Neon Moon... One
✪ Tim Riggins x OC ✪
Warning: Story will contain situations invovling alcoholism, sexual harassment, sexual content, cursing, etc.
“Is there anything else I can get you, ma’am?”
I looked up from my drink. The flight attendant’s smile was polite, practiced—bright without landing anywhere. “I’m good, thanks,” I said, and the ice in my watered-down whiskey clinked against flimsy plastic as the plane slid through a bruised southern sky. Out the window, the clouds were heaped like thunderheads holding their breath, the sun dropping behind a horizon the color of old pennies. The cabin hummed—a chorus of air vents, zippers, and someone’s baby breathing in sleep.
I’d gotten the news almost a week ago. Since then, I’d been drifting through days like I was underwater, watching the world ripple above me while I tried to make sense of what it meant. Fifteen years of distance—of phone calls I didn’t answer and holidays I skipped—had stretched between us, taut and thin. In the beginning, the neighbors kept an eye on him, a chorus of potlucks and porch-watching and “We’ll ring Reagan if anything happens.” They did ring me when something happened. I rarely picked up.
Leaving him in that house had been, if I’m honest, a tantrum dressed up as principle. I told myself I was done with Dillon—finished with that sun-faded water tower, with the old-timers hunched along Mac’s burger counter rehashing high school football like scripture. I couldn’t stand running into people who’d escaped properly, on schedule, with diplomas and starter marriages and calendars full of flights that didn’t lead back home. I didn’t want to see anyone who’d known me when I was just a promise to myself, not yet a complication.
I was always the dreamer. I swore to anyone who would listen—and to plenty who wouldn’t—that I was leaving that town in a dust cloud behind me. City lights, a degree with embossing, a life unlived by anyone I grew up with: that was the map I drew on the back of homework and napkins. The joke, as it turns out, was on me. You can’t follow the tidy route you chart at sixteen when you’re pregnant at seventeen. Sometimes the big city is just a distant glow beyond the highway, and sometimes the highway curves right back into your front yard.
I still wonder who that child would’ve been. What shape their laugh might’ve taken. Whether they’d have my eyes or his mouth, whether they’d inherit my stubborn or his easy charm. Would they have traced the same muddy tracks their father and I wore into the ground, thinking they were the only path? Telling Ted—that was the worst, the kind of conversation that rearranges a room. I watched disappointment pull his face down, watched the moment he realized his daughter, the one he’d shoved hard toward a different life, was leaning into the same hunger that had hollowed out my mother. He didn’t like the father. He hadn’t before. He liked him even less after.
It wasn’t that Ted didn’t want me gone—oh, he did. He was the pusher in the family, the one who believed a good life could be willed into existence with weathered hands and a plan. Looking back now, I wish I’d given him less of my eye-rolling and more of my faith. He carried a blueprint in his head for a version of me I couldn’t yet imagine—and I punished him because it wasn’t my own.
Moving across the country wasn’t a clean choice; it was the way a life collapses and then rolls downhill into the first flat space it finds. For a while I slept in my car, then on couches that smelled like other people’s laundry detergent, then in rooms I found and did not keep. It wasn’t a good time to be Reagan Brett. I did the things you do when the world is shaped like rent and the rent is due—things that would make every woman at Sunday service tilt her head and purse her mouth. Sometimes those choices put envelopes of cash in the mail with no return address, and sometimes those envelopes paid my father’s electric bill and the deductible after his accident. I can’t say he would’ve been proud. I can say I did what I knew how to do to keep the lights on in a house I wasn’t in.
The email came two nights ago, written like an apology and a warning all at once. They were tearing down the block—every house between the church lot and the pecan orchard—making way for a widened street and the bright idea of some city planner who’d never had to pry history out of a doorframe. Eminent domain packaged in polite stationary. Move out within weeks, or else. That was the phrase: or else. My father didn’t write it. He wouldn’t. Pride is a heavy thing to push up a ramp in a wheelchair.
He fell from a bucket truck during a late storm two years back—the kind of thunder that rattles silverware in drawers—and woke up with the world ending at his waist. He refuses to say paralyzed. He says “busted up.” He says “a temporary situation,” as if the body can be negotiated with. He made that house before he made a life with my mother, brick by brick, his hands laid into its bones. If there is such a thing as a safe place for a man like Ted, it was that house—the screen door’s lazy slam, the chipped blue of the bedroom, the sank marks of his chair wheels worn into the oak. He might have loved that house more purely than he ever loved a person; the house didn’t argue. It didn’t leave.
My mother left. She left with her lipstick on and a suitcase snapping shut. Cynthia Brett loved the appearance of things—the the-way-we-look of a life: the right church, a polished daughter, a husband who built and didn’t talk much. She wanted me on a platform, glossy and lit, swan-armed in a dance recital or cheering on the same bleachers where reputations go to bloom or rot. My father cut checks he couldn’t afford and clapped until his palms were raw while I moved like something caught between wanting and refusal. None of it took. I didn’t want Lyla Garrity’s perfect hair and perfect smile and that golden-girl orbit my mother worshipped. I wanted music too loud to talk over and a back road that belonged only to me and the stars I couldn’t name. I wanted the version of freedom you can feel in your teeth.
The plane tipped slightly, angling toward the dark line of land. Out the window, the world broke into towns and ponds and the thin white spines of highways. I swallowed what was left of the drink and tasted the melted edge of it—smoke watered down to memory. I tried to picture what waited: my father’s jaw set against the inevitable, his hands—still strong hands—resting on the arms of his chair, the house holding its breath under the city’s countdown. He wouldn’t have called me. He would’ve stayed with the wreckage and the brick, insisting on weathering this, too.
