The blueprint, p.1
The Blueprint, page 1
Table of Contents
Blurb
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
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Copyright
The Blueprint
By S.E. Harmon
Kelly Cannon is satisfied with his life. He has friends, a wonderful family, and a great job. But his love life has reached a new level of pitiful. Why? Well, his heart decided to break all the rules. Don’t fall in love with a straight guy. And definitely don’t fall in love with your best friend.
NFL standout Britton “Blue” Montgomery has pressure coming at him from all sides. From his father, who’s only interested in Blue’s football career. From his coaches, who just want him to play without getting injured again. From the fans. From his agent. And from his mother, who has popped up on the radar after leaving his family years before. And now his relationship with Kelly is on shaky ground, and that frightens Blue more than anything.
When Kelly admits he’s in love with Blue, bonds are tested, and Blue has to decide what’s really important. He doesn’t want to lose the number-one person in his life, but the cost to keep Kelly close might be more than he’s willing to pay.
It’s a good thing his nickname is the Blueprint—it’s time to draft a new set of plans.
For my mother, who used to ban me from reading romance novels. I like to think you’d get a kick out of the irony. Clearly that lesson didn’t take, but all the others did. I miss you more than words can say.
Acknowledgments
A BIG thank-you to my sister for your continued support and for being my biggest fan. Your “momma heart” knows no bounds, and Justice is very lucky to have you. For those who don’t realize how sweet and special and wonderful you are, there’s room for them inside an angry volcano.
I’d also like to thank all the readers out there who messaged and emailed me about how they enjoyed my work. Words have such powerful impact, especially on us writers, and yours have practically served as fuel—the premium kind, not that 87 stuff—for my inner engine. It really means a lot. So thank you.
Chapter 1
Kelly
IT WAS a strange time to fully understand and appreciate Einstein’s genius. His theory of relativity was a very real thing, a very tangible thing. His theory was the only thing that could explain why a car ride that normally took thirty minutes seemed like a three-hour march through hell.
As I stared out the passenger-side window, barely seeing the passing landscape, I reminded myself to drop a line to my old physics professor and tell her about my recent foray into time dilation. Her students didn’t need to pore over tiny printed text or complete elaborate lab reports. Fifteen minutes in a car with an ex was a remarkably effective teaching tool.
I glanced over at the stony face of my ex-fiancé, Robert—also known as a suspect in my future murder. To be fair, he’d only been my ex for three minutes. I kind of just broke up with him.
He didn’t take it well.
I reached out to turn down the air a pinch, and he snapped, “Don’t touch anything in my car.”
“It’s dual climate control.” Despite my words, my hand froze in place. “I’m just a little hot.”
“And that’s my problem how?”
“You’re being an asshole,” I snapped.
He laughed, the sound grating and unpleasant. “I think that award goes to you tonight, Kelly.”
I dropped my hand in my lap.
I went back to staring out the window, but I didn’t see a thing. Instead his epic proposal played like a looped film reel in my mind. And I do mean epic. Like I had been stuffing my face with popcorn at the Heat game, and suddenly I was on the jumbotron kind of epic.
My cheeks stuffed with popcorn like a hoarding squirrel, I listened as the announcer from hell said something in a voice that boomed through the arena—something about love and forever and… I don’t know. Everlasting future? Okay, so sue me. I didn’t remember it all. I was too busy trying to learn how to teleport instantaneously.
I shut my eyes hard and opened them and… fuck, still there. Only this time Robert was getting on one knee. “Marry me, Kelly Holden Cannon, and make me the happiest man on Earth.”
At least that’s what I thought he said. Things suddenly started to go in slow motion. And who the hell told him my middle name? I struggled to swallow popcorn as my eyes darted side to side as though I were playing pinball inside my skull. I tried to recall what I had done in my past to get front-row tickets—“guest of honor” tickets—to this shit show. I had a lot to choose from.
There was that time when I was in elementary school and I stole candy from the Circle K by our house—a lot of candy. Then I split the stash with my sister Kennedy and my best friend, Blue. We stuffed ourselves and threw up all the way home. I winced. That’s how we found out Blue was allergic to nuts. My mother had to take him to the hospital, and then we had to explain why he had several pounds of Peanut M&M’s in his stomach. Not my finest moment. Or his. Or the doctor’s—especially when Mount Blue erupted unexpectedly and spewed colorful bile all over the doctor’s shoes. Blue still hated Peanut M&M’s, and I always made sure to buy him a king-size pack on his birthday.
Then there was the time when Kennedy broke my PlayStation and didn’t show the least bit of remorse. In retaliation Blue and I baked her a batch of chocolate-chip cookies with ex-lax instead of chocolate. And then there was that time Blue and I…. I swallowed the last of my popcorn. When I really got down to it, I probably would’ve been a better child without Blue’s influence.
