Zoe“Are you ready, Zoe?”I looked up to see Katie and Dad standing in the doorway. Katie hurried forward when she saw me trying to stand up so she could help. When I was on my feet, I slowly turned around, then smiled at the both of them.“How do I look?”Katie pulled me into a hug with a squeal, and Dad cracked a smile. His eyes were wet with tears.“You look so beautiful, Zoe! Oh, now I wish we hadn’t been so quick to get married. Even a small ceremony would be fine, we were just in such a hurry.”I laughed at her grumbling, and Dad let out a chuckle. I was in a simple white wedding dress with cap sleeves and the veil already tucked into my hair. I was heavily pregnant, nearly nine months along, and the baby was bound to come out any day now, so I was in flats.“Kayla, you did such a good job with the makeup,” Katie said. Kayla came up behind me, her hands on my shoulders. “I practiced it so many times, I’m glad to see how it came out. You’re going to be so amazing in the pictures
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas which would be great, if I wasn’t carrying the Quarterback’s baby! Sebastian Blake is my best friend’s little brother. He used to be the skinny kid who hid behind glasses and braces. Now, he’s all grown up, and one of the leading quarterbacks for the Giants. As a sports physician, it’s my job to make sure that Sebastian is in peak condition to play next season, but he’s had one injury after another and has fallen into depression. When I arrive at his door, he doesn’t know who I am, thinking his friends sent him a ‘surprise’ to cheer him up. And now, somehow, I’ve found myself doing home visits and getting on a plane with his team to head to Vegas. They say, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. That would be true if, after Vegas, I hadn’t found out that I was carrying his baby…
“Guys, I’m not in the mood to party!” I sounded like my mom: always whining and complaining, but the guys weren’t listening. I wasn’t in a party mood for real. I hadn’t played ten games in the last season and the way I was feeling, I didn’t know if I would play again. I was going to be one of those quarterbacks that retired early. Shit, I was only twenty-eight, yet I felt like an old man. Too scared to run, pass, or do anything in case something else snapped. The guys were acting nice about it. Telling me to get a grip and that it was all about the game, but I was so fucking scared of doing anything, including sex! “You need to get back out there. What happened to Casanova Sebastian?” Mason said as he passed me another beer. He fucking died when I spent more time watching the game than actually being part of the action. I took a swig of the beer, I had kept telling him I didn’t want and would end up drinking all the same. As they say, actions speak louder than words, and I may h
Coach Thomas said that he was worried about Sebastian for next season, and he wanted me to do some tests to get him up to scratch over the summer. The last doctor did a half-ass job and players were dropping like flies because he wasn’t revealing the extent of their injuries. He spent most of his time boozing and it had taken the club the whole season to figure this out. It was completely unethical. There was so much political maneuvering and backhanding in medicine that no one wanted to rat him out. I thought that it had been bad in the hospital! I suppose I was naive to think that it would be any different in the sporting industry. Maybe being a sports doctor wasn’t such a good idea, but I had no choice: I needed the money. I was hired last week, and my first assignment was to get their all-star quarterback player back on the field for the whole season. Everyone was cheering for me to get in the damn pool.“Sebastian, it’s me.”Then this blue-eyed guy with really tight swimmers on
“Sebastian is even worse than when he was a kid,” I said to Sophia as we both sat down and grabbed some dinner at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge. I’d been in town for a couple of weeks, and we’d planned to meet up tonight in East Village. It was as if we were reliving our college days. One thing I loved about this place was the cocktails; no place beat them. This place was the reason why I went up a couple of dress sizes. The damn cocktails and food were to die for.“Don’t be like that; it’s been how many years?”I looked up and saw that the same Christmas lights were hung above the bar. It was as if this place was stuck in time: we’d changed, but the place hadn’t one little bit.“Can you believe that they still have that?”I pointed to the lights, thinking about the past.She nodded, “Sure, it’s the bar’s trademark. They’re not going to get rid of that. It would be like if they stopped serving cocktails.”She had a point there.“The atmosphere of the crowd, the music and everything, bri
“Sophia, you were always getting me into trouble,” I said as I was danced with some guy that looked as if he’d had more cocktails then we had. As I got closer toward him, I realized that he was old; he made my dad look youthful. Fuck!“I’m not ready to be any guy’s sugar baby!” I said as I pushed him away and started to scan the bar for someone else. Anyone younger than Grandpa!“Let’s see if we’ve still got it.” Sophia had said when she winked at me earlier. “What do you mean?”“Remember we never had any money, so we used to get all these guys to buy us cocktails? Then by the end of the night, we’d tell them that you and I are more than friends.”“That’s so wrong!”“Emma, remember that guy? The one that told you that his dick was so big, that he could convert you!”I squeal as I remember the guy, the idiot telling me that he converted his last girlfriend!That was when we had started scanning the place for guys to buy us drinks and for some reason she had ended up with a hot guy an
I had held my phone in my hand for the last twenty minutes with only one thing on my mind, and that was to call Emma and apologize for what had happened last night. I had managed to grab her card from Mason. The stripper was good, real good at stripping. But I’d lost track of what she was doing, thinking about Emma in my house. She had really brought it all back home. The girl that I’d met when I dropped my big sister at college—and hadn’t stopped thinking about since then—had walked back into my life. That wasn’t something you forgot about in a heartbeat. My parents used to tease me about wanting to go to see my big sis at college all the time. Sure, Sophia and I were close when she was at home. She used to drop me at practice and all that kind of considerate stuff that a big sister would do. But when I first met Emma, she felt like she had put me under her spell or something. I just wanted to go back to that college every damn weekend. Now I thought about it, Emma was my inspiratio
“Why did I agree to this?” I had asked Mason the same question when we left the house and again as we sat in the car. But I had to ask him one more time as we sat on the plane. I was supposed to be resting before the next season, and so far my best friend had me doing everything but rest.He whispered, as he looked around the plane as though someone might be interested in our conversation, “You know why. You were sitting there this morning, just staring at the doc’s card. And let’s not even get started what happened with the stripper.” He held his head down in shame. “A hot, sexy stripper and you were dead man. You think I didn’t know?” I shook my head. “You’re dead down there and if anything can wake you back up, it’s Vegas.”He patted me on the leg as if it was as simple as that. I didn’t even want to go out of town for a day, let alone a weekend, because on Monday Mom would get the results of her biopsy and I wanted to know once and for all if the cancer was back or not. “Even you