Maybe that’s why the neighbors did. Maybe that’s why I was buckled into this narrow seat watching the ground rise. I have been many things, most of them I don’t advertise. I have been my mother’s daughter more than once. But I am also Ted’s, and he taught me to show up—even late, even wrong. If all I can do is help him fold the years into boxes and decide what pieces of a life fit into the back of a borrowed truck, then I will do that. I will step back over the line I drew in anger and see if there is anything of us left to salvage.
“Anything else?” the flight attendant asked again as she came back down the aisle, trash bag rustling.
“No,” I said, handing over the empty cup. “I’m good.”
For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t sure whether that was a lie…
“You know if he catches you in here—” I whispered, my mouth grazing his ear as my fingers slid into his long hair. The equipment room smelled like cut grass and cold steel, the air humming with the A/C and the muffled thud of a distant industrial washer. The caged lockers pressed a chill grid into my spine. His breath was warm at the place my pulse jumped. “He’ll kick your ass, and there’s no way you’re playing this weekend.”
He didn’t bother answering—just smiled against my skin, the curve of it brushing heat along my neck. His hands bracketed my hips like he could hold the building still if it tried to sway. “Coach is gonna be hunting for a new star if I get caught,” he murmured, laughter low. “Imagine the headlines—Riggins gets his ass handed to him by a forty-five-year-old angry dad. Team morale plummets. Season in jeopardy.”
“Please,” I said, tugging lightly at his hair until his eyes met mine. The fluorescents threw a halo along his jaw—stubble and stubbornness. “It won’t be headlines. It’ll be folklore. They’ll carve it into the weight room bench and tell the freshmen it’s tradition.”
He huffed, amused. “Great. My legacy: cautionary tale and caution tape.”
“Fits you,” I said sweetly. “Yellow’s your color.”
His green eyes held mine, steady, our lips a breath apart. The joking softened at the edges. “I want you to know I’m serious about what I said last week.” His voice dropped, losing the swagger but not the heat. “I know I’ve been all talk and no game, but you’re the only constant I have right now—the only thing keeping me above water.”
My fingers traced his face as I listened—mapping him like a route I’d need to run blind. Brow to cheekbone, the faint bump in his nose from sophomore year, the soft place beside his mouth where a smile starts. Under my touch he went very still, that particular stillness he gets when something matters. The washer thudded. The A/C exhaled. Somewhere outside, a whistle cut the air and the world kept moving without us.
“You don’t have to be perfect,” I said, resting my thumb at the seam of his lower lip. He caught a breath there. “Just show up for me.”
“I’m here,” he said, and for once it wasn’t performance. It landed solid, like cleats biting turf.
Something unspooled under my ribs. I slid my hands to the back of his neck, felt the damp heat of his skin, the stubborn curl at his nape. He leaned in slow, giving me time to change my mind; I didn’t. He closed the inch between us and kissed me—careful first, like he’d been rehearsing restraint, then firmer, like he remembered who he was. He tasted like spearmint and blue Gatorade and a little like trouble. I opened for him and he took the invitation, mouth tilting, teeth catching my bottom lip just enough to make my knees forget their job.
“Rude,” I breathed against his smile.
“You started it,” he said, hands sliding from my hips to my waist, thumbs circling heat through cotton. “Came in here smelling like sunshine and bad decisions.”
“Bold of you to assume I smell like good choices around you,” I shot back, tilting his head so I could kiss the angle of his jaw, the rasp of stubble a wicked scrape against my mouth. He shivered, the kind he pretends not to have on the field. His grip tightened, not to claim, just to steady, and the lockers thrummed softly against my spine.
Outside, a cart rattled past; the wire glass in the door buzzed in its frame. He glanced toward it, then back to me, eyes darker, mind clearly doing the math and deciding I was worth the penalty. “We should stop,” he said, voice rougher now.
“Absolutely,” I agreed, tugging him closer by his jersey. “In five.”
His laugh ghosted against my cheek. “You’re a menace.”
“Thanks,” I murmured, and kissed him again. Deeper this time. He answered with a low sound I felt more than heard, one hand sliding up my rib cage, fingers splayed, respectful and ruining me all at once. Heat coiled low, a slow, insistent tide. I nipped his lip in retaliation for earlier; he swore softly, delighted.
“Folklore, huh?” he said when we finally came up for air, his forehead resting on mine, breath uneven, mouth wrecked in the best way.
“Bench etchings don’t lie,” I said, trying for smug and landing somewhere near dazed.
He angled a grin. “Then I’ll make it worth the story.” The way he said it—quiet, sure—made belief slide easy into me.
He drew his thumb along my hip, a lazy line that made concentration a team sport. I could see the long week on him—playbook scribbles, expectations he never asked for, the way he holds a room like it’s nothing. I thought of my dad’s voice in the hall, of the carved initials on the bench, of all the tiny choices that turn into a life.
“Clock’s ticking,” I warned, even as I tipped my chin up again.
“Four minutes,” he bargained, already kissing me like he had no intention of playing fair.
“Three,” I said against his mouth, smiling when he groaned.
“Menace,” he repeated, hands sure and steady, and the world outside kept rattling on while inside it narrowed to the heat of his palms, the soft clink of locker wire, and the stubborn, sarcastic, very real thing happening between us.