The more I reviewed the past, the more I realized that, yes, I was an awful person, and I did deserve a humiliating public proposal.
I looked into Robert’s eyes and realized the arena had gone deathly silent. I probably paused a little too long. Somewhere along the line, we’d had a serious—eighteen-wheeler-with-no-brakes kind of serious—breakdown of communication. I guess I’d been too busy going along with the flow to question anything.
There was no way I could say anything but no. So, in keeping with my general brilliance, I said yes.
Now. Before you turn on me, let me just say I did it for Robert’s sake. The only thing worse than being dumped was being dumped in front of the entire BankAtlantic arena. So to be kind, I said yes, and sweet Mary and Joseph, the spectacle of it all. The jumbotron lit up like a Christmas tree on steroids. The crowd roared. The cheerleaders danced, shook their pom-poms, and kicked their spandex-covered legs like Rockettes.
Robert grabbed me, and I briefly hoped he was going to throw me out of the stands for a mercifully quick death. It turned out he just wanted to give me a tight, exuberant hug. Other people in the stands proceeded to hug us with congratulations. Some beer-bellied guy that I thought looked like a textbook homophobe fist-bumped me so hard I spilled beer on my favorite Miami Heat hoodie.
And then there was the car ride home. I waited until we reached the parking lot to break it off, just so I could explain in private how getting married was a bad idea. At that point Robert began vacillating between awkwardness, recrimination, and cold anger. For my part I wondered how long I would survive if I opened the car door and made a run for it. If you jumped out of a moving car, I thought you were supposed to roll. Because I wasn’t 100 percent sure, I stayed put.
I pressed my tongue behind my teeth and dragged the metal ball of my tongue piercing back and forth as I wondered how I should broach the subject. Gently, I finally decided. Gently was the key. “Maybe we should talk about—”
“Do you know how embarrassing this is going to be?” he exploded.
My breath whistled through my teeth. Apparently we weren’t going to talk about it. We were going to yell about it. “Rob, I’m sorry, but I thought we were on the same page. You kind of blindsided me here.”
“Blindsided you? Where else was this relationship going to go? We’ve been seeing one another for two years.”
“Off and on,” I said defensively.
“More on than off,” he said. “You’ve met my parents. We went on vacation together. You were telling me how, if you were married, it would look better for tenure—”
“That doesn’t mean I’m going to do it,” I snapped. Yes, I did work at a private, exclusive, family-oriented college. And yes, being the single one meant I got excluded from a lot of things. But I didn’t take marriage lightly, and I certainly wouldn’t use it to get a leg up in a career. “We never said anything about getting serious.”
He ignored me, and his driving grew a bit erratic. “I mean, fuck, Kelly, you could have told me—”
“I didn’t know you were going t
“Great. That’s just great. That’s a fine comfort now that the entire tricounty area is going to be laughing their asses off at me.”
“For God’s sake, Rob, no one is going to remember us. In a few weeks, we’ll just quietly tell our family that we decided not to—”
“People are waiting for us at your house. For an engagement party.” He sped through the tunnel at sixty miles an hour, gripping the wheel tightly. The tunnel lights illuminated his face clearly for the first time since we left the arena, and irritation wreathed every feature. “Everyone is waiting to wish us a happy fucking engagement.”
It was a moment before I realized I was just staring at him with my mouth hanging open. I snapped it shut. “Maybe we should just let them believe—”
“Fuck everyone else, Kelly!”
We didn’t speak again until he slammed on the brakes in front of my house and made his back tires to squeal obnoxiously. Under the streetlamps, his cheeks were ruddy with emotion. “I thought this was what you wanted.”
No, you didn’t.
Hell, I realized two weeks into our relationship that we weren’t a good fit. He was overbearing, and he always thought he was right. He critiqued everything from the size of my condo to my mode of dress, and he was always irritated when I had ideas of my own.
I was never ambitious enough for him, and he was always annoyed that I was happy teaching at a smaller private college instead of using my doctorate at an Ivy League school. But Westbrook’s well-respected science program was a huge draw, and I loved the fact that the department encouraged their professors to build time into their schedule for research. The diverse, supportive campus culture, the huge LGBT community, and emphasis on tolerance were just the icing on the top. But none of that mattered to Robert.
Different things were important to us, and sometimes it seemed like he was a little… superficial. He cared about appearances. Money. His high-paying career as an architect. Hell, whenever we went out with his friends, he tried to dress me like his own personal Ken Doll, which roughly translated into him trying to cover up all my tattoos and piercings.
I didn’t know why I didn’t leave him before. Maybe I wasn’t invested enough to really care about his issues. I guess I just wanted someone to fill that lonely space in my life, not anything as distracting or painful as love. As I looked at his rapidly reddening face, I realized something else.
He knew that just as well as I did—all of it.
