Outside the Lines

by Kate Christie

“No,” the rest of the team chorused.

  Steph threw a USA sock to the floor. “I’m sorry I let everyone down.”

  Jo didn’t say anything, but Ellie and Phoebe quickly assured her it wasn’t her fault, it was the ref, it could have happened to anyone…

  “No,” Steph insisted, shaking her head. “It was a bad tackle. I was already sitting on a yellow, and I should have known better.”

  “Well, I should have shut Marisol down,” Emma said. “I’m sorry too.”

  “As long as we’re assigning blame,” Phoebe put in, “I dove early on that last goal.”

  “No loss is ever one person’s fault,” Jo said. “It may be a cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true. We win as a team and we lose as a team. Always. We’re going to have more moments like this, ladies. And that’s okay. In a way, I’m glad that we’re struggling. I brought us here so that we could get out of our comfort zone. As one of my old coaches used to say, adversity builds character. This feeling right now is how we get better. It’s what we do from here, how we recover—if we recover—that matters.”

  She paused and gazed around the room. “Everyone in this room has overcome something to be here—major injuries, anxiety, trauma, loss. No one here has come to this place and time unscathed. But to me, that’s what makes us stronger. In the face of adversity, you all know that you can persevere. That’s what gives each one of you the heart of a champion, whether you win the game in the end or not.”

  She stopped and let her words sink in. “All right. Grab your bags. You can get cleaned up at the hotel.”

  And with that, she and the rest of the coaching staff swept from the locker room. For a moment, no one said anything. Then Ellie stood up and stuck out her arm. “Bring it in, guys.”

  The group gathered around her, arms thrust into the center, bodies pressed together in the familiar ritual, and waited as she looked around the group. Finally Ellie shrugged. “What she said.” She smiled as everyone laughed, and added, “No, seriously, you guys, Jo’s right. Every loss is an opportunity to get better, and we are in this together, badass motherfuckers that we all are, every single one of us. Team on three. One, two, three, TEAM!”

  As players began to filter out of the locker room, Jamie could feel Emma’s eyes on her. But she didn’t look up, merely turned away and went to wait for Angie, who, predictably, had to pee. When she checked again, Emma was already gone.

  On the bus Jamie slid into her usual seat, sighing inwardly when Emma kept her gaze fixed on the foreign city outside her window, noise-canceling headphones clamped over her ears. They would talk when they were alone, and tomorrow they would get back out on the field to resume training. One practice at a time, one match at a time—or so that cliché went.

  Back at the hotel, they rode up in the elevator together, Emma with her headphones still on, Jamie and the others watching the numbers pass in silence. On the sixth floor, the players stepped out and headed down the hallway en masse. Emma’s room came first. Jamie hung back from the group as she unlocked her door.

  “Emma,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the music.

  Emma turned in her partially open doorway and regarded Jamie blankly.

  “Come on, Em,” she tried again.

  “Oh, so now you’re talking to me?” Emma challenged, finally deigning to lower her headphones.

  Jamie glanced down the hallway as the elevator dinged. More of their teammates piled off, but Steph, Emma’s current roommate, wasn’t among this group either. “Can I come in?”

  “Suit yourself.” Emma ducked into the room without waiting to see if she followed.

  She almost didn’t. But the thing about the ice queen act was that she knew it was only a cover to hide whatever Emma was feeling. Besides, they needed to talk before their relationship was back on display in front of the whole team at dinner. No pressure or anything.

  Jamie stopped near the mirrored closets, watching as Emma dropped her bag at the foot of the closest twin bed. The hotel was one of the nicer ones in the city, and yet the rooms were only large enough to fit a double bed or two twins. Still, it was nicer than most of the places she’d stayed with Arsenal.

  Emma turned and faced her, expression closed. “So?”

  Jamie frowned. “What was that back there?”

  “What was what?”

  “You know what.”

  Emma stared at her a second longer, and then she sat down abruptly at the end of the bed and covered her face. “I don’t know,” she mumbled.

