by Hughes, Maya
She stared up at the giant Ben Franklin statue. Her faded pink hair fell in gentle waves around her shoulders. It was longer than when we’d first met.
There was a tug in my chest to come clean with her about the project with Rick, about the story that would come out, and then she looked over at me and tugged me toward the electricity room where giant arcs flowed through cathode tubes and middle school kids ran all around us.
She turned, looked at me, and grabbed my hand, her fingers threading through mine, and that tug in my chest became a gravitational hold I couldn’t escape and didn’t want to. I’d do whatever else my dad wanted before the draft, but I’d tell him to kill that story, kill it dead.
“A lot’s still the same. I have a membership from a city volunteer award I got last year. Sometimes I like to come here to clear my head.”
A group of kids in matching t-shirts strode past us holding hands with their teachers in tow.
“Do they still have the giant heart?”
“Of course, although it’s a tight fit.”
We waited for a lull and climbed up into the heart. “You weren’t kidding. I’m ninety percent sure they’re going to need the jaws of life to get me out of here.” I turned sideways and crouched to get through the left ventricle. “They should have a height limit on this thing.”
She laughed behind me. The melodic sound of it bounced off the close confines of the blue and red walls.
Afterward, we grabbed a soft pretzel—well, four for me and one for her—at the food cart and sat, staring up at the slow rotation of the model planets above.
“I’ve got trust issues,” Elle blurted out just as I shoved a spicy-mustard-laden hunk of pretzel into my mouth. I jammed my fist up to my mouth as a cough racked my body, the spicy burn making my eyes water.
She shoved napkins at my face and patted my back. “Sorry to blurt that out like that.” She stared at me, making sure she hadn’t sent me to an early dough-and-condiment-induced grave.
“I’m good.” I sucked down a gulp of soda. Clearing my throat, I motioned for her to go ahead.
“That probably wasn’t the best way to start a conversation, blurting that out and then making you nearly choke to death.” She half-smiled, half-snorted and scraped at the side of her finger.
“You can tell me anything you need to.” I dropped my hand onto her leg and ran my thumb over her knee.
The corners of her mouth tugged up even higher, but she didn’t look at me. I leaned back, giving her some space and pulling my hand back.
“Trust issues, right.” She took a deep breath and stared out at the kids wandering in and out of the exhibits. “There was this guy I dated back in high school. We were high school royalty. I was a cheerleader. He was—he was a football player. Quarterback.” Her lips tightened. “And he cheated on me.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “It’s not your fault, but it’s definitely some baggage I should’ve left behind. I went to visit him at college. He was a year ahead of me and I walked in on him with someone else—my best friend. She was supposed to be up there visiting her new boyfriend. Turned out her new boyfriend was my current boyfriend. It was excruciatingly humiliating. Once people at my school found out, it was all snickers and laughter behind my back, people I thought were my friends… So when I started college, I decided I was finished with the superficial. Only genuine, good people need apply.”
“That’s when you started the volunteer work.”
A small snort. “Exactly. Pretty selfish, huh?” Her lips pinched together. “Sophomore year, I was ready to wade back into things, date again. I found a guy, big into all the same groups I was in. He was involved in tons of projects and doing so much good. I figured I’d finally found a good one. He did a summer trip to South America, volunteering at an orphanage. There was a girl who’d been in all the pictures he posted online, but he swore I had nothing to worry about. I showed up early at the apartment we were supposed to be sharing and found him in bed with her.”
I winced.
“Things sucked in a different way that time. He was such a nice guy, or so everyone kept telling me, so what exactly had I done to make him do that?”
“It wasn’t your fault.” I clenched my fist, seconds from hunting this guy down and kicking his ass for making her feel like the bad guy when he was the one who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.
“I knew that, but it sure as hell felt like everyone else didn’t, and I got it stuck in my head that I’d show him and everyone else again. I’d win the Huffington Award and then people would see that I’m a good person. Plus, the mo—it’s important for me to prove that I can do it.”
“You’ve definitely been putting in the hours.”
“You have no idea.” She laughed. “But those wounds are still there. So when you showed up…”
I wanted to find the guys who’d hurt her and wreck them. Off the field, I wasn’t someone who had to prove how tough he was by picking fights, but they’d hurt her. They’d wrecked her and made it hard for her to trust herself, let alone anyone else. I wanted to ram my fist down both their throats. “I was a walking talking reminder of two people who hurt you.”
She peered up at me. “I shouldn’t have taken everything out on you.”
Her armor made so much more sense, as well as her intense dislike for me on sight. When wounds are raw, you’re bound to lash out if someone pokes them, even if they don’t know they’re doing it. “I get it.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s right, but I do have a severe aversion to liars, even when it comes to things that seem small.” A muscle in her cheek clenched. “Even if it seems like no big deal, I can’t have people in my life who lie to me.”
“I get that, and I’ll never do that.” The words were out before I could stop them, before I could say the thing I’d just resolved never to say.
She nodded, but it was going to take more than my words to make her believe it.
“Your turn.” She lifted her chin with her gaze trained on me.
“This is a you show me yours, I’ll show you mine situation?”
