Something soft touched my skin. “Kayden?” a voice asked.
“Huh?” I jerked and my head smacked a hard surface—the edge of the bed frame, I realized. I looked up and the room was suddenly light, and Kylie’s face was sticking over the edge of the mattress, her hair spilling down onto me, tickling and catching against the beard I’d grown out as a disguise.
“What?” I squinted against the sun coming in through the window and grunted as I got myself up to sit. I must have been sleeping in the shape of a pretzel from how my body felt. “What do you need?”
“I don’t know what happened. Am I at your apartment? What am I doing here?” she asked me.
“You called me last night when Roy left you at the bar. I came and picked you up.” I rubbed the back of my neck. I didn’t remember going to sleep, but at some point in the early morning, I must have made the floor my bed. Every part of me hurt.
“You brought me here?” Her eyes got big and she sat straight up. Clothes, towels, and blankets spilled off her and down onto me. “Oh, lordy! Emma! She’s all alone at home and she must be so worried!”
I removed the pile of crap from my lap. “I’m sure she’s fine. She’s a dog, right?”
Kylie shook her head at me like I was crazy. “Why am I laying in a pile of laundry?” she asked next. She pushed more stuff off herself and stood. Then she reached out a hand to me, to help me up, too.
I looked at her hand for a second then took it. Her fingers were warm now—she was fine. “I ran out of blankets. You got really cold.” I levered myself off the ground with the help of the mattress and slowly released my hold on her hand.
“I remember calling you and then sitting down in front of the bar. You came and got me?” I nodded at her. “Thank you so much, Kayden. Thank you! I appreciate that a lot, a real lot. And covering me with your laundry, too! Thank you.” She flipped her long hair around until it was up in some kind of knot at the back of her head, and then she rushed out of the bedroom. I followed, carrying her ugly shoes.
“I’ll get out of your way,” she was saying as she headed for the exit. “I need to get home to Em.”
“Hang on. I’ll take you, if you give me a minute.”
Kylie glanced at the door but then nodded and sat. “Ok. Thanks for that, too.”
It used to take me a while to get ready, to groom and pick out clothes, but now I was out of the shower and dressed in under five minutes. She was still sitting on the couch when I finished, but she’d stripped down and removed the top layers of clothing until all she wore now was a tight, pink t-shirt that said “Roys” across her chest.
“My uniform,” she told me, gesturing to it. She twisted around to display the back of the shirt which read, “I drink at.” The O on the front made a circle around her boob, and that placement must have been purposeful. She waved her hand at her face. “It’s pretty hot in here.”
“I turned up the temperature for you,” I explained. “You were in bad shape last night, thanks to that dick who’s your boss.”
She smiled. “But you came when he left me. Just like Captain Blackthorne got Lady Lorna when they were shipwrecked and she got kidnapped for the second time!” She held up the book she’d loaned me. I’d stuck it in the couch when I’d finished, thinking I might read it again to see if Lady Lorna was the dumbass that I had originally thought. “If you’re done with this, you can take another when we get to my house.”
“Uh, ok.” I was still stuck on the idea that she was comparing me to the Blackthorne pirate. That guy was fierce. “All I did was drive over to the bar.”
“In the middle of the night, when I needed you,” Kylie said. “I don’t even remember getting into your car or coming back here, so I must have been really out of it.”
“Roy—” I started to say, but she cut in.
“I know. He and I will have a long talk because, as you said, he really was a dick. Oh! You have my shoes. I didn’t know where they’d gone.” She yanked them onto her feet and stood to walk to the door. I realized that my eyes were stuck on the way her black pants stretched over her body and I looked hard at the book to put a stop to it. I almost let her die the night before, and here I was staring at her ass this morning like I was a thirteen-year-old kid.