  “Yes you do.” Jamie stepped closer, stopping in front of her and touching one of her hands. “Don’t shut me out.”

  “I can’t help it. I’m Scandinavian. It’s what we do,” she said, voice still muffled by her fear filter. Or maybe an all-around general emotion filter was a more accurate description.

  Jamie tugged on her hands. They came away easily enough. “Seriously, what was that?”

  Emma sighed, her breath sending a few flyaway curls away from the edge of her face. “I’m sorry.”

  “For…?”

  “For being a dick.”

  Her phrasing reminded Jamie of a walk they’d taken nearly a year earlier when they were still figuring out how to be around each other. “No argument here.”

  “It’s just, Mari’s a legend, you know?” Emma said, her voice higher-pitched than usual. “And she was looking at you like she wanted to wrap you up and take you home with her, and I—”

  Jamie choked out a laugh. “Marisol. Looking at me. Did you take an elbow to the head today or something?”

  Emma’s shoulders dropped. “You didn’t notice?”

  She started to step back but realized that might not send the right message. “Okay, first of all, you’re on crack. Second of all, even if Marisol liked girls—”

  “She does. She totally does.”

  “Even if Marisol liked girls,” Jamie repeated, pretending Emma hadn’t spoken, “you would have nothing to worry about. Do you honestly think I would give her the time of day?”

  Emma plucked at the polka-dot quilt that matched the retro table and chairs near the balcony door. “No. But she’s Marisol. She has a reputation, Jamie, one that makes Ellie’s pale in comparison. I didn’t think, okay?”

  Jamie set her blown mind aside and refocused on the topic at hand. “Okay. You’re not going to do that again, though, right? Act like I’m some piece of meat that you own?”

  Emma’s mouth dropped open. “I didn’t act like that!”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I didn’t!”

  Now Jamie did step back. For a moment she was tempted to walk out again—forget this shit, I’m out—but then she pictured having to explain to their friends why they weren’t currently speaking; imagined Jo and the other coaches watching them shoot daggers at each other across the conference room mere days after revealing their romantic involvement. Their supposedly issue-free romantic involvement.

  Instead of bolting, she closed her eyes and channeled the voice of her former therapist, Shoshanna: Is your anger justified? Definitely. Then speak from the “I” perspective and tell her how you feel.

  “When you put your arm around me like that in front of Marisol and Isa,” she explained, “I felt like you saw me as a thing to be owned, not as my own person.”

  “Oh.”

  She opened her eyes to see Emma gazing up at her, expression troubled. “Oh?” she echoed.

  “No, I can see that.” Emma sighed. “I really am sorry. I was having a bad day and I took it out on you. I didn’t mean to make you feel like that.”

  “Okay. Apology accepted.”

  “Good. Thank you.” Emma looked relieved, as if she too had pictured airing their personal drama in front of the entire national team. Definitely not for the faint of heart, new relationship management policy or not.

  “Thank you.” Jamie took a breath, feeling some of the tension ease from her neck and shoulders. “Anyway, do you want to talk about t
he game?”

  As Emma hesitated, voices sounded out in the hallway, and Jamie took another step away. By the time the door opened and Steph walked in, she and Emma were several feet apart.

  “Sorry,” Steph said, pausing in the entryway. “Am I interrupting?”

  “No,” Emma said. “I was just about to walk Jamie out.”

  And there was her answer. Jamie imagined barbed quills, only this time they were lodged in Emma’s skin, and she was the one trying to protect the people around her from their inadvertent release.

  At the door, Emma hugged her, but carefully, like she wasn’t sure she should. Jamie hugged her back harder. “Apology accepted, remember?”

  “I remember.” Emma pulled away. “Thanks for coming after me.”

  “I wanted to,” she said, wondering if Emma remembered that conversation on an LA roadside too. “Let me know if you want to talk later, okay?”

  She nodded. “Thanks, but I think I need some time to myself.”

  Even though Jamie had been expecting that response, despite the fact she fully understood where Emma was coming from, she still had to work to keep her hurt from showing. “Okay, then. I’ll see you later.”

