesn’t know me in many of the ways Gabby does. She’s the first person I ever really let see all my different sides even though it was terrifying to let her in.

I told her things I never told Stacy.

I felt different ways about her that I never felt for Stacy, too.

I can sit here trying to convince myself that it was meaningless or that we didn’t know each other long enough for it to have mattered—or any one of another million lies swirling around my mind, but I know the truth.

Now that she’s part of my life, I’m not sure how to exist without her. And even worse, I don’t know how I’m supposed to live with her for the next month when I won’t be able to touch her or kiss her or look at her or fall further in love with her.

Because one thing’s for sure. I either lose a friendship that’s over a decade old with the kind of guy who offered to pay me more than I’m worth and who is depending on me to start a new legacy here in Vegas…or I lose Gabby.

Which would be less destructive? To put the entire Vegas Heat organization in jeopardy after I committed to building a brotherhood? Or to take that shot for myself and bury it deep and deal with the pain?

I can’t let the entire organization down. There’s Troy, but there’s also the entire team. The staff. The crew.

I have no choice but to take the hit this time.