Under the Bleachers: A Novel

by K. K. Allen

  “Tell me we’re not pretending anymore.” His voice cracks, and suddenly I realize what this week has been about. It hasn’t just been about getting to know me, or teasing me slowly until we can’t take it anymore. He wants to trust this. To trust me. And he wants me to trust him.

  I melt at his words and shake my head. “No, Zach. Not anymore.”

  “So you’re mine?”

  Isn’t this a lot to commit to when we’re both so worked up? “I’ll try,” I say honestly.

  He shakes his head, the stubble of his chin scraping my skin. “Not good enough. I need to hear you say it,” his husky voice demands.

  I groan in frustration, but not because of his question. Why are we still talking? “I’m yours, Zach,” I whisper. “I’ve always been yours.”

  With a curl of his lips he’s guiding my head toward his again until we crash together in an explosive kiss. Because when oil and water react to heat, everything sizzles.

  He finally eases his grip. My body begins to move above him, slowly, treasuring every inch of his still-clothed body. His hands find the bottom of my tank top and slip inside it, running a hand up my back before encircling my waist and pulling my body down firmly onto his lap. He groans, and then everything intensifies. Our breathing. Our rhythm. Each touch. Each sound.

  He rocks up into me, pulling away from my mouth and grabbing hold of the bottom of my tank top. With one look in my eyes, he asks permission and receives it. My shirt comes off. His eyes roam over me before his hands do. And then his mouth is wrapping around the peaks of my breasts and teasing each one with a gentle suction.

  He must feel me try to move. Both of his hands have moved down again so that they’re on my thighs, under my shorts, rocking me into him with a firm grip as if he can’t get enough. He tastes me. Licks me. Nips me. His boxer briefs and my shorts leave little to the imagination, only sending us into a deeper frenzy.

  I pant into the air. My hands are equally greedy as they grip his hair and I press into him. “Zach,” I say again, this time for an entirely different reason. My heart rate quickens and my muscles begin to clench. Grinding against him might just get me to where I need to be.

  “You’re so beautiful, Cakes,” he murmurs against my skin. “Fuck. I need to be inside you.” But he doesn’t try to move us. Instead, he’s helping me find my release as I desperately move against him, and I swear he might come too.

  A sharp moan makes it past my throat as pleasure soars through me, blasting my body with shudders, and then everything goes still.

  With a growl, Zach grips me by the waist and flips me onto my back. But just as he starts to tug at my shorts a phone rings—well, it sings.

  What the hell? No.

  Kenny Chesney’s voice pours through Zach’s phone speakers, and his head falls to my chest with a moan.

  Running my hands through his hair, I sigh. “Ignore it.”

  We’re still barely clothed when he starts to move above me, pressing his lips to mine. And then I hear the lyrics “never forget you, Coach.”

  I can’t help it. I look over to the coffee table and see Coach Reynolds lit up on his phone. Yup. Moment totally ruined. I reach for his phone and hand it to him with an annoyed smile. “It’s for you.”

  “Cakes.” He wrinkles his eyes. “I don’t want to talk to him right now. I don’t know why he’d be calling on a Friday ni—” Zach’s face changes suddenly. “Shit!”

  He jumps up from the couch and dresses faster than anything I’ve ever seen, retrieving his clothes from the bathroom and shoving his feet into his shoes.

  He presses his lips to my forehead. “I’ll call you once I’m on the road. I’m so late.”

  I’m officially panicking now. I hope everything’s okay, but there are so many questions swirling through my mind.

  It takes thirty minutes for him to call me. Apologies immediately flood the phone line. I’m trying to grasp his words, and ease immediately settles in my stomach when I realize everyone is going to be okay. There’s no emergency. Just a promise he made to someone other than me.

  “Coach’s daughter has a dance recital tonight,” he explains. “I’m so sorry, Cakes. I promised her I’d be there, and I completely forgot until Coach called. It wasn’t on my damn calendar.” He lets out an uncomfortable laugh. “I can be back at your place around ten … but you probably need to sleep.”