  “I’ll see you at dinner,” Emma corrected, squeezing her arm.

  Jamie squinted at her. “Right. See you at dinner.”

  She left then, running through the afternoon’s events in her head as she paced toward her room. Their first real fight hadn’t been over the Arsenal-United rivalry, after all. It had been over a pretty woman who Emma had somehow worried might swoop in and snatch her away—a woman who happened to be Brazil’s Greatest Of All Time. Which, hello, Marisol liked girls? And had been flirting with her? This was almost as surprising as Emma behaving like a jealous girlfriend. Although in a way she supposed it made sense—Emma had once admitted that one of the long term effects of her father’s death was that she sometimes worried irrationally about losing the people closest to her.

  As she let herself into her and Gabe’s room at the other end of the hall, Jamie couldn’t help wondering how Emma’s fear of loss might manifest in the future. At least they were both aware of it. Awareness was supposed to be the first step, wasn’t it?

  Chapter Nine

  The next morning, Jamie brushed her teeth hurriedly and slapped a baseball cap over her bedhead. Then she headed down the hall, fiddling with her glasses as she stopped before Emma and Steph’s door. Emma had texted to invite her out for coffee in the hotel restaurant, which seemed like a good sign.

  Jamie closed her eyes and whispered her shortest mantra. Twice. Then she knocked.

  Emma opened the door immediately. She was smiling—another good sign. “Hi.”

  “Hi, yourself.”

  Emma hugged her, saying as she pulled back, “I love you in glasses.”

  “I love you in glasses, too,” she replied. She could hear the shower running and added, her voice low, “I also love you out of them.”

  Emma swatted her arm and dragged her to the elevator, where they stood a foot apart smiling at each other, energy fairly crackling between them. Another week of enforced team time was going to be the death of her, it really was.

  “So,” Emma said when they were seated side-by-side at the counter near the restaurant’s front window, the stadium where they’d lost to Brazil the day before visible in the near distance. “I did some thinking about the game yesterday.”

  “Okay.” She sipped her green tea and waited.

  Emma toyed with the foam at the top of her cup. “I’m not sure what was worse, my shitty performance or my shittier attitude.”

  “Everyone’s entitled to a bad game,” Jamie said.

  “I know. But I haven’t been playing well for months now. At least, not consistently,” she amended as Jamie opened her mouth to protest.

  That, she couldn’t argue with. Emma did seem to have hit a rough patch. Such things happened to professional athletes, but still. The timing of this particular slump was more than a bit suspect.

  “Is it… Am I distracting you?” Jamie made herself ask.

  “No,” Emma said quickly. Maybe too quickly.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” Emma bent forward to sip her mocha, letting her loose hair shield her face. “It’s nothing new. Just this stupid system Jo wants me to play. She expects me to score. I’m not a scorer.”

  “I think I might have heard that somewhere.” Emma’s perfectionist streak, she knew, was easily enough to knock her off her game, especially since Jo was asking her to learn new skills. “Why don’t you talk to Mary Kate? I bet she could come up with some strategies that would help.”

  Mary Kate Kennedy was the national team’s resident sports psychologist. She traveled to most major competitions with them, and some of the smaller ones too.

  Emma lifted her head, expression thoughtful. “That’s a good idea.”

  “Don’t sound so surprised.” Jamie brandished the cocky smirk she knew Emma simultaneously loved and hated. “I mean, Stanford, am I right?”

  “Ugh,” Emma said, and then, after a glance around the mostly empty restaurant, pressed her shoulder into Jamie’s and murmured, “You’re lucky I love you, dork.”

  She returned the pressure. “Ditto, nerd.”

  Emma fiddled with the handle on her mug. “I’m sorry again about yesterday.”

  “It’s okay. I don’t need you to be perfect, Em, but I do need you to communicate with me, okay?”

  “Yeah, I think I can do that. The communication thing, not the perfection thing.”

