The Wall of Winnipeg and Me

by Mariana Zapata

  The reminder that I didn’t need to take his crap anymore hit me right between the eyebrows, and my shoulder blades. I could take him being aloof and cold. I could handle him not giving a single crap about me personally, but embarrassing me in front of other people? There was only so much you could forgive and ignore.

  One, two, three, four, five, six.

  “Is he always like that?” Christian’s voice jump-started me out of my thoughts.

  I shrugged a shoulder, conscious not to put my foot in my mouth in front of someone who was practically a stranger even though said man wasn’t exactly on my list of people I would pull out of a burning building at the minute. “He’s a good boss,” I let the bland, forced compliment out, getting to my feet. “I don’t take it personally.”

  Usually.

  “I need to get going anyway. See you,” I said as I slipped the strap of my bag over my shoulder and picked up the insulated bag with the big guy’s food inside.

  “I’m sure I’ll see you soon,” he noted, his tone just a little too bright, too fake.

  I nodded before noticing Aiden taking a knee on the turf, staring over with a perfectly impassive expression on his face. Fighting the uneasy feeling I got from him practically telling me to scram, I went to stand on the other side of the tire. He was sweaty, his T-shirt clinging to the muscles of his pectorals like a second, paler skin. His face was tight, almost bored—so basically the norm.

  I tried to steady my words and heart. Confusion, anger, and, honestly, a little hurt soured my stomach as I watched him. “Is there something wrong?” I asked slowly, steadily as I tapped my fingers along the stitching of the bag with his camera and my things inside.

  “No,” he answered sharply, like he would have if I’d asked him if he wanted something with fennel for dinner.

  I cleared my throat and rubbed the side of my hand against the seam of my pants, warily, counting to three that time. “Are you sure?”

  “Why would anything be wrong?”

  Because you’re being a massive douche bag, I thought.

  But before I could make up something else, he kept going. “I don’t pay you to sit around and talk.”

  Oh no.

  He leaned his entire upper body forward to rest against the length of his leg in a deep stretch. “Did you bring my breakfast?”

  I tried to be patient. I really did. For the most part, I had patience on lockdown. There was no sense of “this is mine” when you had three older sisters who didn’t respect anyone’s boundaries, and one little brother. Needless to say, I didn’t get my feelings hurt particularly easily, and I didn’t hold 99 percent of things against my brothers or sisters when they said something they wouldn’t mean later on.

  But that was the problem, Aiden wasn’t my brother. He wasn’t even my friend.

  I could take a lot, but I wasn’t obligated to take anything from him.

  In that moment, I realized how over this shit I was. I was done. Done.

  Maybe I was scared as hell of quitting, but I would rather take a gamble on myself than stay there and get insulted by someone who wasn’t any better than me.

  Calmly, calmly, calmly, despite the angry ringing in my ears, I made myself focus on his question and answered, my voice stony, “Yes.” I held up the bag he clearly would have seen when I walked up to him.

  He grunted.

  As much as I could respect Aiden for being so determined, focused, and logical, sometimes…

  It grated on me just how blind he was to everything else in his life. In all the time I’d worked for him, he still couldn’t grace me with more than an occasional “thank you” or “good lunch.” Sure, I knew that you shouldn’t expect someone’s gratitude for doing things just because it was good manners, but still. I could count the number of times he’d smiled at me or asked me how I was doing on one hand. One freaking hand. I was a person who filled a role, but I could have been any person filling this role and it wouldn’t have mattered.

  I did a good job, hardly ever complained, and always did what needed to be accomplished even if I didn’t want to do it. I tried to be nice to him, to mess with him even though he definitely didn’t care for it, because what was life if you took it too seriously?

  But he’d pretty much just told me to “shoo” in front of other people.

  “Is that all?” Aiden’s rough voice snapped me out of my thoughts. “I have a workout I need to finish.”

