All In: Playing to Win (Gambling With Love Book 5) (16 page)

"Girlfriend?" The word, along with gasps ripple through the group. I'm sure it's a surprise since this is the first time I've admitted to seeing someone since my official split with Lacy.           

"The same woman you were with at the children's hospital concert?" another female reporter asks.

"Yes."

"How long have you been seeing each other?"

"Just a few weeks."         

"Did you know she was a breast cancer survivor?" a man asks.

I hang my head from the weight of my guilt, knowing where this is about to go. "No. I didn't know until I came back after halftime and I saw her standing in the middle of the field."

"Is this the same woman you gave the football to last Sunday?"

"Yes."

"You said you just met, so is it a coincidence that she looks similar to the woman you kissed in college at the Virginia Tech game?" one of the sharper reporters asks. I can't help but smile at the memory, and I have to give him props for being so astute.

"That was her, but we never dated in college or even talked after that game. Somehow I've lucked up and thankfully she's back in my life. We met when she was here at the stadium working on the merchandise for the breast cancer auction, and we've been seeing each other ever since."

…

Natalie

Zack knocks on my door a few hours after his game. The game where he realized I survived cancer. I had hoped that we would get through the halftime presentation before he came out of the locker room, but I wasn’t that lucky. Then he kissed me.

"Hey," I say when I open the door.

"Hey. I've missed you," he says, his arms wrapping around me, his words making me melt into his warm chest. The smell of his soap is nice, but I think I like the right off the field, sweaty Zack better. There's something so primal about the warm scent of his physical exertion mixed with the smell of grass that makes we wish he'd have his dirty way with me right there on the field. Regardless, I'm just ecstatic to see him. 

"I've missed you too," I finally admit.

"Natalie, why didn't you just tell me?" he asks, when he finally pulls back to look at me.

"It's not easy to tell someone I'm missing pertinent feminine parts. A part men desire, and one that's such a huge part of sex."

"Not that part. I don't care about that. I'm talking about the fact that you had cancer, and now you're here, alive and healthy. There's nothing more important than that, baby. Thinking about anything else…God, Natalie. You have no idea how much that hurts." His arms are instantly around me again, holding me tightly.

"You want to watch the afternoon game?" I ask his broad chest, not willing to talk about cancer anymore.

"Sure, we can do whatever you want."

I lead Zack over to the couch and pick up the remote to turn the volume up on the Saints and Seahawks game. Cuddling on the couch together, God it's so nice to be back in his arms.

"Taking notes?" I ask after we sit in companionable silence watching the television for a while.

"A few," he says with a quick kiss to my cheek. "We've got the Saints again in week twelve and the Seahawks in week fifteen."

"Tough teams. Top defenses," I respond. "The Saints blitz too often so they can't stop the run. The Seahawks' defense is shit on the secondary with their veteran strong safety injured and out for the season, so you'll probably be able to throw deep on his side and catch the newbie off-guard."

Zack gives a raspy laugh and the deep rumble vibrates through my body. "Damn woman. You really do know football."

"Yeah, I watched with my dad growing up and I was a cheerleader through high school and two years in college, so of course I know football."

"Ha! Our cheerleaders haven't figured out more than timeouts and halftime."

"Seriously?" I ask.

"Yes. The fact that you actually understand the game blows my mind. Women lie and tell me they're huge football fans all the time to fuck me, but they're usually just full of shit."

"I'm no expert, but I do know more about you as a player than the fact that you look good in your uniform. I know that you held the ball too long in the first three games this season, which is why you got sacked and pressured so often. You do better in the shotgun formation because it gives you more time to find the best throw. You could rush more yards if you wanted, but I have a feeling your coach nixed that idea to keep you from getting hurt."

"Huh. You're pretty much spot on, baby. Shotgun more? That's probably a good idea. You are seriously incredible, you know that? How'd I luck up twice in this lifetime to find a woman who's not only beautiful but smart, and knows her shit when it comes to what I love more than anything in the world?"

"What happened in college?" I ask, unable to help myself.

Zack rests his forehead against mine for a few seconds before he answers. "I was stupid. I had a girlfriend but in that moment I forgot all about her and just...needed to kiss you. When the video went viral my girlfriend freaked out, said she was going to break up with me. You know my arrogance, even then no one broke up with me. I was Zack motherfucking Bradford, damn it. So I got her to forgive me even though I wanted to find you, ask you out, and then fuck you. I should’ve followed my gut and not my ego. I even looked for you at the next few games, but you weren't there."

"And now here we are four years later."

"And I don’t want anyone else, Natalie. Let me stay and sleep with you tonight. Nothing else until you're ready."

I agree and relax against his powerful warmth now that the pressure is off. I'm still not ready to take that last step of being naked with him, but I think I'm getting closer to trusting him.

...

The next morning the press was still going crazy. Video replays from halftime are on all the news sites, along with the video from college. Everyone had put the two events together, and after Zack confirmed it was us, that's all they're talking about.

After practice Zack came over with Mexican food, we ate and went to bed, making out with all of our clothes on. It was the kind of making out I haven't done since I was a teenager. The kind that goes on for hours and ends with the flushed, heightened unfulfilled arousal, but also with a kind of ridiculous giddiness. The feeling of knowing a boy likes you so much that he can't stop kissing you, and knowing he desperately wants to go further but he won't because you're not ready.

"Tell me about it, Natalie. I want to know what happened, and what you went through," Zack says from above me.

