Change of Hart(20)

“So are you gonna be this kid’s daddy now or something?” Deuce asked with a smirk.

“Fuck it, I’m out,” I said, slamming on the stop button and leaving the treadmill. I would go run the stairs in the stadium. I wasn’t gonna listen to Deuce make fun of me. Not about this.

“Come on, man!” he yelled after me. “I was just kidding! Come on, Jason. I’ll stop, I promise!”

I gave him the finger over my shoulder on my way out the door. I heard him roaring with laughter behind me.

For the next thirty minutes I ran up and down the stairs. That’s a lot of stairs. But I was worked up. I thought about why I was so pissed off. It’s not like Deuce said anything different than he would normally say. I just didn’t know where I stood with Addison and it frustrated me that Deuce could pick up on it so easily.

This was different than when I had dated before. This wasn’t a woman who was just gonna fall in bed with me. I couldn’t charm her into a date. This was a woman who needed to be courted. And damn if I didn’t know how to do that without looking like an idiot in the process.

Because she didn’t act like a grieving widow. She didn’t get teary eyed when we talked about her dead husband. She didn’t seem nostalgic at all. And we had great conversations. It was all really confusing.

On top of that, I wasn’t sure how I felt about being this interested in someone. I had spent my entire life planning for a career that only spanned a few short years. Did I really want this kind of distraction at this point in my life? Then again, could I even help it anymore?

After five times up and down the entire stadium, I decided I was done. We already worked out that morning, but had practice that afternoon. If I was gonna get some food and run a couple errands, I needed to head to the shower. I could take out the rest of my frustration that afternoon on the field.

As I opened my locker and peeled off my shirt, I felt Deuce sit down on the bench next to me.

“Ok, all jokes aside, bro. Tell me the truth.” I turned to face him. He had a towel wrapped around his waist and his hair was still wet from his shower. “When you were running those stairs, you were thinking about her, right?”

I whipped back around, my anger resurfacing, and started taking my running shoes off. I was not in the mood to hear this shit again.

“Just hear me out,” he pleaded.

“I’m listening,” I said, not turning back around.

“When I first started dating Vanessa, she was all I could think about. Before practice, during practice, after practice. Like I was obsessed or something. It bugged me because I didn’t want to be focused on a woman. I wanted to be focused on playing football. But I couldn’t help myself with her. I used to bring my phone in the weight room, too.” He shrugged. “You just never caught me because I’m not a dumbass who left the sound on. I had it on vibrate and only checked it when you weren’t looking.”

I smirked and chucked my socks in my locker, stripped my shorts off and wrapped a towel around my waist.

“She turned me down the first few times I asked her out, too,” he admitted.

“You never told me that.”

“Dude, it bugged me so bad I didn’t want anyone to know,” he said. “Even you. I couldn’t figure her out and she drove me crazy. Kept making it seem like she was interested but turning me down if I pushed. But I kept at it. Talking and flirting and enjoying our conversations. And one day, she agreed to go to that gala with me.”

I looked over at him and sat down. “I thought that was a blind date.”

“That’s what I told you,” he said, slugging me on the shoulder. “I didn’t wanna tell you what was really going on because I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. I had never felt about anyone the way I felt about my little fun-size girl. I wasn’t gonna look like a pansy-ass if it never went past that date.”

I smirked. “Yeah, I get that.”

“My point is,” he continued, “I’ve been there. And dude, I’m gonna keep making fun of you,” he said in a sensitive-sounding voice, making me chuckle. “But stop thinking so hard and just enjoy this ride. Maybe she won’t go out with you. But maybe she will. And then you’ll fall in love and get married and have to put up with her turning into a psycho for no apparent reason and you’ll have a whole different set of problems to worry about,” he said, shaking his head as he stood up and grabbed his clothes.

I chuckled. “Deuce, you have the strangest way of making this situation look like a win-win for me.”

“Man,” he said, his head in his locker, “Some days I wonder what I saw in her at all. And then I remember, and it makes all that mind fuck worth it.”