Kylie was very worried about Emma, which she let me know repeatedly as we rode over to her house. “She doesn’t like being alone,” she said for the fifth or sixth time. “We’ve really never been apart for that long, not since I brought her home when she was a puppy. Well, we were separated once for a little while when I was in jail in Arkansas, but the charges didn’t stick and I got out pretty fast.”
“What in the hell were you locked up for?” I asked, jerking my head to look at her and jerking the wheel at the same time.
“Watch out!” With the car straightened, she told me, “I broke a bottle over a customer’s head in the bar where I worked. It was his fault, because he grabbed me really hard, grabbed my breast and then my arm, and then he tried to pull me into the parking lot. But, you know, the police get upset when someone’s unconscious…”
“Jesus! Did you kill him?”
“Not at all! He was fine, after some stiches and yes, a short hospital stay. Anyway, he deserved it, no matter if his friends told the police that I was leading him on. I wasn’t! Any guy who touches a woman against her will should get a bottle over the head.”
I thought back through my past. “I’m glad you did that. He did deserve it.”
“Em was alone, and even though my neighbor fed her and took her out, it was still awful.” She cleared her throat. “It’s better when we’re together.”
Her house was as dark and sad as I remembered it from the last time I’d seen it, but Kylie was so happy to be there. She ran inside and greeted her dog like they’d been apart for years instead of just one night, although Emma seemed just fine. She’d been asleep in a tiny bunk bed when we walked in, not even getting up to come to the front door—that was how worried she was about being alone.
The bedroom was just about as bad as the front of the house, with piles of crap everywhere, boxes, and a tiny window that barely let in the weak December sun. Kylie saw me looking around. “This is where we sleep,” she explained. “Because Aunt Maude passed away in the other room and she was in there for a while before they found her. I’m not superstitious, not too much, but…”
But the bed was clearly made for a child, and I had no idea how she fit herself and a huge dog in it. Emma started to climb back onto the bunk and Kylie helped her. “She’s probably tired after spending the night waiting up for me,” she explained. Her face suddenly changed and she glanced down at the dog. “Sorry about the smell. Sometimes she has tummy issues. It’s the new diet the vet put her on.”
I put my shirt over my nose and went into the living room. It looked slightly emptier, but not by much. There was still shit everywhere but now that more of the carpet was exposed, you could also see some weird stains that reminded me of what Kylie had just said, that her aunt had died in this house and it had been a while before someone found her. Were those marks blood? Was this what happened when a body got left somewhere for too long? I stepped carefully.
Kylie came behind me, still waving her hand against the toxic cloud her dog had produced. “I’d like to open the windows for fresh air, even with the cold, but they stick,” she explained. “In the summer that was—”
I yanked and the window crashed open so we could breathe in this hellhole of a house.
“Thanks,” she told me. “That’s twice now that you’ve helped me so much. I should make you breakfast to show my appreciation! I wonder what I have to eat.”
That didn’t sound too promising, but I followed her into the kitchen and looked over her shoulder as she opened the refrigerator. There was a bottle of orange juice with maybe two sips left at the bottom, a box of baking soda that was grey with mold, and a hot dog lying alone on the top shelf, naked and shriveled. I pointed at it. “What the hell is th
at about?”
“A leftover, but I don’t like to wrap stuff. All the food in our fridge is free-range,” she told me.
“That’s not what ‘free range’ means,” I said, but she just shrugged.
“Close enough. Do you want anything to eat?”
I shook my head, hard. “No. Absolutely not. Your refrigerator is disgusting.”
Kylie just laughed. “I guess we have different standards. Lucky that Emma doesn’t care!”
I thought about her farting pet. Yeah, she wouldn’t care about a dried-up hot dog that was turning green.
“I’m not that hungry either. I feel a little tired still—kind of weird,” she said. “Maybe I’ll just sit down.” She cleared a spot on the couch for herself and then another one, which she patted. “Come on,” she invited.
“You feel weird because you almost died last night. Your boss left you in the parking lot to die.”
“He didn’t mean it, though,” she answered. “You know how people are.”