  His voice fades with regret. Meanwhile, I’m speechless. After giving in to what felt was so right, I never expected Zach to make everything feel so wrong. He made a choice. A choice that comes before me. A choice that brings on my darkest, deepest insecurity, making me want to wrap myself into a selfish ball.

  It’s a sweet thing he’s doing for that little girl, but what about me? Is it so awful to want a man that will choose me first for once?

  My thoughts are dark. While his reasons for leaving were innocent and honest, and his apology is genuine, that’s not what my mind focuses on. All I can think about is the little girl that still breathes inside me, still heartbroken and living with wounds cast by her father.

  Insecurity breeds anger. The anger intensifies, making the corners of my eyes burn as tears threaten to surface. Of course, I hold them back. I’ll always hold them back. Because I’ll do anything to wash away the memories of these past weeks. Weeks that slowly opened me up to the possibility of trusting someone. Maybe even loving someone.

  I’ve seen others fall in love. I’m a sucker for a good romantic comedy. But never once did I imagine myself in the place of the girl that gets her heart won over by the leading man. Not until Zach came along and demanded I give him a chance. I should have never listened.

  Zach and I don’t defy the odds; we are the odds. We were oil and water from the beginning, and that’s not about to change anytime soon.

  “Don’t bother.” And then I hang up … because it’s done.

  “Monica! Monica, wake up. Let’s go. Now! I found it.”

  Maggie’s voice was distant, as if I had drowned and she was trying to reach me from the surface. It took me a few seconds of her rattling my body around to bring me to full consciousness. Her tone was filled with excitement, which I knew could only mean one thing. “You found Dad’s address?”

  “Yes,” she hissed. “C’mon. We need to leave before Mom wakes up. Let’s go.”

  I tossed the bedcover to one side and moved quickly, following my sister’s pace. Ever since she got her learner’s permit, finding dad has been all she talked about. Oftentimes after the lights went out and mom was snoring in the next room, Maggie would sneak into my bed and we’d talk. She would tell me how much she hated modeling and that she resented Mom for not letting her quit. And then we’d talk about how much we missed Dad. Maggie would fill me with dreams of sneaking off in the middle of the night to find him. The way she told it, our reunion would be nothing short of a fairytale.

  Maggie had turned sixteen the week before, and it seemed that her dream—our dream—was finally going to come true. We hadn’t seen our father in nearly two years.

  I was ten when he was injured. For the following six months, he fell into some sort of depression. And then he started to travel once a month. Once a month became once a week, and by the time I was twelve, he was gone.

  He stopped coming home. Stopped calling. I was twelve when I realized that I didn’t have a father anymore—not in the normal sense of the word, anyway. That was also the year the divorce was finalized and we moved to Rockwall, leaving Dallas behind permanently.

  “Look, it’s not that far from our old house!” Maggie said, her excitement palpable. That this didn’t bother her like it did me was just one of the many differences between the two of us.

  “Really? So Dad was our neighbor and still never came to see us?”

  Her eyes never left the road as she spoke. “We don’t know that. He could have moved back after the divorce.”

  Maggie was as careful and logical as they come. It mu
st have been from all that work strutting the catwalk. Patience, timing, and grace were necessities for survival in the fashion world. Perfection was the only option, and Maggie was very much perfection.

  My sister was the beautiful one: tall with killer legs, a slender frame, and sharp eyes that screamed for attention. I aspired to be just like her. It felt natural to want what she wanted, and seeing Dad again was no exception.

  “Where’d you find this, anyway?” I asked, staring down at the empty envelope with my dad’s name and address scrawled on it in familiar writing.

  “Mom keeps a safe in the back of her closet. I found it last week when I was looking for jewelry for the party.”

  I stared at my sister’s profile. Even in the dark, I could see the shine in her eyes, and the pride in her face. “What will mom do when she wakes up?”