  It was an oddly relieving sensation that pierced through my chest right then. I felt… like I could breathe. Standing there, I felt right. “Yeah, that’s all, boss.” I swallowed, forced a smile on my face, and walked out of there with my head held high, thinking, I’m done. I’m so done.

  What was wrong with him?

  I’d been around Aiden dozens of times when he was having a bad day. Bad days with Aiden Graves were nothing new or anything to particularly hold on to. Even practices with the Three Hundreds were serious business for him. Every mistake he made was like a strike against his soul that he dwelled on. He’d said so in interviews plenty of times in the past, how he lay in bed going over plays until he went to sleep.

  He was cranky on days that the sun was out and he was cranky on cloudy days too. I could handle grouchy men who preferred their own company. Usually he just glared and maybe snarled a bit.

  No big deal. He didn’t throw things or yell.

  But acting like an asshole with me in public? Saying that kind of stuff? That was new even for him, and that was probably why I was handling it so badly. Sometimes the worst things you could ever hear were wrapped in sweet tones and calm voices.

  I walked out of the facility distracted. I even drove my car muttering to myself under my breath. Twenty minutes later, I pulled into Aiden’s subdivision and parked on the street like usual. When I opened the front door, I realized something was wrong when the alarm system wasn’t beeping.

  The alarm wasn’t beeping.

  “Zac?” I yelled, reaching into my purse for my pepper spray at the same time I made my way through the kitchen, toward the door that led into the garage, to see if there was a car in there.

  I didn’t make it that far.

  Sitting on the onyx countertop right next to the refrigerator were dangling long legs stuffed into brown leather cowboy boots. I didn’t need to look at the upper body above them. I knew what I would see: a threadbare T-shirt, a narrow, handsome face, and light-brown hair hidden beneath that black Stetson he’d owned for years.

  Zachary James Travis was draped across the counter with a bag of chips in his lap. At six foot three, Zac was the second string quarterback of the Dallas Three Hundreds. Plagued by one injury after another, Austin, Texas’s once-upon-a-time star had stumbled through the last six years of his career. Or so the sports analysts said.

  But that wasn’t how I knew Zac. With a twang in his accent, clothes that told everyone the only thing he worried about was them being clean and comfortable, and a smile that made most women swoon, he was my buddy. My confidant where his roommate was not.

  And I hadn’t seen him in almost three months since he’d left to go back home for part of the offseason.

  In that instant though, I didn’t miss him that much. “You almost got sprayed in the face! I thought you were coming next week.” I panted with my hand on my chest, the other hand clutching my pepper spray.

  Dropping his boot-clad feet to the floor, I finally let my eyes go up to find that he was standing there with his arms open, smiling wide. He was fresh faced, tanner than usual, and, eyeing his middle section, maybe a little thicker. “I missed ya too, darlin’.”

  Temporarily pushing aside the veil Aiden’s crappy mood had put over my head, I couldn’t help but smile. “What are you doing here?”

  “I figured it wasn’t gonna kill me to come back a little early,” he explained as he rounded the kitchen island and came to stand in front of me, pretty much towering over my five-foot-seven frame. Before either one of us could say another word, his a
rms were around me.

  I hugged him back. “The only person that might be getting killed soon is you-know-who. I’ve almost poisoned him a few times these last couple of months.” I took a sniff of him and almost laughed at the scent of Old Spice he insisted on wearing.

  “Is he still alive?” he drawled the question lazily but seriously.

  Thinking about his comment at the facility had me scowling into his shirt. “Barely.”

  Pulling back, the smile Zac had on his face withered, his eyes narrowing as he studied my features. “You look like hell, sugar. You’re not sleepin’?” he asked as he kept eyeballing what I was sure were the circles under my eyes.

  I shrugged beneath his palms. What was the point in lying? “Not enough.”

  He knew better than to give me shit; instead, he simply shook his head. For a second, I thought about how Aiden would react to the four or five hours I usually squeezed in. He was even more religious about getting anywhere from eight to ten hours of snooze time daily. That was also part of the reason why he didn’t have any friends. Thinking about Aiden reminded me of the conversations I’d had recently and how I hadn’t talked to Zac in two weeks.