“No, I guess I don’t, and if someone left me outside to die, I wouldn’t be so happy about it.”
“I’m not happy about it! But I have to go back and work with him today. We have to get along with the people we work with. Or for,” she added. “Right?”
I didn’t really know. Thinking back on my work experience, which was only my football career, I couldn’t think of one coach I’d gotten along with, one teammate I would call a friend. “I told you last night that I have plans to get a job and you were pretty happy about it,” I mentioned, and her eyes lit right up.
“Oh, really? I don’t remember that but I’m so glad! Did you tell me what you’re interviewing for?”
I shook my head. “Not an interview, it’s the tryout you read about. I’m going to try out for the Junior Woodsmen team.”
“I thought you said you wouldn’t. That you’d been a starter on the biggest stage and you wouldn’t go backwards,” she pointed out, remembering every damn word I’d ever said.
But I didn’t have a choice. “Yeah, well, I’m trying my hand with the devo league.”
“Devo? Why do you call it that?”
“It’s short for development,” I explained. “It’s the development league, like the B-squad, for college players who didn’t get drafted into the United Football Confederation or sometimes for guys who aren’t good enough to keep playing in the big league and move backwards, downwards. Like me. The pay is terrible and the facilities are worse, so the Junior Woodsmen team plays on an old practice field outside in the snow. It’s awful.”
Kylie stared at me. “And that’s what you want to do? To go out for that team, for bad pay in the snow?”
What the hell else was I going to do? I didn’t bother to answer those questions.
“I thought you said you were done with football,” she went on. “You said it a few times.” When I still didn’t answer, she went on. “I was looking at help-wanted ads on Roy’s computer yesterday, and you know that lawyer you talked to about your agents robbing you blind because you weren’t paying attention?”
I stared at her. “That wasn’t what happened.”
She just went on. “He’s looking for an assistant and he pays really well. I was thinking about applying there myself, but you have to have a high school diploma.”
“You didn’t finish high school?”
Color rose up in her cheeks. “No. I dropped out when I was sixteen, but you graduated, right? So you could—”
“No. No, the only thing I’ve ever been able to do at all is football.”
“I seemed to get the feeling that you didn’t really like it,” she told me, and what was I going to say to that? I’d talked again to Amy, my accountant, and she’d fired me, saying she wasn’t going to take any more of my money for her fees. She’d also mentioned that I should immediately move out of my apartment into someplace cheaper and sell my Bentley. I’d decided those were problems for another day, but yeah, I was going to have to go back to playing football. Whether I liked it or not.
When I didn’t answer, Kylie continued. “Well, are you ready for your tryout? Do you have to, like, prepare a piece or something?”
“Have you ever played a sport, ever once in your life?”
“No. Once in middle school, I tried out for a play, and I had to prepare a piece,” she explained. “I recited the Pledge of Allegiance because that was all I knew by heart but I put a lot of emotion into it. I got a part in the production but then I couldn’t do it because I had, you know, other things to take care of.”
“Like your dog?”
“Exactly. It would have taken a lot of time away from her and…you know. So, what do you have to prepare for your audition? I mean, tryout?”
“I’m not going to say the Pledge of Allegiance,” I said, and got the familiar feeling like, shit, I wasn’t ready for this and I wasn’t going to be good enough. “I’m out of shape. I got winded carrying you and it’s been a year since I’ve thrown a ball, except to the kid at Helping Hands.” And when I’d thrown it to him with some pace on it, I knocked him over, so it hadn’t been great practice.
“You carried me?” Her eyes got big.
“Yeah, a little. You were sleeping.”
“Wow. Wow! I wish I’d been awake so I could have experienced that! I’ve never been carried before. Probably when I was little, by my mom,” she amended, “but not ever by strange men. You know what I mean by that.” Yeah, I did. “It reminds me so much of my Great-aunt Maude.”
“She used to carry you?”
