It was then that Trevor grabbed me by the wrist and made a face to tell me to follow him. I pointed at the Travis family, but Paw-Paw waved me off to go alone. Trev led me through a maze of people, around a barricade, down some stairs, and through a checkpoint as White Oaks fans were going insane at their win.
It was one step closer to the playoffs.
“Bianca!” a voice yelled from around the security guard.
It was Zac, holding his helmet in one hand as one player after another walked by him, slapping him on the shoulder, hooting and yelling as they went down the dark tunnel that we had approached. His face was pink, and his hair was matted to his head, but he looked happy and alive and amazing.
What I would remember for the rest of my life was meeting him halfway and how he held me with his arms banded right under my butt after he pulled me into them, grinning so wide as I hugged him and kissed his cheeks and his mouth and his cheeks some more.
“I knew you were going to do it! I fucking knew you were going to do it!” I told him, pressing my mouth against his damp ear so that I wouldn’t have to yell in his face from the deafening noise of the fans still going crazy.
He pulled back a little and smiled at me, the biggest smile to date, probably ever in existence. His hand moved, and he palmed my cheek as his gaze traveled over my painted face, that perfect grin still there. All for me.
“How do I look?”
He drew the pad of his finger over my fake mustache. “Like the best thing I’ve ever seen.”
And then he kissed me again.
* * *
Hours later, after he’d had to let me go—after kissing my face a bunch more times even though I warned him about my face paint bleeding—and after one interview after another, Zac celebrated with his team in the locker room while the rest of us headed over to Trevor’s. The Travis family, Connie and Richard, and Boogie waited for him there. We ate food that Trev had ordered and scarfed down celebratory cake. CJ went out with some of the other players on the team, but Zac didn’t.
It wasn’t until after Connie headed back to her hotel and Boogie had decided to drive back to Austin so he wouldn’t leave Lauren alone for longer than necessary, that Zac grabbed my hand and asked if I wanted to go look at something with him. His mom and grandpa just smiled and waved us along.
I held up my promise and said yes.
Nothing could have prepared me for the three-and-a-half-hour drive that led us awfully close to Liberty Hill. I hadn’t even realized how long we’d been in the car because we’d been too busy talking about the game and how incredible it had gone and all the other little things that had been said in the locker room before and afterward.
“Are you planning on driving me out to the middle of nowhere and dumping my body?” I asked as he took a sharp right turn onto a dirt road that I hadn’t seen until the last minute.
“Not today. Maybe in sixty years,” he said with a smile I barely caught the edge of thanks to the light from his dash.
My heart thumped like a little kid who just got told she was going to Disney—not that I knew from experience, but I could imagine. “Oh? Sixty years?”
His smile got even wider as he navigated us down the pitch-black street. “You play your cards right and maybe it’ll be seventy.”
I was too busy taking in the magnitude of his words to respond.
He glanced at me. “Too much?”
Too much? I squeezed my hands into fists and put them under my thighs for the second time in two days, but this time, it was because… I didn’t know what to do with them, not because I wanted to smack him. “No. It’s just… I’m not used to it. It doesn’t feel real, I guess.”
“What doesn’t feel real?”
“You. This. Everything.” I laughed, feeling nervous all of a sudden. “I mean, I’m fine. I’m not complaining, but it’s just… a lot to take in.”
Zac reached across the console, and I took his hand, sliding my palm across his warm one.
“Just yesterday I thought I was going to need to go far away for a while to get over you, because there was no way I could keep going with you a few feet away and now—”
“And now we’re pulling up to what I wanted to show you,” he cut me off with a squeeze of his hand as he turned the car into a fenced-in property with a gate with horses on it.
I squinted through the side window, but it was too dark to see anything other than a white fence along the sides of the car. “Where are we?”
Up ahead, the headlights caught onto a two-story home circled by a handful of big trees.
I eyed Zac and caught him looking at me with a small smile on his face.
“Why do you look nervous?” I questioned.
“I’m not nervous.”
“That’s your nervous face, Snack Pack.”
“It’s not my nervous face,” he tried to claim.
But it was his nervous face. What the hell did he have to be nervous about?
He slowly pulled the car to a stop along the gravel driveway and put it into park.
“Whose place is this?”
He snickered as he turned the car off. “So many questions. Come on. Come with