“Something like that.” The corners of her eyes creased with a small smile. “Don’t leave me out here dangling by myself.”
A tightness in my chest that had been there for a long time squeezed the air from my lungs. Steeling myself, I let out a shaky breath. “I’ve never wanted to play football.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her straighten and turn to me. Those were words I’d never said to another person. “When I was little, I never even played catch with my dad in the backyard or anything. He was always gone. The kitchen was where I felt most comfortable, but my dad played football, so I kind of came into it by osmosis.
“When I was young, going to the locker rooms and practice was just as natural as sitting on the counters at Tavola, my grandfather’s restaurant. Dad didn’t have time to push me when he was playing. Travel and practices took up a lot of his time, and then one day it was like a flip switched. Even before he retired, he was there pushing me to be a football player.
“I was just happy to have him around, so I was cool with doing whatever it took to keep his attention. I brought up maybe not playing back in high school, and he stopped talking to me for a week. That was that. I never brought it up again. After every practice, he’d run me through even more drills. Every game, win or loss, needed a full debrief—he even recorded all my games so we could go through my mistakes frame by frame, and now… I thought if I won the national championship, he’d finally tell me he was proud of me.” Shaking my head, I rested my forearms on my legs. “How stupid am I? Doing all this for Daddy’s approval.” I glanced over at her.
She shook her head and reached out, taking my hand. “Not stupid. You trusted someone you should’ve been able to trust with your absolute faith.” She paused for a moment. “You don’t want to go pro?”
“I don’t think I have a choice.” I squinted over at her.
“You al
ways have a choice.”
“It’s all I’ve ever known.”
The slow strokes of her thumb on my arm halted, a question in her eyes.
“Is it what you want?”
“Sometimes I close my eyes and try to see something beyond that.”
“What do you see when you think of your future?”
“The pain and how my body will betray me. It’ll be with me forever. Even with the best physical therapy money can buy, I’ve got injuries that’ll only get worse as I get older. My dad’s broken down. He hides it well, but I’ve seen how it’s wrecked him. I’d like to have a life where I’m not dreading getting older because I’m destroying my body out on the field for even more money. I see myself taking over for my grandfather, following in his footsteps.”
“It’s hard to know what life has in store for us.” Her slow strokes began again, tickling the hair on my arm. The way she stripped me down without even trying, getting me to talk about things I hadn’t said out loud made my throat tight. She licked her lips. “Don’t do what you think other people expect you to do if it’s not what you want.”
“What do you want?”
She licked her lips and her gaze dropped to my hands. “To find something I love so much I could never walk away from it…to find something that’ll make me happy.”
You make me happy. I choked back those words. “Thanks for being someone I can talk to.”
“That’s what friends are for, right?”
“Is that what we are?” My gaze collided with hers. The flicker that lit me up like a house on Christmas Eve pulsed between us.
Her lips parted. Pink. Full. Hers. “Yeah.” It didn’t sound convincing to me.
I scooted my chair closer, the blue metal scraping across the floor between us. “Is that all we are?”
She licked her lips and her gaze dropped to mine. Her pulse raced against the back of my hand.
Dropping my hand on top of hers, I made a Nix-Elle sandwich, twining my fingers through hers.
“What else would we be?” The words were so low I could barely hear them.
“I’m crazy about you, B and E, and you’re not like anyone I’ve ever met before.” I can’t say I want you to be my girlfriend because you’ll probably turn into The Flash, bolting out of here with a fire streak behind you.
She squeezed my hand. “I can say the exact same thing.” Her smile wasn’t restrained and tentative like it usually was. It was wide and bright, and I needed to taste her again.
Tugging her forward until she was almost on my lap, I attacked her lips with a pent-up hunger that had been burning in me since that first kiss. She was just as hungry, giving as good as she got.
A loud throat clearing broke us apart. With flushed lips that matched her hair, Elle stared at me wide-eyed. We both turned our heads, wincing at the ticked-off chaperone and mini-me troop behind her. She tapped her foot and we bolted, our laughter bouncing off the elevator walls as the doors closed behind us.
“I don’t go around kissing just anyone, you know.” I leaned against the wall.
“You mean I’m special?” Elle pressed her fingers against her chest, doing her best Southern debutante impersonation.
“You have no idea.”
18
Nix
I’d been summoned—again—only this time it wasn’t to our house, but to the stadium. The clock was ticking down and Dad was no longer amused by how long I’d put off this decision. Graduation was less than a month away.
Security let me in with little more than a wave. I weaved my way through the underbelly of the stadium and stepped into the locker room. It didn’t smell anything like our campus locker room. There was nothing more than the lingering smell of Icy Hot in the air, but it had more of a new car smell. Symmetrical vacuum lines ran across the green and silver carpet. Every locker was three times the size of the ones we had at FU.
Coming in here this time was different. It wasn’t my dad’s old locker room; it was one that could be mine…but that didn’t send thrills of anticipation through me. As nice as it was with flat-screen TVs, padded bench seats, and solid wood lockers, this wasn’t the place for me.