“No, that was how she met Ronnie! She was swimming in Sleeping Bear Bay and…oh, lordy. I can’t believe I haven’t told you this yet. It was the most stupendiflous discovery!”
She launched into a story about finding letters and possibly poisonous mushrooms, and about how her aunt wasn’t a strong swimmer but some guy named Ronnie had been a lifeguard and carried her. Mostly, it was a story about a love affair.
I wasn’t all that interested in how long it took to drive to Chicago for college and Ronnie’s broken-down car, or how Maude had difficult family obligations that Kylie wasn’t quite clear about, but I did like to listen to her talk. And I figured I’d hang out for a while in her smelly, dirty house, because she’d need a ride to work. I thought that I might have some things to say to Roy when I took her there.
I sat back against the couch and watched her hands move as she spoke. It wasn’t a bad way to spend the day.
Chapter 6
Kayden
I put my fist over my mouth and tried to control my heaving chest so no one could see how hard I was sucking in oxygen in order to live. Another guy walked behind me, a lineman, and knocked into my shoulder. He was big enough that he almost knocked me onto my ass.
“Sorry,” he smirked. “Got to watch out for you, right? The bust of a quarterback?”
I flipped him off and his nostrils flared like a bull seeing a red cape. For a second, I thought he was going to come at me, but he just nodded.
“If you make the team, I’ll line up on your left. For your protection, unless I don’t happen to see the defensive end coming at you,” he said. “That’s your blind side, QB. It would be a real shame to watch you get buried, but that’s only if you make the team.”
“So you’ll let them hit me? Smart plan, you fucking piece of meat,” I answered. “The league scouts will definitely be impressed by the guy can’t do his one job, protecting me. And yeah, I will be your quarterback, so watch your goddamn mouth.”
Another nostril flare and I got ready to take a big hit, but the coach blew his whistle. “Run it again!” he barked, and we lined up for another timed 40-yard dash. Unfortunately, I stood next to a running back, who took off like he’d been shot out of a cannon. At least I beat out the asshole who’d tried to knock me down.
We stood at the other end of the field and I hoped I didn’t pass out. I’d paid a hundred dollars to have the privilege of showing up here today to the Junior Woodsmen tryout
s, where most of the other guys wanted to kill me and then I nearly lost my lungs onto a frozen field.
It turned out that the hundred bucks was the best money I ever spent, even if I got a little disturbed to see the balance in my account after I withdrew the cash. I hadn’t thought that I’d missed football but it seemed to feel different today. Nobody had put me through my paces like this since I’d entered the draft after college, and back then, I’d been so nervous that I wasn’t going to get picked by a team that I’d nearly blown my chances. I’d gone out to party the night before the skills showcase, and I was sluggish and slow the next day trying to run almost these same exact drills. I’d watched my draft prospects sink accordingly.
Maybe that was the difference, that today I wasn’t feeling the effects from the night before, and from all the nights and all the days before, all that time I’d spent drinking and using—I stopped suddenly, halfway up to a stand after I’d picked up my gear bag. How long had it been? How long since I’d been clean?
“You all right, there? They work you too hard, old-timer?”
I spun around but the guy was laughing, not pissed off at me like everyone else here seemed to be. My rep had preceded me, or maybe they just hated me on sight.
“Shit, it’s been a while since last season and maybe I should have put a little more time in on the treadmill instead of the couch in the meantime.” He put out his hand. “Rami Nour.”
We shook. “Kayden Matthews,” I answered.
“Yeah, I know. I’ve seen you on TV, man. You’re here trying to take my spot.”
I stilled. “You’re the Junior Woodsmen QB?” I hadn’t looked up my competition, promising myself that I was going to be better than he was, no matter if I hadn’t played for a year or so.
“Yeah, as of this moment I’m the quarterback, but probably not for much longer.” He windmilled his arm and I watched it. “You know that tomorrow’s our day, right? We’ll be throwing, not just running around.”
The Bust Page 10