  “I finally told Aiden,” I blurted out.

  His thin mouth fell open, those milky-blue eyes going wide “You did?”

  Zac had known what my plans were. Soon after we started getting to know each other, he’d seen me working on my tablet while I was having lunch one afternoon, and asked me what I was doing. So I’d told him.

  He’d simply grinned at me back then and replied, “No shit, Van. You got a website or somethin’?”

  Since then, I’d redone the logo for his personal website—after I’d insisted how much of a good idea they were for branding himself—and done various banners for his media pages. As a result, he’d gotten me more work through a couple of the other players on the team.

  I threw my hands up and put a smile on my face at the same time I wiggled my fingers. “I did it. I told him,” I practically sang.

  “What he say?” the most unapologetically nosey man I’d ever known asked.

  I fought and lost the urge to grimace at the memory of how much Aiden hadn’t said. “Nothing. He just told me to let Trevor know.”

  One of Zac’s light-brown eyebrows twitched. “Huh.”

  I ignored it. It didn’t matter if Zac thought the same thing I did: What a dick thing to do. “Yay,” I muttered, still giving him spirit fingers because even memories of Aiden weren’t going to rain on my parade of quitting soon.

  He eyed me speculatively for a moment before the emotion was wiped off, and he slapped me on the shoulder hard enough to make me go Oof. “It’s about damn time.”

  I rubbed my arm. “I know. I’m relieved I finally sucked it up. But between you and me, I still want to hurl when I think about it.”

  He watched my hand for a second before making his way back around the island. With his back to me, he said, “Aww, you’ll be fine. I’m gonna miss the hell out of your meatloaf when you’re gone, but not all of us get to do what we love for a livin’. I’m glad you finally get to join the club, darlin’.”

  Some days, I didn’t completely understand why I wasn’t madly in love with Zac. He was a little full of himself, but he was a pro football player, so it wasn’t exactly a surprising trait. Plus, he was tall, and I loved tall guys. In the end though, all I felt and had ever felt toward Zac was friendship. The fact that I’d gone out to buy him hemorrhoid cream a couple of times probably helped solidify the lines in our friend zone.

  “I’ll make you meatloaf anytime you want,” I told him.

  “You said it.” Zac grabbed a banana from the metal tree next to the fridge. “I’m so damn happy to hear you did it.”

  I shrugged, happy but still a tiny bit nervous about the situation despite knowing it was mostly unreasonable. “Me too.”

  For a second, I thought about telling him how Aiden had been acting an hour ago, but what was the point? They had polar-opposite personalities as it was, and I knew they got fed up with each other at times. Really, when I thought about it, I wondered how or why they still lived together. They didn’t spend much time together or go out and do stuff that friends did.

  But with one guy who felt so uncertain with his position on the team that he didn’t want to buy a house, and another who wasn’t even an American resident, I guess they both found themselves in weird situations.

  “How much longer are you—?” Zac started to ask just as his phone rang. With a wink, he pulled it out of his pocket and said, “Gimme a sec it’s—damn, it’s Trevor.”

  Ugh. He and Aiden had the same manager; it was how they ended up living together.

  “He knows?” he asked, pointing down at the illuminated screen of his phone.

  I scrunched up my nose. “He hung up on me.”

  That earned me a laugh. “Lemme see what he wants. Then you can tell me what he said.”

  I nodded again and watched as he answered the call and headed toward the living room. Setting my bag on the counter, I started cleaning up the kitchen, remembering at the last minute that it was trash day. Pulling the bag out, I put another one in there and then headed into the garage to grab the city-issued can.

  I slapped the button to open the garage door. I held my breath before opening the bin lid, throwing the bag in, and then dragging the can down the driveway toward the curb. Just as I was setting it in place, a woman ran by across the street in a steady pace, heading in the direction of where one of the subdivision’s walking trails started.