  “Freak out, probably.” Maggie laughed. “Call us a million times. Then she’ll probably call Dad.”

  “She doesn’t have his new number,” I reminded her.

  Maggie’s face transformed into one of fury. “You don’t actually believe that, do you Monica? Of course she has his number. She clearly had his address.” She ripped the envelope from my hands and waved it in my face as evidence. “She’s been lying to us.”

  “But why would she lie? Dad stopped coming around long before we moved. He’s the one who left.” I took the envelope from her. “Pay attention to the road.”

  She huffed and faced forward. “You’ll see, M.”

  I hated that she called me M. While the two of us were Dad’s m&ms—Maggie and Monica—I was his M, and she was his Mags. The nickname just another painful reminder of what he left behind.

  Maggie’s face narrowed into the night with infectious confidence. “When we get to Dad, I’m sure he’ll explain everything.”

  It was two in the morning when we arrived outside a beautiful brick home guarded by a tall iron gate. I hadn’t been able to sleep during the hour ride there, especially with the anticipation of seeing my father again.

  Maggie was certain that Mom was the cause of his disappearance, and I was starting to believe her considering all the facts. Mom was hiding letters from him, so she obviously lied about knowing where he was. But why all the secrets? And if she was lying to us, then why hadn’t he been fighting harder to see us?

  Maggie parked on the curb outside the gate and looked at me, a huge grin on her face. “We should probably wait until morning. I don’t want him to get mad that we woke him up.” She reached into the backseat and handed me a blanket and pillow. “Get some sleep, sis. Dad will be so excited to see us in the morning.”

  I believed her. I slept well that night and woke up feeling just as excited as she was. At the first sign of light, we hopped the fence and ran, giggling, across the perfectly manicured lawn. We dashed up to the white doors and stood at the lavender welcome mat on the front porch.

  It was in the instant that the front door opened that my world started to change. I felt the shift. The first blow to my already aching heart. A blow that winded me from the first impact. Because I knew. When I saw the familiar raven-haired beauty holding a newborn baby in her arms … I knew.

  I’d never forget that tightness in my chest when I awoke to that velvety voice in the hospital after my fall from the bleachers four years earlier. Two broken limbs felt like nothing compared to the pain I felt when I saw my father with the nurse.

  Maggie, of course, didn’t make the same connection. She’d never seen the woman before now, but beyond that I think she was in denial.

  With a tug of her hand, I silently begged for us to leave. I didn’t want to see my father and confirm what I already knew, but Maggie yanked her hand away and spoke to the woman, whose panicked eyes were scanning my features as if she’d seen a ghost.

  “Hi,” Maggie greeted her cheerily. “We’re here to see our dad, Liam. Do you know him?”

  The woman’s eyes darted to the baby in her arms. “I’m sorry—I—how did you—?”

  “Honey?”

  A familiar figure appeared behind the woman. A figure I’d always thought of as superhero strong but that I quickly realized was anything but. His eyes caught her expression, and I’m certain he knew before he saw us.

  Watching my father recognize his two little girls standing on his porch—one with a hopeful expression and one with utter devastation on her face—he was no longer that superhero to me. No longer the man I remembered idolizing and thinking about with unmeasurable love.

  He was a fraud.

  As if my heart hadn’t already been pummeled, another little girl, this one a toddler, scurried over and clung to my father’s leg. She had dried snot on her nose and long, ratty but beautiful dark hair. Someone should have been there to take their picture. A family of four stared back at us now—a beautiful family who had clearly created a life together, built as if another hadn’t been buried in the process.

  That’s when my sister finally made the connection. The light in her beautiful brown eyes dimmed, her mouth fell closed and flat, and the perfect posture she’d trained for years to achieve slouched in defeat. Whatever hope she’d held onto died that day.

  There we were, standing on the porch of our father’s new home with his new family. A home we didn’t belong in because we’d been replaced. Our Dallas home, my mom, Maggie, me—we’d all been replaced by this perfect picture before us.