  “Same,” Jamie said, smiling sideways at her. More than her heart leapt when Emma smiled back and pressed her palm against her thigh.

  God. Damned. Team. Time.

  Still, she was lucky that they were here together, especially lucky that Emma somehow loved her as much as she loved her. Marisol might be beautiful and charming and potentially the greatest soccer player of their generation, but she wasn’t Emma.

  Coffee with Emma was a good start to what turned out to be a fantastic day. That afternoon Jo informed her at the end of practice that she would be starting in Steph’s place against Argentina. STARTING. HER FIRST NATIONAL TEAM GAME.

  “I am?” she asked, somehow dazed even after willing those very words to emerge from her coach’s mouth.

  Jo inclined her head. “You are.”

  Jamie bounced on her toes as she grinned at the head coach. “Thank you, ma’am!”

  “You’ve earned your shot, kiddo,” Jo said, giving her the smile that had always seemed reserved for her, proud and big sister-like and protective in a way that Jamie had never quite been able to explain. “Now take it.”

  “I will,” Jamie promised.

  When she shared the news with Emma, her girlfriend for once didn’t bother to check to see who was nearby. She simply pulled Jamie into her arms there in the hallway outside the practice facility locker room.

  “I’m so proud of you!” she said, voice and breath warm in Jamie’s ear.

  “So am I,” Jamie admitted, feeling Emma’s laugh reverberate through her own chest.

  “You should be.” Emma smiled into her eyes. Then her gaze flickered, and that was all the warning Jamie had before she felt something small and solid smack into her from behind.

  “Group hug!” Angie called, and then Jamie’s other friends from her youth team days were surrounding her and Emma in a laughing embrace, and all Jamie could do was grin at Emma and hold on tight.

  As she tried (and failed) to fall asleep that night, Mel’s voice came back to her from a year earlier: “What we’re offering you is a chance to play yourself onto this team. What you do with that opportunity is up to you.” Then she remembered what Jo had said: “You’ve earned your shot.”

  Turned out the theory of marginal gains worked. Jamie had worked her ass off all summer, improving a small amount at a time on whatever she could—strength, endurance, diet, sleeping habits, and mental acuity—until now, in De
cember, she was about to start her first national team game. It didn’t matter that she was only starting because Steph had picked up a red card. It didn’t even matter that Steph would likely be back starting in the next match. What mattered was that Jo was giving her a chance that she had no intention of squandering.

  Win the first five minutes, she told herself, visualizing herself running and passing and shooting and scoring like a soccer-playing machine. Play your ass off for the first five minutes, and then do it again for the next five. And the next, and the next, and the next after that… Ellie had told her once that she approached big games by breaking them down into smaller chunks of time so that they didn’t feel quite as overwhelming. As she pictured it now, Jamie sent out a mental thanks to her housemate, teammate, captain, mentor.

  Because hard work alone hadn’t gotten her to this point. Without Ellie and Emma, without Jo and Mel and all of her other coaches along the way, without her parents or her sister or her teammates from every team she’d ever played on, she wouldn’t be here now in Brazil, waiting for the sun to rise on the biggest day yet of her soccer career. Her family and friends back home would all be watching her debut on YouTube, since the tournament wasn’t being televised in the US. But that was okay. There would be video replays available of her first goal in a US uniform. Tomorrow, when the time came, she was going to score.

  Win the first five minutes, she told herself again, concentrating on her breath. Win those, and she would be golden.

  * * *

  Emma had been expecting it. She had even rehearsed her reaction ahead of time, a rehearsal that, it turned out, had been unnecessary. Because Jamie’s first goal for the United States Women’s National Team? It was spectacular, a dead-ball strike from thirty yards out that was still rising when it slammed into the top right corner of the goal. Emma wasn’t far behind her when the referee blew the whistle three and a half minutes into the game. She sprinted up and launched herself at Jamie, feeling her girlfriend’s strong arms encircle her waist and lift her clear off the ground.

  “Yes!” Emma shouted, and grinned up into Jamie’s ecstatic face. “I knew you could do it!”