I never misled Rob about who I was and what I wanted. Clearly I hadn’t been the only one feeling the distance grow between us. Instead of initiating a breakup, Rob apparently decided marriage would bring us back together.
His mouth tightened. “It’s him, isn’t it?”
I decided to spare us both and not ask, “Him who?” I guess Blue had been between us since the beginning. Worse yet, he didn’t even know it. To him I was just his best friend, the guy next door, the guy he grew up with. The guy he could trust not to perv on him.
“To think I was excited when I found out he was your best friend. The great Britton Montgomery.” Robert laughed humorlessly. “All of my friends were so fucking jealous that we get access to the skybox and seats on the fifty-yard line. But I’ll tell you what, you can keep all that free swag if this is what comes with it.”
I started to feel a little less guilty. Talking shit about Blue was a good way to get on my X-list. “Leave him out of this,” I growled.
“Finally. Some fucking emotion.” He gave me a mocking look. “Does he know that you want him? That you don’t just love him as a friend? That his nonthreatening gay best friend wants nothing more than to be fucked by the big football star?”
I stared at him, jaw working. He smiled at my pissed-off silence. “Does he know that you love him? That you want to be with him?”
I gritted my teeth. It was probably poor form to reject someone’s proposal and punch him in the face. “I think it’s time for you to go.”
“We could’ve had something real.” He shook his head. “And you want to throw it all away on someone who doesn’t even know you’re alive.”
“I think you’re overstating things a bit.”
“Oh, he loves it when you’re up in the stands. Loves to come and crash on your couch and eat your food and borrow your shit. He loves it when you look up to him like you worship the ground he walks on.”
“Robert.”
“Like you’d suck his dick if he even gave you a scrap of—”
“Robert, stop.” I stared at him in a way that let him know I was dead-ass serious. “Before you say something I can’t forgive.”
He stopped, but it was clear he had a lot more to say. He rubbed his neck. Finally he said, “We could’ve had something, you know. We would’ve been happy.”
There was some truth to that. If I tried hard enough, I could almost see our life together. His perpetual bossiness would negate me ever having to make any hard decisions. We’d live in Robert’s overpriced townhouse downtown, with its beautiful views of the city. We’d have dogs—Scotties, probably. Rob loved Scotties.
We’d have perfectly good sex. Even though he’d never let me fuck him because that would be giving up too much of his precious control. And his weird “daddy” kink I sometimes indulged—if you were dicking me down good enough, I could manage to call you daddy every now and again, if that’s what turned your crank.
Between my job as a professor and his work as an architect, we’d make more than enough money. We’d have friends. Family. Vacation photos of us in brightly patterned swim trunks, drinking margaritas and toasting the camera in humid, exclusive places. We’d be good together. Happy together. Comfortable together.
And fuck love.
And there was the rub. Despite my bitterness about the subject, deep down inside, I think I was waiting on the fantasy, still hoping for the impossible. And I wasn’t willing to compromise. I sighed inwardly. I was as delusional and optimistic as any Disney princess. It was going to look fantastic on my eHarmony profile. I’d use Snow White as my fucking avatar. She found seven men. Surely I could scrounge up one.
There was nothing else to do but get out of the car. I closed the door behind me and stood there on the curb, hands jammed in my jeans pockets. They were so worn and holey that one of my fingers poked through the fabric.
“Robert.” I looked at his irritated face and felt a little helpless. “I need you to know that I am sorry.” At that point I wasn’t really even sure what I was apologizing for. For my inability to love him? For turning down his proposal? For loving someone else?
I might as well have saved my breath.
He pulled off with a godawful squeal and then stomped on the brakes. As the bright-red lights popped on and he reversed, my heart thumped harder.
Oh Christ. He’d decided that yelling wasn’t enough, and my picture was going to be on the news. Probably my employee-ID picture where I’d been hungover and midsneeze. The news always used the worst photo they could find.
He came to a stop in front of me, and his Lexus rocked a little. He held out his hand with a glare. I looked at him blankly for a second before I realized what he wanted.
“Oh. Sorry.” I worked the ring off my finger and grimaced a little as it stuck on my knuckle. I laid it in his palm, and he stuck it in his pocket.
“I hope you’re very happy being Montgomery’s one-man cheer squad for the rest of your life.”
“We’re just friends.”
“Keep barking up that tree,” he said with a scowl. He peeled off without another glance.
I stood there for a moment, thoroughly exhausted with everything. At least the night couldn’t get any worse. I stumbled up the front walk and unlocked my door with the key code. I would kill for a cold shower and an equally cold Diet Coke. And then—
“Surprise!”
I blinked at the roomful of our friends. Shit. I’d already forgotten about the surprise party. I looked around, mouth agape, and took in the colorful streamers and the big-ass banner that read Congratulations in splashy neon letters.
“Hey, bro.” A voice came from my left, and I swung my head around.
“Kennedy?” I gaped. “What’re you doing here?”