“You’re here.” My dad stalked out of one of the side doors. The slight limp in his gait was nothing compared to the large ice pack bandaged to his arm.
“Dad.”
To have me meet him here was breaking all kinds of recruiting rules, but he was the great Phillip Russo who didn’t care what anyone said, not even the commissioner.
“Threw a few balls out there—not as easy as it used to be.” He went back out the doorway he’d come in through.
I guessed that meant I was supposed to follow him.
He lowered himself into a swirling whirlpool of water. The sharp smell of the topical muscle ointments blanketed the room. It was like my room back home after every game and practice. Some of the physical therapists, conditioning specialists, and other team staff came into the room, and a few guys from the team showed up. The game wasn’t until that night, but when you needed to work those kinks out to be one hundred percent, you showed up early.
“All this is waiting for you, son.” Dad spread one arm out all the way. The other only moved as far as he could with the bandage and ice pack restriction on his arm. To him this was about the glory of the field. He had a grin on his face like he was giving me the keys to the castle. For so long, this had been exactly what I’d wanted: sweating it out beside my old man as he ran me through practice drills on the field, grinning like an idiot as he coached me from the sidelines and became a fixture in my life. After way too long without an ounce of his attention, I’d lapped it up, basked in it, and had never been happier—but once all the warm, shiny feelings wore off, all that was left was his scrutiny and unending disappointment. Nothing was ever good enough.
But here, in a room soaked with Icy Hot and painkillers, all I saw were guys holding it together for one more minute on the field. Knee braces. Long deep scars from surgery. The nail gun pattern on shoulders and knees from pins being inserted. They gave it their all out there through blood, sweat, and pain. My surgery paled in comparison to what they went through to stay on the field.
“A ring just like this is in your future.”
He rested his elbow on the edge of the tub and held up his fist. The bulky gold- and diamond-encrusted ring didn’t make me want to rush to the gym and get ready for next season.
To top off our highly-against-regulation time in the stadium, Dad brought me around to the team doctor. One of the linemen walked out, lifting and dropping his ice-pack-covered and Ace-bandage-wrapped shoulder. Sympathetic pain throbbed in my own.
I held my head high. “I wanted to talk to you about the volunteer project thing.”
“The story’s ready to go.”
“I need you to kill it.”
“It’s PR gold—why would I kill it?”
Of course he wouldn’t just do it because I asked. “There are a few other things I’m working on that’ll be a better fit, more focused on the sport.” I’d figure a project out later, but I didn’t want Elle to find out about this. Ever since we’d left the Franklin, guilt had been riding me hard. Thinking about fucking things up with her sent a panicked streak through my chest like nothing else. Slowly, I was winning her over, and I didn’t want to erase all that.
“What kind of things?” He leaned over the edge of the soaking tub.
“Phillip.” An older man with salt and pepper hair clapped Dad on the back.
“Frank.” He shook the man’s hand.
“Your dad said you’ve been complaining about your shoulder. Let’s go talk.” Frank dropped his hand onto my shoulder and led me into his office. Dad followed behind. The doctor put on a white coat over his team t-shirt and looped a stethoscope around his neck then wheeled his stool closer to me. My dad kicked one of his feet in front of the other and leaned against the wall. So much for doctor-patient confidentiality.
“Yeah, I’ve tweake
d it a few times this season. Took a few hits too many.”
“No problem. Don’t worry about it. I can set you up with a few muscle relaxers and painkillers before games and practices and you won’t feel a thing.”
Not feeling pain didn’t mean I wasn’t doing damage… “Won’t that make it worse?”
“I’ve been a team doctor for long enough to know if you don’t play, you don’t get paid. I give my patients what they need.”
“But what about the damage it does?”
“That damage hurts a hell of a lot less once the paycheck rolls in. Believe me.” He clapped me on the shoulder and laughed like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Dad walked me outside to my car. The solid hitch in his gait only got more pronounced with each passing year. “Nothing to worry about. The docs keep you healthy enough to play, even if you’re hurting. Play through the pain and bask in all the glory.” He looked up at the stadium like it was the gates of heaven.
“Our team doctor told me I’ll probably need to get this worked on.”
A short, loud blast of air shot out of my dad’s nose. “Your team doc was trying to keep you scared to show off too much this season. They’ve got nothing left once you’re gone, and if you’re breaking records left and right, it doesn’t give them any room to grow.”
There was a zero percent chance of that being true. Plus, the team still had LJ, Berk, and Keyton, guys who were all set to be strong draft picks, but arguing with Dad when he was like this was a one-way ticket to Lecture-Ville. “Permanent damage isn’t what I want, Dad.”
“I’ve been doing this for longer than you’ve been alive, son, and I know what it takes to make it in this business. Now, about making sure you’re on the right track with the publicity ahead of the draft, I’ve got a few things in the works.”
“About that—why don’t we hold off? Maybe do it closer to the big day?” I still hadn’t told Elle. One kiss from her hadn’t been enough. It never would be. She was finally letting me get closer, and I hadn’t realized how much I wanted that. If my face was splashed all over the internet with what had happened over spring break, she’d remove my balls.