“Carsen has a hidden talent for making pie crust,” she says.
I grin, pulling one of the pies closer. Hadley always makes her dishes look like artwork and these pies are no different. Each of them is artfully topped. Some are braided, others woven, some have pie crust in the shapes of leaves, all of them are intricate. “I don’t know if I can cut into these.”
“How about this one?” She sets a pie covered with whipped cream beside me.
“Which one is this?”
“Chocolate crème.”
My gaze shifts to her knowing one as she grabs a stack of dessert plates and a handful of silverware.
“You gave me Thanksgiving and made me chocolate crème pie?”
“There’s no football or five-hundred-corn maze.”
I tag her around the waist and kiss her, well aware this is more than just pie and a lot of effort.
Hadley is grinning when she pulls away, one hand still on my chest. “I’m going to see what kind of pie everyone wants.”
As she drifts toward the living room, Katie wanders in and gives me a pathetic attempt at an eye roll before smirking. She has yet to lay into me for breaking the number one rule of our contract. “Your girlfriend might steal all your friends with her cooking skills.”
I chuckle. “Likely.”
Katie grabs a knife and starts slicing into a pie. “She made like fourteen chocolate crème pies to make it taste like grandma's. It’s richer and she used whipped cream instead of Cool Whip but tell her it tastes just like grandma’s because she worked her ass off, trying to make it.”
My gaze shifts from Katie to Hadley, realizing she worked on one of her perfect recipes for me.
My expression grows somber as I nod.
Katie nods, too, smiling as she cuts into another pie. “She’d have a blast at grandma and grandpas. They’d like her.”
I know she’s giving me her approval, and that might make this day the best day I’ve had in a very long time.
Chapter30
Nolan
The adage that time passes when you’re having fun is proven true as the next five days pass before I’ve even managed to blink.
Katie and Carsen flew to Indiana on Wednesday, and Hannah flew to Connecticut. Hadley and I spent the afternoon at Hudson’s dad’s house for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Hadley was still nervous about the swimming pool incident, but those nerves seemed to melt away before we sat down for dinner. It wasn’t the same casual affair as our Brunch Thanksgiving, but still nice, filled with laughter and heaps of food. We celebrated the night in Hadley’s room, a Christmas movie on in the background that I worked to distract her from watching by having my mouth and hands on her.
“Payne. With me,” Krueger says, passing me as I get dressed, ready to head home and have a rerun of last night.
Palmer raises his brow. We’ve been waiting for Peters’s wrath. Hints of it have been seen in practices with additional conditioning, but not to the full extent that any of us expected.
I give him a casual shrug and follow Krueger to his office. It’s still bare, almost as though he’s waiting to be canned and doesn’t want to have to come back here to empty the space.
He waits until I’m seated across from him before looking at me. “What do you want to do next year?” It’s the last question I was expecting to hear, also one of the last ones I want to answer.
“Sorry?”
“Are you considering entering the draft this spring? Do you want to wait another year? Are you planning to graduate first?”
I’ve been avoiding this question for the past three months. Longer. I hate the idea of putting all my eggs in one basket. I hate the idea of failing. Deciding to enter the draft lays me at the mercy of doing both. I scratch along the underside of my jaw, feeling tension radiating through my shoulders and neck. “Does it matter?”
“What do you want to do with your future, Payne?”
“Not be a corn farmer.”