  Something, which was as close to jealousy as I thought I could get, panged through my stomach. I eyed my knee and flexed it a little, knowing I could jog if I wanted to, but most of the time I was too tired. Years of physical therapy had done a lot and I knew my knee would ache less if I actually exercised regularly, but I just didn’t have the time… and when I did have the time, I spent it doing other things.

  What a bunch of excuses, weren’t they?

  I wanted all these things out of my life…

  I had finally put in my notice to quit and everything seemed to be going okay. Or at least, things could have been a lot worse than they were. Maybe it was time to start working on other things I wanted to do. I’d been so focused on building up my business the last few years that I’d put off doing a hundred other things I could remember wanting to do when I was a kid.

  Screw it.

  I only had this one life to live, and I didn’t really want to sit back and not accomplish the things I wanted.

  It was time, damn it.

  Chapter Four

  The thing with having a terrible day is that a lot of times, you don’t know it’s going to be a bad one until it’s too late; it isn’t until your clothes are on, you’ve eaten breakfast, and you’re out of the house, so it’s too late to go back to request a sick day… and bam! The signs stare you right in the eye, and you know your day has instantly gone into the shitter.

  I woke up that morning at five o’clock, slightly earlier than usual because it was going to be a busy day of running around, to the smell of my coffee machine going, and my alarm clock blaring the most obnoxious tone in its programming. I showered, slipped a thick headband on to keep the hair out of my face, and threw on a pair of slim, red, cropped pants, a short-sleeved blouse, flats, and my glasses. My two cell phones, tablet, and laptop were all sitting together on the counter in the kitchen. I grabbed my things, poured a travel mug with coffee, and hauled ass out of my apartment when the sky was still sleepier than it was awake.

  I managed to make it all the way to the parking lot when things started to go wrong. I had a freaking flat. My apartment complex was too cheap for working outside lights, so it took me three times as long to change the tire than it would have usually taken me, and I stained my pants in the process. I was running late, so I didn’t go back to change.

  Luckily, the rest of the drive went by fine. There wasn’t a single light on at any of the other h
ouses surrounding my boss’s, so my usual spot in front of the 4000-square-foot home was empty. I went inside through the front door, disarmed the security panel, and headed straight to the kitchen just as the pipes began humming with use upstairs.

  I put on the apron hanging from a hook in the corner of the kitchen because one stain was enough for only having been up two hours. I pulled fruit out of the freezer, the kale and carrots I’d washed and prepped the day before out of the fridge, measured a cup of pumpkin seeds out of a glass container on the counter, and dumped it all into the five-hundred-dollar blender on the countertop. On the mornings when he didn’t leave the house to go to training first thing, he had a big smoothie, worked out a little at home, and afterward had a ‘normal’ breakfast. As if a sixty-four-ounce beverage could be considered a snack.

  When I was done blending the ingredients, I poured the mixture into four big glasses and placed Aiden’s portion in front of his favorite spot on the kitchen island. Two apples out of the fridge later, I set it all right next to the glasses of smoothie. Like clockwork, the sound of thunder on the steps warned me The Wall of Winnipeg was on his way down.

  We had this routine set up that didn’t require words to get through it.

  The second sign I’d been given that today wasn’t going to be my day was the scowl Aiden had on his face, but my attention had been too focused on washing the blender to notice it. “Good morning,” I said without glancing up.

  Nothing. I still hadn’t been able to give up greeting him even though I knew he wouldn’t respond; my manners wouldn’t let me.

  So I went on like always, washing dirty dishes as the man sitting on the stool in front of me drank his breakfast. Then, once he was ready, he finally cracked the silence with a low, sleep-stained and hoarse-voiced, “What’s the plan for today?”

  “You have a radio interview at nine.”

  He grunted his acknowledgment.

  “Today is the day the Channel 2 news people are coming by.”

  Another grunt, but that one was especially unenthusiastic.