Looking away from his milk chocolate eyes, I try to think about where to begin. I'm getting ready to tell him about the urgent care doctor who thankfully insisted on more testing instead of brushing the lump off as a benign cyst, when it hits me like a bolt of lightning. I can't believe I never thought about it before! But at the time, everything happened so fast it was hard to even remember to breathe the first few weeks.

"Actually, if it wasn't for you, they wouldn't have caught it so soon," I tell him.

"Ah, what?" he asks with a confused furrowed brow.

"The day you knocked me down? When we got back to Chapel Hill my cheerleading coach made me go get checked out at an urgent care. My ribs were really sore so she wanted me to get an x-ray to make sure I hadn't cracked one. I hadn't, they were only bruised."

"Shit, I'm sorry," he says, blowing out a breath.

"No, now I'm really thankful that lineman pushed you into me. During the exam of my ribs I mentioned just in passing that my gynecologist had found a cyst in my right breast. The doctor felt it and said the gynecologist was probably right, that with my age and clear family history that it was likely a benign cyst. Just to be certain he scheduled me for a sonogram the next Monday. All they would tell me at the time was that it wasn't a cyst, so they referred me to a surgeon. The surgeon assured me it was probably just a fibroadenoma, calcium and fatty tissue. He went in and removed it anyway to send it to a lab to make sure."

"And they told you it was cancer?"

"Yeah. I wasn't allowed to travel with the team to cheer during the weekend's away game because of the bruised ribs. By the next week's home game I'd received the news and started having more tests done. It was stage II breast cancer. After that everything happened so fast. I was still in denial when they scheduled me for surgery. Since I had the BRCA1 mutated gene they suggested I go ahead with a double mastectomy as a preventative measure, even though the cancer was only in the mammary lymph nodes and four centimeter tumor in my right breast. I agreed since I didn't want to have just one breast, or take the chance of having to go through the whole ordeal again. I decided not to have reconstruction surgery, so now I just have the scars."

"Did you have to have chemotherapy, too?" he asks, gently pushing a strand of hair behind my ear.   

"Yeah, chemo for six months and radiation treatments for six weeks."

"Was your family there for you while you went through all that?"

"Of course. I moved back in with my parents in Greensboro, and I don't know what I would've done without them taking care of me. I withdrew from all my friends from high school and college, even the ones that tried to be supportive. I was pissed and...jealous that I was being forced to battle cancer, barely able to get out of the bed some days, while they were all partying and living life. It was just too hard to hear about the guys they were dating or the petty argument they had with their roommates when they ate all the Poptarts. I was bitter and angry."

"You had a right to be. It couldn't have been easy to sit back and watch everyone else's life go on while you were sick."

"It felt like I was being punished for my vanity," I admit, blinking back tears. "Thankfully my parents were able to put up with all my mood swings. My mom has been a fifth grade teacher for twenty-five years, so she had a lot of vacation time saved up. She took half a year off to stay with me and take me to all my appointments. That was also about the time I started questioning the whole heredity issue. I mean, breast cancer usually runs in families. Not a single other woman in our family has had it. My grandma is still alive and well at eighty-four. My mom and her sister have never had any irregular mammograms. So why me at twenty-one?"

"Huh. Did the doctor think that was strange?"

"He did. That's when my mom and dad finally told me I was adopted."

"Whoa!" he says, shaking his head. "Like you didn't already have enough to worry about. They'd kept it from you your whole life?"

"Uh-huh. And the strange thing is I never noticed. I mean, I actually
look
like my mother, the same green eyes and light hair, except I'm several inches shorter."

"Did they tell you anything about the adoption?"

"They'd been trying to have a baby for years before they contacted the adoption agency. They were chosen by a teenage mother, my biological mother. The day I was born, six weeks premature because of her drinking, smoking, or whatever else, I went straight into my parents' custody. When I was finally healthy enough, I went home with them from the hospital. I mean, they had pictures of me when I was born and when I was in the neonatal intensive care, so I never even considered that I wasn't theirs."

"Wow, Natalie. How did you deal with all that?"

"I didn't really have a choice. I wasn't all that upset. I knew my birth mother had done the right thing for me. My parents loved me and cared for me when she knew she wouldn't be able to. I understand their reasons for not telling me, too. They didn't want me to think they loved me any less just because I wasn't theirs biologically, so I couldn't be mad at them for that."

"I'm sorry you had to go through all that," he says, brushing his lips over my cheek. "So, since I found out yesterday, there's something I've been worried about. What's the chance of recurrence?"

"It's about sixteen percent during the first five years. My doctor said probably less than that, maybe six percent or so since I had radiation therapy," I tell him. "I found out I had cancer right around four years ago, and I've been cancer free for a little over three years."

"Whew, that's not as bad as I thought it might be," Zack said letting out his breath. "I was scared it was fifty percent or something incredibly high, but those odds are good, really good."

"I may not be able to have kids," I blurt out. "I don’t have breasts and I may not be able to have any kids. I have to stay on hormone blockers until I reach the five year mark, and then there's a thirty percent chance my ovaries won't wake up. I'm a real catch."

"You are. Those things...one is only superficial, and the other, well, there are lots of options, like adoption."

I try to blink the tears back before they fall down my cheeks. "I want to have a baby. Not now of course, but in a few years. I just...I want to hold my own baby, you know?"

"Actually I do know what you mean," Zack says, dropping his eyes and hanging his head. "I might be a father in about four months."

"What?" I exclaim, grabbing the sides of his face to raise it so he'll look at me. He might be a…

"You remember me telling you about Lacy, my ex-girlfriend? Well, she's five months pregnant."