  The next few moments were a blur as the woman rushed her children inside and closed the door behind them, leaving my dad alone with us. He fell to his knees. His face crumbled, and tears quickly formed in his eyes.

  He wept, and he apologized, and he tried to embrace us. I know I felt stiff in his arms. It had been two years of complete silence, and I now knew his betrayal started even before that.

  But why? Did he not love us anymore? Did we do something wrong? Did he like them better? So many questions, but I would never get my answers.

  Maggie wouldn’t embrace him and grabbed my hand instead.

  “You have another family?” I could feel her shaking through our conjoined palms. “You left us!” Her scream was so loud that I swear it rang through the air for several seconds while our dad buried his head in his hands and shook.

  “I love you girls so much,” he cried. “You weren’t supposed to find out like this.”

  Something about that last sentence set Maggie off and she burst into tears. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” Her screams were ear-piercing and heartbreaking, and my own silent tears came in a steady stream down my face.

  “Mags.” Dad’s voice broke, but he knew there was nothing he could say to make this better for any of us. “You have every right to be mad, but please, just come inside. I’ll tell you everything. Meet your sisters—”

  I felt myself being yanked from the porch and down the driveway, otherwise, I was numb. I kept my eyes on my father, not wanting to leave despite my hurt. His eyes met mine. “M,” he croaked, before his expression crumbled in agony.

  He pleaded with Maggie to stay. Followed us down the driveway, even. Then he reached for me and clung to my hand. For the instant our hands were connected, I wanted to cling back … but I knew I had a decision to make.

  Stay with my dad, or go home with Maggie.

  I chose her.

  As much as I wanted to stay, to force myself to listen to what he had to say, to make him fix the hurt with that magic glue that always solved what seemed like life’s biggest problems when we were little … it was too late. Maggie and I weren’t little anymore. Two years had passed since we’d seen our father, and this was our reunion.

  So I left with Maggie. She needed me. I needed her. We were two sisters, lost and broken, but at least we were lost and broken together.

  Chloe is the last person I expect to show up at Monica’s front door early Saturday morning. My back and neck are stiff, my throat is dry, and my stomach aches from a forgotten dinner. I’ve been propped against the d
amn wall all night, waiting. Screw my morning workout.

  The moment Monica hung up on me, her final words banging through my mind like a gong in a subway station, my heart overturned in my chest: don’t bother. Such hurtful words from the brightest light that has come into my life in a long time.

  I panicked. Only a few minutes from Clara’s recital, I made a U-turn and called Monica back until my calls started going straight to voicemail. What the fuck did I do?

  Circling the conversation in my mind, I texted coach to apologize for missing the event and then sped back to Monica’s. After relentlessly pounding and desperately shouting her name, a neighbor popped his head out to tell me he saw her leaving five minutes before I had arrived.

  I slept as best I could sitting up, dozing off every now and then, only to be awakened by every little noise, each time expecting the sound to be Monica walking down the hall. I imagined the conversation we’d have. One where I completely misheard what she said. Or maybe she was kidding. Because for the life of me, I don’t know what could have caused that reaction. It was a little … explosive. Even for her.

  Okay, sure, I’m an ass because I forgot that I already had plans. I forget things. My timing sucks, too. When I think about what was about to happen on that couch I want to drill my head into the wall behind me. But what was I supposed to do?

  Chloe looks exhausted and doesn’t even register me sitting by Monica’s door until she almost trips over a sprawled out leg. “Zach?”

  I rub my eyes, my body groaning as I shift up straight. “Where’s Cakes?”

  Chloe purses her lips and shakes her head, then inserts a key into Monica’s door and pushes it open. “Gavin’s getting her drunk ass on the bus. Come in. Help me grab her stuff.”

  As tired as I am, I jump to my feet and hold the door open. “Why hasn’t she come home?”

  I’m thrown a glare over her shoulder, something I never think I’ve ever seen from Chloe Rivers. “You should know, superstar. Probably the same reason you slept on the floor in front of her apartment.”